"Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle;
Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way."
The place was, after a time, let to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who let ruin take its course, as the old lord had done. When the old lord died, the host of crickets which he had fed are said to have taken immediate flight, issuing forth in such a train that the servants could scarcely move without treading on them. When Lord Grey's lease was out, he and his hounds took their flight in like manner; but this was some years afterward, and for the present Mrs. Byron betook herself to Nottingham, and placed her son under the care of Mr. Rogers, the principal schoolmaster there, and under that of a quack, one Lavender, to straighten his feet. Thence they removed to London, where they resided in Sloane Terrace, and Byron was sent to Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich. Thence he was removed to Harrow, and during the years he spent there Mrs. Byron went to reside again at Nottingham, and afterward at Southwell, with occasional visits to Bath and Cheltenham. Harrow and Cambridge were, of course, for the chief part of the years of his minority, his proper homes, but the vacations were chiefly spent at Southwell, with frequent visits to Newstead and Annesley. Before his minority, however, expired, Lord Grey de Ruthyn had quitted Newstead, leaving it in a deplorable state of dilapidation, and Lord Byron incurred great expense in repairing the abbey, much, indeed, beyond the reach of his resources. His income was small; for the best part of his ancestral property had been sold by the late lord, especially the Rochdale estate, which was afterward recovered. The allowance for his education was all that he could claim from his trustees, and his mother's small income was eked out by a pension of £300 per annum. The debts incurred by him for the repairs of Newstead not being legally recoverable, as they were incurred by a minor, remained for years unpaid; and the importunities of his creditors were one of the strongest motives for his early traveling abroad. The failure of his hope of marrying Miss Chaworth, and adding her estate, which adjoined his own, to Newstead, was, both in affection and in point of fortune, a severe blow. His embarrassments finally compelled him to sell Newstead, and to make a marriage de convenance, which, to a person of his peculiar temperament, habits, and opinions, was certain to result in trouble and disunion. From these causes his life became unsettled and imbittered, and scarcely had he reached the period at which his fame ought to have made his native land the proudest and happiest of all lands to him, when he abandoned it forever, and
"In the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects: he was not
Himself like what he had been: on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer."
The Dream, vol. x., p. 249.
Of Newstead and Annesley I have given a particular account in The Rural Life of England. To these I must refer, and have only to add that, in the hands of Lord Byron's old schoolfellow, Colonel Wildman, Newstead is restored and maintained as all lovers of English genius would wish it to be, and is ever open to their survey. Since that account, too, the old hall of Annesley has undergone a renovation, and that scene of melancholy, desertion, and decay there described, exists now only in the volume which recorded it. In the present paper Southwell and Harrow will chiefly demand our attention.
Southwell, during the period of his Harrow school-life, became a most favorite resort of his. His mother had settled down there. Body and mind were now in progress of expansion toward manhood. His relish for society, his love of fame, and his love of poetry, were every day more and more developing themselves. But his world yet was only the school world. He was shy in general society. Here, however, he formed a group of friends of superior taste and education, in whose quiet little circle he became speedily at home, and for a time into this circle he seemed to throw himself, with all his heart and youthful enthusiasm. The Pigotts, the Beechers, the Leacrofts, &c., were his friends. Here he used to spend his summer vacations; here, it seems, he spent nearly the whole of one year. His dogs, his horses, firing at marks, swimming, and private theatricals, were his amusements, and for a time Southwell was his world. The Pigotts were his great friends, and there he went in and out, spent his evenings or spent his days, to his great contentment. A wider and a gayer world had not yet opened upon him, and for a season Southwell and his friends there were every thing to him. Of course, in this little circle he was the great hero; it is not often that a little Cathedral town can catch a live lord; nothing could be done without him; every flattering attention awaited him; and for a time he was not too conversant with the great world for the little one of Southwell to be spoiled to him. Hence he made occasional visits to Newstead and Annesley, with whose heiress he had fallen deeply in love. Here he began to cultivate more sedulously the composition of poetry, in which he was warmly encouraged by his most intimate friends, the Pigotts and Mr. Beecher, all persons of very refined taste, and here, eventually, he put his first volume to press, with Ridge, a printer at Newark. It was from Southwell that he made an excursion to Scarborough with his young friend Mr., since Dr. Pigott, and was much smitten with a fair Quakeress, to whom he addressed the verses published in his Hours of Idleness. But he had not been long at Cambridge, and seen something too of London, before the charm of Southwell had vanished, and we find him protesting that he hated Southwell. "Oh! Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals!" During the time that he spent there, his hours certainly did not drag very heavily. It was only on looking back from a gay scene that they appeared so to him. No one who now visits that quiet village will be surprised that a scene so still, though so naturally pleasant, could not long hold a spirit of so restless a caste. For, by his own experience,
"Quiet to quick spirits is a hell."
Most of his old friends have long left the place. Dr. Pigott, to practice at Nottingham; others are dead. Miss Pigott still lives in the house which her society and music made so agreeable to him. Mr. Beecher too still lives, and has not lived without setting the stamp of his mind on the age. To him we are, in fact, indebted for the New Poor Law. Long before the old act was rescinded, he resolved to test its powers, and he proved that if exerted they were equal to the utmost necessity of the country. He and his friend, the Rev. Mr. Lowe, of Bingham, enforced these powers in their respective parishes, where the poor's rates had grown to an equality with the rental, and the spirit of pauperism showed itself in its worst shape, that of the demoralized indolence and insolence of the young and able-bodied laborers. These gentlemen began by adopting the plan of refusing any relief to such except in the shape of labor. They insisted on all such as they pleased coming into the house, and there carried out the plan of separating husbands, wives, and children. The uproar that this produced was terrible. The people threatened to destroy the authors of this scheme, and demolish their property. Soldiers were obliged to be called in at Bingham, and finally the magistrates triumphed. The paupers were reduced to obedience, and the parish rates fell to a nominal sum. These facts and results were published by Mr. Beecher in a pamphlet, which, falling into Lord Brougham's hands, became the seed of the New Poor Law. The merits of that law do not claim discussion here; it was only necessary to point out this great fact of the life of that early friend of Lord Byron, whose influence was so great with him as to induce him to commit his first volume to the flames.
In the summer of 1845 I paid a visit to Southwell. The day, for a wonder, was fine, for a more rainy or cold June never passed. The little town looked very pleasant in its quietness. Every one knows how a Cathedral town does look; all asleep in the sunshine, if sunshine there be. A few shops, that seem to be expecting customers sometimes; a large inn, that must, too, have visitors sometimes, or it could not exist. A number of pleasant villas in their pleasant gardens, full of roses, and green plots not shaven quite so close as in greater and smarter places, amid a great deal of greenness every where in gardens, crofts, and meadows. The old minster standing aloft in venerable and profoundly silent majesty, in its ample green burial-ground.