two days, and at the conclusion he
was unanimously pronounced guilty of manslaughter. On being brought
up for judgment he pleaded his privilege and was discharged. It was
to this lord that the poet succeeded, for he died without leaving
issue.

His brother, the grandfather of the poet, was the celebrated "Hardy
Byron"; or, as the sailors called him, "Foulweather Jack," whose
adventures and services are too well known to require any notice
here. He married the daughter of John Trevannion, Esq., of Carhais,
in the county of Cornwall, by whom he had two sons and three
daughters. John, the eldest, and the father of the poet, was born in
1751, educated at Westminster School, and afterwards placed in the
Guards, where his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his
father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long
before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the
seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances
which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life.
The meanness with which he obliged his wretched victim to supply him
with money would have been disgraceful to the basest adulteries of
the cellar or garret. A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married;
but, within two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct
of Captain Byron, that the ill-fated lady died literally of a broken
heart, after having given birth to two daughters, one of whom still
survives.

Captain Byron then married Miss Catharine Gordon, of Gight, a lady of
honourable descent, and of a respectable fortune for a Scottish
heiress, the only motive which this Don Juan had for forming the
connection. She was the mother of the poet.

Although the Byrons have for so many ages been among the eminent
families of the realm, they have no claim to the distinction which
the poet has set up for them as warriors in Palestine, even though he
says--

Near Ascalon's tow'rs John of Horestan slumbers;

for unless this refers to the Lord of Horestan, who was one of the
hostages for the ransom of Richard I., it will not be easy to
determine to whom he alludes; and it is possible that the poet has no
other authority for this legend than the tradition which he found
connected with two groups of heads on the old panels of Newstead.
Yet the account of them is vague and conjectural, for it was not
until ages after the Crusades that the abbey came into the possession
of the fa