and complete literary type of his race. Burns, to his ruin, had only the
fire: the same is true of Byron, whose genius, in some respects less
genuine, was indefinitely and inevitably wider. His intensely susceptible
nature took a dye from every scene, city, and society through which he
passed; but to the last he bore with him the marks of a descendant of the
Sea-Kings, and of the mad Gordons in whose domains he had first learned to
listen to the sound of the "two mighty voices" that haunted and inspired
him through life.

In the autumn of 1798 the family, i.e. his mother--who had sold the whole
of her household furniture for 75 _l_--with himself, and a maid, set
south. The poet's only recorded impression of the journey is a gleam of
Loch Leven, to which he refers in one of his latest letters. He never
revisited the land of his childhood. Our next glimpse of him is on his
passing the toll-bar of Newstead. Mrs. Byron asked the old woman who kept
it, "Who is the next heir?" and on her answer "They say it is a little boy
who lives at Aberdeen," "This is he, bless him!" exclaimed the nurse.

Returned to the ancestral Abbey, and finding it half ruined and desolate,
they migrated for a time to the neighbouring Nottingham. Here the child's
first experience was another course of surgical torture. He was placed
under the charge of a quack named Lavender, who rubbed his foot in oil,
and screwed it about in wooden machines. This useless treatment is
associated with two characteristic anecdotes. One relates to the endurance
which Byron, on every occasion of mere physical trial, was capable of
displaying. Mr. Rogers, a private tutor, with whom he was reading passages
of Virgil and Cicero, remarked, "It makes me uncomfortable, my lord, to
see you sitting them in such pain as I know you must be suffering." "Never
mind, Mr. Rogers." said the child, "you shall not see any signs of it in
me." The other illustrates his precocious delight in detecting imposture.