"the wicked lord" were thought too wild and
monstrous. He always went armed, as if dreading
secret enemies. On one occasion, he is said in a
rage to have thrown his wife into the lake in front
of the abbey, from which she was rescued by the
gardener; who then thrashed her savage husband.
Another time, he is said to have shot his coachman
for disobeying orders, and to have thrown
the bleeding body into the coach where Lady
Byron was seated, and driven her home himself.
Once when his neighbour, Admiral Sir Borlase
Warren, one of his old naval friends, came to dine
with him, pistols are said to have been placed on
the table beside the knives and forks, as parts of
the regular table furniture, and as likely to be
needed. These stories are, of course, mere country
people's exaggerations of petty acts of
passion; but they show how much the proud,
wicked lord was dreaded and hated by the
villagers round the forest. This at least is
certain—that the wayward unhappy man
separated from his wife, drove away nearly all his
servants, and created a mournful solitude around
himself.

Enraged at the marriage of his son and heir,
who died young, he let the abbey fall into
ruin, cut down all the family oaks to pay his
debts, and sold the valuable mineral property
in Rochdale. He had been, in youth, a
lieutenant under Admiral Bolchen. His only amusement,
in age, consisted in sham-fights on the
lake, between two "baby forts" he had built on
the shore, and a little vessel he had brought on
wheels from some port on the eastern coast.
Heedless of what might happen after his death,
and unable to cut off the entail, he never
mentioned his grand-nephew but as "the little boy
who lived at Aberdeen."

At war with the human race, the wicked lord,
in "austere and savage seclusion," took refuge
in the love of animals. He tamed an
immense number of crickets, whom he allowed to
crawl over him, and corrected when too familiar
with a wisp of straw. When their patron and
protector died, there is a tradition, according to
Washington Irving, that they packed up, bag
and baggage, and left the abbey together for
"fresh fields and pastures new," flocking across
the courts, corridors, and cloisters in all
directions.

The Byrons came in with the Conqueror, and
stood well all through English history. One
ancestor at Horeston Castle, in Derbyshire, was
hostage for the CÅ“ur de Lion's ransom; another,
fought by the side of Henry the Fifth in France;
a third, rode at Bosworth against the fierce Crookback;
a fourth, was made Knight of the Bath at
the ill-fated marriage of Henry the Eighth's
brother, Prince Arthur; a fifth, "Sir John Byron
the little, with the great beard," whose ghost
still haunts the corridors of Newstead, was
rewarded with Newstead at the dissolution and
tearing to pieces of the monasteries. Sir Nicholas
Byron defended Chester, and fought passionately
at Edgehill. At the battle of Newbury
there were seven cavalier brother Byrons fighting
against the Puritan flag. Another Lord Byron
was groom of the bedchamber to stupid Prince
George of Denmark, and married three times—
first, a daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater;
second, a daughter of the Earl of Portland;
third, a daughter of Lord Berkeley, of Stratton,
from the last of whom the great poet was
descended.

When the old lord died, in his miserable self-
made solitude, in 1798, Newstead passed into
the possession of the poet, then eleven years of
age, living, with his mother, in humble lodgings
in Aberdeen. His father was the profligate and
abandoned son of that brave old sailor, the
brother of the duellist— "Foul Weather Jack,"
whose voyages and adventures are well known.
The bad son had been discarded by his father.
He then seduced the Marchioness of Carmarthen,
was divorced from her, and broke her heart. He
afterwards married the poet's mother, Miss
Gordon, whose fortune of twenty thousand pounds
he squandered in two years, and then deserted
her.

Tom Moore tells a simple but striking anecdote
of the arrival of the short fat intemperate
mother and the little lame boy, handsome and
bright-eyed, at the Newstead toll-bar to take
possession. Mrs. Byron, affecting ignorance,
asked the toll-keeper's wife to whom the seat
among the woods belonged. She was answered
that the owner of it, Lord Byron, had been some
months dead.

"And who is the next heir?" asked the proud
and happy mother.

"They say," replied the old woman, "that
he is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen."

"And this is the bairn, bless him!" exclaimed
the nurse, no longer able to keep the secret, and
covering with kisses the young lord who was
seated on her lap.

One of Byron's favourite haunts was "The
Devil's Wood"—a gloomy grove of larches,
planted by the wicked lord before the duel, and
ornamented with leaden statues of fauns (called
devils by the country people), and dark green
with mould. In his farewell visit to the grove,
when he sold Newstead to Colonel Wildman,
his old Harrow school chum, he came
here with his sister, and carved their joint names
on an elm.

It was while home at Newstead for the Harrow
vacation that the boy poet, then only fifteen,
fell in love with Mary Chaworth, a beautiful girl
of seventeen. Their trysting-place was a gate
that joined the Newstead grounds to those of
Annesley Hall. Mary's mother encouraged his
visits; for the feud had ceased, the fatal bloodshed
had been forgotten, and the marriage would
have joined two noble estates. Soon after
Byron returned to school, the girl (at an
impressible age) fell in love with Mr. Musters, a
young stalwart fox-hunter, whom she first saw,
from the roof of the hall, dashing through
the park at the head of all the riders: when
Byron returned home, she was engaged to him.
They parted (it is told in that chef-d'Å“uvre of
love-poems, The Dream) on a hill near Annesley,
the last of a long promontory of upland that