"BYRON."

"P.S. If you think proper to send me any answer to this, I shall be
extremely happy to receive it. Adieu.

"P.S. 2d. As you say you are a novice in the art of knitting, I hope
it don't give you too much trouble. Go on _slowly_, but surely. Once
more, adieu."


We shall often have occasion to remark the fidelity to early habits
and tastes by which Lord Byron, though in other respects so versatile,
was distinguished. In the juvenile letter, just cited, there are two
characteristics of this kind which he preserved unaltered during the
remainder of his life;--namely, his punctuality in immediately
answering letters, and his love of the simplest ballad music. Among
the chief favourites to which this latter taste led him at this time
were the songs of the Duenna, which he had the good taste to delight
in; and some of his Harrow contemporaries still remember the
joyousness with which, when dining with his friends at the memorable
mother Barnard's, he used to roar out, "This bottle's the sun of our
table."

His visit to Southwell this summer was interrupted, about the
beginning of August, by one of those explosions of temper on the part
of Mrs. Byron, to which, from his earliest childhood, he had been but
too well accustomed, and in producing which his own rebel spirit was
not always, it may be supposed, entirely blameless. In all his
portraits of himself, so dark is the pencil which he employs, that the