Page images
PDF
EPUB

door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor,—how that there had been a Revolutionary war, that the country had thrown off the yoke of Old England, and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him: but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was petticoat government. Happily that was at an end: he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes; which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his fate, or joy at his deliverance.

He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle's hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to his having so recently awakened. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related; and not a man, woman, or child in the neighborhood but knew it by heart. Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he always remained flighty. The old

Dutch inhabitants, however, almost universally gave it full credit. Even to this day they never hear a thunder-storm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of ninepins; and it is a common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle's flagon.

X. GEORGE GORDON

LIFE AND WORKS.

BYRON.

WHEN we think of Byron, there arises in our mind the image of a violent, madly sensitive soul, defying Heaven, defying society, eating his own heart.

This wild, passionate nature was a fatal inheritance from a long line of lawless ancestors. On his father's side he was a descendant of the vikings, those famous wasters of the sea. His father himself, "mad Jack," was a profligate captain in the Guards; and his granduncle bore the title of "the wicked lord," from having killed his neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a murderous duel. His mother, "bonny Catharine Gordon o' Gight," had an uncontrolled temper that bordered on insanity. She used, when her little son ran round the room, laughing at her attempts to catch him, to say he was as bad as his father, and to call him "a lame brat."

This son, the only child of this ill-assorted pair, was born Jan. 22, 1788, in Hollis Street, London, and was named George Gordon Byron. He had a club-foot, a deformity he never forgot. He was soon left a halforphan; and passed his early youth with his mother at Aberdeen, Scotland.

He inherited the family title and estate, Newstead Abbey, in his eleventh year (1798), and two years later was sent to Harrow, an English public school, for five years (1800 to 1805). Here, on one occasion, when Sir Robert Peel was being officially flogged by his "fag

master" (an older boy), Byron rushed up and offered to take half the blows.

When fifteen (1803) he met, near Newstead Abbey, Mary Chaworth, a girl two years older than himself, with whom he fell in love. She received his attentions, but one day said to her maid, within his hearing, “ Do you think I could care for that lame boy?" Byron afterwards embodied this, his first love, in a poem called The Dream.

Two years later (1805) he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Once, while at home on a vacation, his mother and he had a quarrel, and both ran to the neighboring apothecary, each to beg him not to sell the other poison. At another time she replied to one of his sarcasms by flinging a poker at his head.

Byron's first humble volume of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807), was attacked by Lord Brougham with knife and tomahawk in the Edinburgh Review; but soon afterwards (1809) the reviewer was himself flayed by Byron in a satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Byron then left England, and on his return the first half of Childe Harold was published (1812). The effect was electrical. "I woke up," he says, "and found myself famous." For three years afterwards he poured on the public a flood of Eastern rhymed romances, The Giaour, Corsair, and others, in all of which are found passages of marvelous beauty.

In the zenith of his early fame he married Miss Milbanke (1815); but she soon separated from him, and, amid a torrent of abuse, he himself left England never to return. They had one child, a daughter, Ada.

He passed the remainder of his life, when not on his travels, mainly at Geneva, Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, the four cities in which he wrote the poems that have immortalized his name. In Italy he joined a secret patriotic society called the Carbonari, and threw himself heart and purse into the insurrection of 1820. This was crushed by the Austrians, but Byron's love of freedom found a fresh field of action in a revolution which broke out in Greece, in the spring of 1821. After rendering the cause great service by his pen, he sailed for Greece (July, 1823), to serve in the field against the Turks. He arrived at Missolonghi, a town in the Morea, at the beginning of the next year, but was there taken with a fever, and bled to death by his doctors (April 9, 1824).

Byron professed to love solitude and privacy, but he always chose a glass house to hide in. During his life he divided with Napoleon the homage and curiosity of the world. He had many strange habits: at Newstead Abbey he used to drink wine out of the skull-cup of an old monk; he commonly traveled in a private menagerie of cats, dogs, monkeys, and parrots. These eccentricities were matter of as serious interest to the thinkers of that time as Napoleon's mode of holding his head or clasping his hands behind him. Of his appearance Scott says that his countenance was a thing to dream of, and that no poet of his day approached him in personal beauty.

The morals of Byron have been most justly condemned. But there was one noble principle, the love of freedom, to which he was never false, and to which

« PreviousContinue »