has been said of Lord Byron that he was prouder of being a descendant
of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into
England, than of having been the author of "Childe Harold." The remark
is not altogether unfounded, for the pride of ancestry was a feature of
his character; and justly so, for his line was honourably known on the
fields of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor; and in the faithful
royalist, Sir John Biron, afterwards Lord Biron, throughout the Civil
Wars.

In 1784, the father of the poet, Captain John Byron, nephew of the fifth
Lord Byron, with the sole object of relieving his debts, married, as his
second wife, Miss Catherine Gordon, a wealthy lady of illustrious
Scottish ancestry. Her fortune was swallowed up, and she was reduced to
L150 a year, before she gave birth, on January 22, 1788, in Holles
Street, London, to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron. The
boy was somewhat deformed, one of his feet being twisted.

In 1790, we find the unhappy parents living in separate lodgings in
Aberdeen; and this estrangement was followed by complete separation, the
worthless Captain Byron proceeding to France, where he died in the
following year. The mother, a woman of the most passionate extremes,
sent the boy to day school and grammar school. His schoolmates remember
him as lively, warm-hearted, and more ready to give a blow than to take
one. To summer excursions with his mother in the Highlands the poet
traces his love of scenery and especially of mountainous countries; and
he refers many years after, still with keen feeling, to a little girl,
Mary Duff, for whom, in his eighth year, he cherished a consuming
attachment. So early were his sensibilities dominant.

On the death, in 1794, of the grandson of the old lord, little George
stood in immediate succession to the peerage; in May, 1798, the fifth
Lord Byron died at Newstead Abbey, and the boy's name was called in
school with the title "Dominus." The Earl of Carlisle was appointed his
guardian in chancery, and in the same summer, Lord Byron, in his
eleventh year, took possession, with his mother, of the seat of his
ancestors. The next year Mrs. Byron was placed on the Civil List for a
pension of L300 a year. Removing to London, she placed George at school
with Dr. Glennie at Dulwich, but thwarted the progress of his education
with her fondness and self-will, until Lord Carlisle gave up all hope of
ruling her. It was at this p