LIFE OF LORD BYRON.


It has been said of Lord Byron, "that he was prouder of being a
descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the
Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of Childe
Harold and Manfred." This remark is not altogether unfounded in truth.
In the character of the noble poet, the pride of ancestry was
undoubtedly one of the most decided features; and, as far as antiquity
alone gives lustre to descent, he had every reason to boast of the
claims of his race. In Doomsday-book, the name of Ralph de Burun ranks
high among the tenants of land in Nottinghamshire; and in the
succeeding reigns, under the title of Lords of Horestan Castle,[6] we
find his descendants holding considerable possessions in Derbyshire;
to which, afterwards, in the time of Edward I., were added the lands
of Rochdale in Lancashire. So extensive, indeed, in those early times,
was the landed wealth of the family, that the partition of their
property, in Nottinghamshire alone, has been sufficient to establish
some of the first families of the county.

Its antiquity, however, was not the only distinction by which the name
of Byron came recommended to its inheritor; those personal merits and
accomplishments, which form the best ornament of a genealogy, seem to
have been displayed in no ordinary degree by some of his ancestors. In
one of his own early poems, alluding to the achievements of his race,
he commemorates, with much satisfaction, those "mail-covered barons"
among them,

who proudly to battle