it. In the absence, too, of all that might cheer and sustain, he had
every thing to encounter that could distress and humiliate. To the
dreariness of a home without affection, was added the burden of an
establishment without means; and he had thus all the embarrassments of
domestic life, without its charms. His affairs had, during his absence,
been suffered to fall into confusion, even greater than their inherent
tendency to such a state warranted. There had been, the preceding year,
an execution on Newstead, for a debt of 1500_l._ owing to the Messrs.
Brothers, upholsterers; and a circumstance told of the veteran, Joe
Murray, on this occasion, well deserves to be mentioned. To this
faithful old servant, jealous of the ancient honour of the Byrons, the
sight of the notice of sale, pasted up on the abbey-door, could not be
otherwise than an unsightly and intolerable nuisance. Having enough,
however, of the fear of the law before his eyes, not to tear the writing
down, he was at last forced, as his only consolatory expedient, to paste
a large piece of brown paper over it.

Notwithstanding the resolution, so recently expressed by Lord Byron, to
abandon for ever the vocation of authorship, and leave "the whole
Castalian state" to others, he was hardly landed in England when we find
him busily engaged in preparations for the publication of some of the
poems which he had produced abroad. So eager was he, indeed, to print,
that he had already, in a letter written at sea, announced himself to
Mr. Dallas, as ready for the press. Of this letter, which, from its
date, ought to have preceded some of the others that have been given, I
shall here lay before the reader the most material parts.

[Footnote 1: To this he alludes in those beautiful stanzas,

"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell," &c.