lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly
shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as "Dear Madam,"
and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash
in his letters, as when he said, "Dear Mother--you know you are a vixen,
but save me some champagne." If Byron's mother had been of the stuff of
which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled
at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in
time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a
respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too
much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London,
economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis
at Cambridge. When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms,
took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as "my
corporeal pastor"), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame
bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country
as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy's clothes, thus
supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his "Quest of the
Golden Girl."

But all this time his brain was active, and another book of poetry had
been printed, entitled "Hours of Idleness." This book was gotten out, at
his own expense, by the same country printer as the first.

Surely the verse must have had merit, or why should Lord Brougham, in the
great "Edinburgh Review," go after it with a slashing, crashing, damning
criticism?