where it was elegantly mounted.
On its return to Newstead, he instituted a new order at the Abbey,
constituting himself grand master, or abbot, of the skull. The
members, twelve in number, were provided with black gowns--that of
Byron, as head of the fraternity, being distinguished from the rest. A
chapter was held at certain times, when the skull drinking goblet was
filled with claret, and handed about amongst the gods of this
consistory, whilst many a grim joke was cracked at the expense of
this relic of the dead. The following lines were inscribed upon it by
Byron:

Start not, nor deem my spirit fled;
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaff'd, like thee;
I died: let earth my bones resign.
Fill up, thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than mine.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others, let me shine,
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine.

Quaff while thou canst. Another race,
When thou and thine, like me, are sped,
May rescue thee from earth's embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life's little day
Our heads such sad effects produce;
Redeem'd from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs, to be of use.

The skull, it is said, is buried beneath the floor of the chapel at
Newstead Abbey.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Sussex Archaeological Collections xiii. 162-3.

[7] See _Notes and Queries_, 4th S., XI. 64.

[8] Told by Mr. Moncure Conway in _Harper's Magazine_.

[9] "Tales and Legends of the English Lakes," 96-7.

[10] "Harland's Lancashire Legends," 1882, 65-70.

[11] "British Goblins," 1880, p. 146.

CHAPTER III.

ECCENTRIC VOWS.

No man takes or keeps a vow,
But just as he sees others do;
Nor are they 'bliged to be so brittle
As not to yield and bow a little:
For as best tempered blades are found
Before they break, to bend quite round,
So truest oaths are still more tough,
And, tho' they bow, are breaking-proof.
BUTLER'S "Hudibras," Ep. to his Lady, 75.

Some two hundred and fifty years ago, the prevailing colour in all
dresses was that shade of brown known as the "couleur Isabelle," and
this was its origin:--A short time after the siege of Ostend
commenced, at t