Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/141

 Smyrna in the Pylades, sloop of war, on 5 March 1810; visited Ephesus; and on 11 April sailed in the Salsette frigate for Constantinople, and visited the Troad. On 3 May he repeated Leander's feat of swimming from Sestos to Abydos. In February 1821 he wrote a long letter to Murray, defending his statements against some criticisms in W. Turner's ‘Tour in the Levant’ (see Appendix to ). Byron reached Constantinople on 14 May, and sailed in the Salsette on 14 July. Hobhouse returned to England, while Byron landed at Zea, with Fletcher, two Albanians, and a Tartar, and returned to Athens. Here he professed to have met with the adventure turned to account in the ‘Giaour’ about saving a girl from being drowned in a sack. A letter from Lord Sligo, who was then at Athens, to Byron (31 Aug. 1813), proves that some such report was current at Athens a day or two later, and may possibly have had some foundation. Hobhouse (Westminster Review, January 1825) says that Byron's Turkish servant was the lover of the girl. He made a tour in the Morea, had a dangerous fever at Patras (which left a liability to malaria), and returned to Athens, where he passed the winter of 1810–11 in the Capuchin convent. Here he met Lady Hester Stanhope, and formed one of his strong attachments to a youth called Nicolo Giraud. To this lad he gave a sum of money on parting, and left him 7,000l. in a will of August 1811. From Athens Byron went to Malta, and sailed thence for England in the Volage frigate on 3 June 1811. He reached Portsmouth at the beginning of July, and was met by Dallas at Reddish's Hotel, St. James's Street, on 15 July 1811.

Byron returned to isolation and vexation. He had told his mother that, if compelled to part with Newstead, he should retire to the East. To Hodgson he wrote while at sea (Letter 51) that he was returning embarrassed, unsocial, ‘without a hope and almost without a desire.’ His financial difficulties are shown by a series of letters published in the ‘Athenæum’ (30 Aug. and 6 Sept. 1884). The court of chancery had allowed him 500l. a year at Cambridge, to which his mother had added as much, besides incurring a debt of 1,000l. on his behalf. He is reduced to his last guinea in December 1807, has obtained loans from Jews, and expects to end by suicide or the marriage of a ‘golden dolly.’ His mother was put to the greatest difficulties during his travels, and he seems to have been careless in providing for her wants. The bailiffs were at Newstead in February 1810; a sale was threatened in June. Byron writes from Athens in November refusing to sell Newstead. While returning to England he proposed to join the army, and had to borrow money to pay for his journey to London. News of his mother's illness came to him in London, and before he could reach her she died (1 Aug. 1811) of ‘a fit of rage caused by reading the upholsterer's bills.’ The loss affected him deeply, and he was found sobbing by her remains over the loss of his one friend in the world. The deaths of his schoolfriend Wingfield (14 May 1811), of C. S. Matthews, and of Eddlestone, were nearly simultaneous blows, and he tells Miss Pigot that the last death ‘made the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives lost between May and the end of August.’ In February 1812 he mentions Eddlestone to Hodgson (Memoirs, i. 221) as the ‘only human being that ever loved him in truth and entirely.’ He adds that where death has set his seal the impression can never be broken. The phrase recurs in the most impressive of the poems to Thyrza, dated in the same month. The coincidence seems to confirm Moore's statement that Thyrza was no more than an impersonation of Byron's melancholy caused by many losses. An apostrophe to a ‘loved and lovely one’ at the end of the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ (st. 95, 96) belongs to the same series. Attempts to identify Thyrza have failed. Byron spoke to Trelawny of a passion for a cousin who was in a decline when he left England, and whom Trelawny identifies with Thyrza. No one seems to answer to the description. It may be added that he speaks (see, chap. iv.) of a ‘violent, though pure love and passion’ which absorbed him while at Cambridge, and writes to Dallas (11 Oct. 1811) of a loss about this time which would have profoundly moved him but that he ‘has supped full of horrors,’ and that Dallas understands him as referring to some one who might have made him happy as a wife. Byron had sufficient elasticity of spirit for a defiance of the world, and a vanity keen enough to make a boastful exhibition of premature cynicism and a blighted heart.

At the end of October 1811 he took lodgings in St. James's Street. He had shown to Dallas upon his return to England the first two cantos of ‘Childe Harold’ and ‘Hints from Horace,’ a tame paraphrase of the ‘Ars Poetica.’ According to Dallas, he preferred the last, and was unwilling to publish the ‘Childe.’ Cawthorn, who had published the ‘English Bards,’ &c., accepted the ‘Hints’ (which did not appear till after Byron's death), but the publication was delayed, apparently for want of a good classical reviser (To Hodgson, 13 Oct. 1811). The Longmans had refused the ‘English Bards,’ which attacked