by those who loved and
understood him sufficiently to be at once gentle and firm enough for
the task. The female attendant of whom we have spoken, as well as her
sister, Mary Gray, who succeeded her, gained an influence over his
mind against which he very rarely rebelled; while his mother, whose
capricious excesses, both of anger and of fondness, left her little
hold on either his respect or affection, was indebted solely to his
sense of filial duty for any small portion of authority she was ever
able to acquire over him.

By an accident which, it is said, occurred at the time of his birth,
one of his feet was twisted out of its natural position, and this
defect (chiefly from the contrivances employed to remedy it) was a
source of much pain and inconvenience to him during his early years.
The expedients used at this period to restore the limb to shape, were
adopted by the advice, and under the direction, of the celebrated John
Hunter, with whom Dr. Livingstone of Aberdeen corresponded on the
subject; and his nurse, to whom fell the task of putting on these
machines or bandages, at bedtime, would often, as she herself told my
informant, sing him to sleep, or tell him stories and legends, in
which, like most other children, he took great delight. She also
taught him, while yet an infant, to repeat a great number of the
Psalms; and the first and twenty-third Psalms were among the earliest
that he committed to memory. It is a remarkable fact, indeed, that
through the care of this respectable woman, who was herself of a very
religious disposition, he attained a far earlier and more intimate
acquaintance with the Sacred Writings than falls to the lot of most
young people. In a letter which he wrote to Mr. Murray, from Italy, in
1821 after requesting of that gentleman to send him, by the first
opportunity, a Bible, he adds--"Don't forget this, for I am a great
reader and admirer of those books, and had read them through and
through before I was eight years old,--that is to say, the Old
Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a
pleasure. I speak as a boy, from the recollected impression of that
period at Aberdeen, in 1796."

The malformation of his foot was, even at this childish age, a subject
on which he showed peculiar sensitiveness. I have been told by a
gentleman of Glasgow, that the person who nursed his wife, and who
still lives in his family, used often to join the nurse of Byron when
they were o