Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/195

 The writer of the lines above quoted, besides being a wit and a poet, was one of those who, though his estates were encumbered, must have profited with the other receivers of rent from the influence of the Corn Laws on the price of bread. Yet his rentals could hardly have risen so as to treble or even to double in a few years, since his biographers give us reason to conclude that the interior at Newstead never exhibited the profuse luxury and licentious revelry which are indicated in the opening stanzas of Childe Harold. Not the less, however, does Lord Byron's case serve as an illustration of the effects of the high rents in raising to a notable height the pride and arrogance of the landlord class. For the profuse luxury—the lordly revelry—

—if they were above the means of men of small or encumbered estates, characterized the banquets of the larger landholders, whose pride was not unworthy of kings. And if Lord Byron was not equal in wealth, his pride was equal to the pride of the largest-acred baron or squire who voted for the Corn Laws. His pride was' very much pride of race, as if the sword had made him a conqueror,