inds; and it is
likewise possible that Lord Byron may really, during the last period of
his sojourn at Athens, have sometimes been melancholy, for causes of
grief were certainly not wanting. His man of business wished Lord Byron
at this time to sell Newstead, so as to get his affairs into some
definite order. Perhaps it would have been wise, but such a
determination was extremely repugnant to him, for he was very fond of
Newstead, and had even written to his mother, before leaving, that she
might be quite easy on this head, as he would never part with it.
However, his agent, wishing to get him back to England, then affected
negligence, would not write, and made him wait for money. Lord Byron
grew uneasy and alarmed, was out of humor, and often seemed capricious,
because these circumstances obliged him to change his travelling plans,
and finally left him no other alternative but to return to England,
where, as he wrote to a friend, his first interview would be with a
lawyer, the second with a creditor; and then would come discussions with
miners, farmers, stewards and all the disagreeables consequent on a
ruined property and disputed mines.

After having resisted all these fears for some time, he was obliged to
decide on returning. Behold him, then, on the road to England.

At Malta he had attacks of fever to which his state of mind was
certainly not wholly foreign. "We have seen," says Moore, "from the
letters written by him on his passage homeward (on board the 'Volage'
frigate) how far from cheerful or happy was the state of mind in which
he returned. In truth, even for a disposition of the most sanguine cast,
there was quite enough in the discomfort that now awaited him in England
to sadden its hopes and check its buoyancy."

And yet in these letters, melancholy at bottom, which he addressed to
his mother and friends during this tiresome voyage of more than six
weeks, we still perceive, overriding all, his kind, sensitive, playful
nature. He told them that if one can not be happy, one must at least try
to be a little gay; that if England had ceased to smile on him, there
were other skies more serene; that he was coming back shaken by fever
morally and physically, but with a firm, intrepid spirit. And, in short,
pleasantry never failed him.

Always admirable toward his mother, he spoke of his apathy, but
re-assured her directly, adding:--

"Dear mother" (he wrote to her on the 'Volage' frigate), "within that
apa