ome curse hangs over me and mine," says he. "My mother lies a corpse
in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I
say, or think, or do?

"My dear Davies, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me; I want a
friend. Come to me, Scroope, I am almost desolate, left almost alone in
the world. I must enjoy the survivors while I can. Write or come, but
come if you can, or one or both."

Hardly had he allowed himself this heartrending expression of grief,
most touching for those who knew his repugnance to showing any
sensibility of heart, when a new calamity overtook him. His dear friend,
Wingfield, died at Coimbra at the age of twenty-one. Thoughts of death
even took possession of Lord Byron's soul, influencing and directing all
his actions. Neither self-love, nor the hope of great success with
"Childe Harold," which had been announced to him as he passed through
London, any longer could charm; tears dimmed the lustre of fame; he
could only occupy himself with the fate of the surviving, and resolved
on making his will in case of his own death. We find him then at this
time solely engaged in making out this new deed. He destroyed the old
will, rendered useless by the death of his mother, and took care to
forget no one in the new one; all his servants were mentioned with
admirable solicitude; and, in short, his last testament fully displayed
the beautiful, generous soul that had dictated it.

Some weeks after, he wrote to Dallas:--

"At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at
seventy? It is true that I am young to begin again, but with whom can I
retrace the laughing part of life?"

"Indeed," writes he at the same time to Hodgson, "the blows followed
each other so rapidly, that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I
do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly
persuade myself that I am awake did not every morning convince me
mournfully to the contrary.

"Davies has been here; his gayety (death can not mar it) has done me
service; but, after all, ours was a hollow laughter! You will write to
me? I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."

His moral sufferings had never been so great; and what he said and
experienced under these circumstances, amply prove that solitude was
good for him, when not unhappy. "I can do nothing," writes he to Dallas,
"and my days pass, except for a few bodily exercises, in uniform
indolence and idl