man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged
most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep
when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will
live. Immortal poetry for youth!--new generations will learn it by
heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all
memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his
deathless songs will still sing on.

In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much
considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed,
calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a
peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which
was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world
with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that
he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.

As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent,
passionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their
desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father,
one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family
life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society;
and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of
Gight, Aberdeenshire, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his
debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress
of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a
year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen,
but soon separated.

Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money
from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small
supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in
Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's
mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in
his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which
we could expect to build a very noble or well-balanced character, and
the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so
great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.

A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a
pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to
develop many of the domestic virtues. Nei