much more sense and ability than, from her general
character, we should be inclined to attribute to her.

Among those lesser traits of his conduct through which an observer can
trace a filial wish to uphold, and throw respect around, the station of
his mother, may be mentioned his insisting, while a boy, on being called
"George Byron Gordon"--giving thereby precedence to the maternal
name,--and his continuing, to the last, to address her as "the
Honourable Mrs. Byron,"--a mark of rank to which, he must have been
aware, she had no claim whatever. Neither does it appear that, in his
habitual manner towards her, there was any thing denoting a want of
either affection or deference,--with the exception, perhaps,
occasionally, of a somewhat greater degree of familiarity than comports
with the ordinary notions of filial respect. Thus, the usual name he
called her by, when they were on good-humoured terms together, was
"Kitty Gordon;" and I have heard an eye-witness of the scene describe
the look of arch, dramatic humour, with which, one day, at Southwell,
when they were in the height of their theatrical rage, he threw open the
door of the drawing-room, to admit his mother, saying, at the same time,
"Enter the Honourable Kitty."

The pride of birth was a feeling common alike to mother and son, and, at
times, even became a point of rivalry between them, from their
respective claims, English and Scotch, to high lineage. In a letter
written by him from Italy, referring to some anecdote which his mother
had told him, he says,--"My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with
her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the _old
Gordons_,--_not_ the _Seyton Gordons_, as she disdainfully termed the
ducal branch,--told me the story, always reminding me how superior _her_
Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and
always masculine, descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my
mother's Gordons had done in her own person."

If, to be able to depict powerfully the painful emotions, it is
necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if, for
the poet to be great, the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be owned,
paid early this dear price of mastery. Few as were the ties by which his
affections held, whether within or without the circle of relationship,
he was now doomed, within a short space, to see the most of them swept
away by death.[17] Besides the loss of his mother, he had