to fetch the sparring-gloves, and
proceeded to his usual exercise with the boy. He was silent and
abstracted all the time, and, as if from an effort to get the better of
his feelings, threw more violence, Rushton thought, into his blows than
was his habit; but, at last,--the struggle seeming too much for him,--he
flung away the gloves, and retired to his room.

Of Mrs. Byron, sufficient, perhaps, has been related in these pages to
enable the reader to form fully his own opinion, as well with respect to
the character of this lady herself, as to the degree of influence her
temper and conduct may have exercised on those of her son. It was said
by one of the most extraordinary of men[16],--who was himself, as he
avowed, principally indebted to maternal culture for the unexampled
elevation to which he subsequently rose,--that "the future good or bad
conduct of a child depends entirely on the mother." How far the leaven
that sometimes mixed itself with the better nature of Byron,--his
uncertain and wayward impulses,--his defiance of restraint,--the
occasional bitterness of his hate, and the precipitance of his
resentments,--may have had their origin in his early collisions with
maternal caprice and violence, is an enquiry for which sufficient
materials have been, perhaps, furnished in these pages, but which every
one will decide upon, according to the more or less weight he may
attribute to the influence of such causes on the formation of character.

That, notwithstanding her injudicious and coarse treatment of him, Mrs.
Byron loved her son, with that sort of fitful fondness of which alone
such a nature is capable, there can be little doubt,--and still less,
that she was ambitiously proud of him. Her anxiety for the success of
his first literary essays may be collected from the pains which he so
considerately took to tranquillise her on the appearance of the hostile
article in the Review. As his fame began to brighten, that notion of his
future greatness and glory, which, by a singular forecast of
superstition, she had entertained from his very childhood, became
proportionably confirmed. Every mention of him in print was watched by
her with eagerness; and she had got bound together in a volume, which a
friend of mine once saw, a collection of all the literary notices, that
had then appeared, of his early Poems and Satire,--written over on the
margin, with observations of her own, which to my informant appeared
indicative of