Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by William Howitt

These are interesting landmarks to the visitor, who will find the path to the tomb beneath the large elm well tracked, and the view there over the far-stretching country such as well might draw the musing eyes of the young poet. Captain Medwin says he saw the name of Byron "carved at Harrow in three places, in very large characters—a presentiment of his future fame, or a pledge of his ambition to acquire it." The play-ground and cricket-ground will also be visited with equal interest. There we see in these a new and eager generation of fine lads at play, and then we have a lively idea of what Byron and his cotemporaries were at that time, now less than forty years ago. No one was a more thorough schoolboy, in all the enjoyment of play and youthful pranks, than Lord Byron, as he himself, in verses addressed to one of his school comrades, shows us, and as all his schoolfellows testify of him.

"Yet when confinement's lingering hour was done,
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one:
Together we impelled the flying ball,
Together waited in our tutor's hall;
Together joined in cricket's manly toil,
Or shared the produce of the river's spoil;
Or plunging from the green declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore:
In every element, unchanged, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name."

But the whole of this poem, called Childish Recollections, published in the Hours of Idleness, is filled by the charms of recollected school delights at Harrow. Here his schoolfellows, among others, were Lord Clare, for whom, through life, he retained the warmest attachment, Lord Delaware, the Duke of Dorset, to whom he addressed one of his early poems, Colonel Wildman, who afterward purchased Newstead, Lord Jocelyn, the Rev. William Harness, &c. He says, "P. Hunter, Curson, Long, Tattersall, were my principal friends. Clare, Dorset, Colonel Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and John Wingfield, were my juniors and favorites." Last, and not least, Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now with very odd feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that when a great fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a fag, was giving him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it. "While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend; and although he knew that he was not strong enough to fight ****** with any hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his eyes, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation, asked very humbly if ****** would be pleased to tell him 'how many stripes he meant to inflict.' 'Why,' returned the executioner, 'you little rascal, what is that to you?' 'Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, 'I would take half.'"

With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood. His removal to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London, led him into those dissipations and sensualities which continued to cast a sad foil on the greater part of his after life. To Cambridge he never appeared much attached, and rather resided there occasionally as a necessity for taking his degree than from any pleasure he had in the place. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, are nearly the sole locality which will there attract the attention of the admirers of the poet, except the Commoners' hall, in which now the long tossed about statue of him by Thorwaldsen is about to be erected.

It was during his being a student of Cambridge that Newstead Abbey fell into his hands by the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthyn's lease, and that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and furnished it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time. Here, with half a dozen of his fellow-collegians, among whom was the very clever and early-lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he spent a rackety time. He had got a set of monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse in London, and in these they used to sit up all night, drinking and full of uproarious merriment. "Our hour of rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, "was one. It was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then, for the amusements of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room; practicing with pistols in the hall; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three in the morning. The evening's diversions may easily be conceived. I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull filled with Burgundy. After reveling on choice viands and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and after sandwiches, &c., retired to rest."

It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the neighborhood. During this time there were still work-people employed in the repairs of the house; and I recollect a master-plasterer, who, at the same time, was doing work for my father a dozen miles off, relating, to our astonishment, the goings on of these gay roisterers. Byron himself says, that

"Where Superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile."

And the person here referred to particularly mentioned one young damsel, dressed in boy's clothes, that Byron had there, no doubt the same who about the same time lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride about on horseback with him at Brighton. Here, at this time, his dog Boatswain died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in the garden where the poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed himself with writing his scarifying English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which appeared about the time that he came of age, and so amply avenged him of the Edinburgh reviewers. Being, as he informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt, he left his mother in possession of Newstead, and set out on his foreign tour. In two years he returned to England, not only triumphant, by the great popularity of his satire, over all his enemies, but having in his portfolio the first two cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From this moment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Sir Walter Scott with all his well-earned honors. From the most solitary and friendless, because unconnected, man of his rank, living about town in clubs and lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad in the world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord Holland, Rogers, Moore, &c., were his friends. He was besieged on all sides by aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great parties. His life was, for four or five years, that of the most perfect Circean intoxication of worship and dissipation; yet during this period he poured out the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair and Lara, poems of great vigor and beauty, and new in scene and spirit, but by no means reaching that height of poetical wealth and glory which he afterward mounted to. Then came his ill-starred marriage, and in one short year his utter and lasting separation from his wife. This unfortunate marriage, against which he was strenuously warned by his most experienced friends, became the blight of his whole life. To the last he persisted in protesting that he never knew the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him; but Lady Byron, in a paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has assigned as the reason that she believed him insane, or, if not insane, not safe to live with. No wonder that his excitable temperament was lashed to a pitch of phrensy little short of madness, when such were his pecuniary embarrassments that, in the one year of his living with his wife, nine executions were levied on his goods, his rank only saving him from a prison. It is easy to perceive the effect of this on the proud and sensitive mind of Lord Byron; and when the hand that should have soothed him was coolly withdrawn from him on the occasion, the finish was put to mortal endurance. Banished, as it were, by the abhorrence of his country—of that country which, from worshiping him, turned as suddenly to denounce him—believing that in the abandonment by a wife there must be some hideous cause, he went forth never to return.

The limits of this work will necessarily confine any minute account of the homes and haunts of our poets to those only which lie within the British isles; I shall, therefore, only summarily trace the progress of Byron's wanderings and abodes from this period; and before doing this, I will point out in a few lines the residences which he occupied during the five years of his London life. Before he went abroad, Gordon's Hotel, Durant's Hotel, both in Albemarle-street, and 8 St. James's-street, were his homes. On his return from his first tour, he took on a lease for seven years a suite of rooms in the Albany, of Lord Althorpe. The year of his married life was chiefly spent at 13 Piccadilly Terrace. The clubs which he frequented were the Alfred, the Cocoa Tree, Watier's, and the Union.

In his first tour he traversed Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, tracking his way in light by the composition of Childe Harold. Now, abandoned by the one heart that he had chosen to be his domestic stay and solace through life, assailed bitterly by that public which had so recently devoured with avidity his splendid poems, regarded as an infidel and a desperado, he went from the field of Waterloo across Belgium, along the Rhine, through Switzerland into Italy, which became his second country, retaining him till a few months before his death. Every step of his progress was illustrated by triumphs of genius still more brilliant than before. From the moment that at Waterloo he exclaimed