ts of
passion, called him "a lame brat." As all that he had felt strongly
through life was, in some shape or other, reproduced in his poetry, it
was not likely that an expression such as this should fail of being
recorded. Accordingly we find, in the opening of his drama, "The
Deformed Transformed,"

_Bertha_. Out, hunchback!
_Arnold_. I was born so, mother!

It may be questioned, indeed, whether that whole drama was not
indebted for its origin to this single recollection.

While such was the character of the person under whose immediate eye
his youth was passed, the counteraction which a kind and watchful
guardian might have opposed to such example and influence was almost
wholly lost to him. Connected but remotely with the family, and never
having had any opportunity of knowing the boy, it was with much
reluctance that Lord Carlisle originally undertook the trust; nor can
we wonder that, when his duties as a guardian brought him acquainted
with Mrs. Byron, he should be deterred from interfering more than was
absolutely necessary for the child by his fear of coming into
collision with the violence and caprice of the mother.

Had even the character which the last lord left behind been
sufficiently popular to pique his young successor into an emulation of
his good name, such a salutary rivalry of the dead would have supplied
the place of living examples; and there is no mind in which such an
ambition would have been more likely to spring up than that of Byron.
But unluckily, as we have seen, this was not the case; and not only
was so fair a stimulus to good conduct wanting, but a rivalry of a
very different nature substituted in its place. The strange anecdotes
told of the last lord by the country people, among whom his fierce
and solitary habits had procured for him a sort of fearful renown,
were of a nature livelily to arrest the fancy of the young poet, and
even to waken in his mind a sort of boyish admiration for
singularities which he found thus elevated into matters of wonder and
record. By some it has been even supposed that in these stories of his
eccentric relative his imagination found the first dark outlines of
that ideal character, which he afterwards embodied in so many
different shapes, and ennobled by his genius. But however this may be,
it is at least far from improbable that, destitute as he was of other
and better models, the peculiarities of his immediate predecessor
should, in a consid