verdict of wilful murder, and Lord Byron was tried for the crime.

The trial took place in Westminster Hall, and the public curiosity
was so great that the Peers' tickets of admission were publicly sold
for six guineas each. It lasted two days, and at the conclusion he
was unanimously pronounced guilty of manslaughter. On being brought
up for judgment he pleaded his privilege and was discharged. It was
to this lord that the poet succeeded, for he died without leaving
issue.

His brother, the grandfather of the poet, was the celebrated "Hardy
Byron"; or, as the sailors called him, "Foulweather Jack," whose
adventures and services are too well known to require any notice
here. He married the daughter of John Trevannion, Esq., of Carhais,
in the county of Cornwall, by whom he had two sons and three
daughters. John, the eldest, and the father of the poet, was born in
1751, educated at Westminster School, and afterwards placed in the
Guards, where his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his
father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long
before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the
seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances
which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life.
The meanness with which he obliged his wretched victim to supply him
with money would have been disgraceful to the basest adulteries of
the cellar or garret. A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married;
but, within two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct
of Captain Byron, that the ill-fated lady died literally of a broken
heart, after having given birth to two daughters, one of whom still
survives.