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
following account of his own temper, from one of his journals, must be
taken with a due portion of that allowance for exaggeration, which his
style of self-portraiture, "overshadowing even the shade," requires.

"In all other respects," (he says, after mentioning his infant passion
for Mary Duff,) "I differed not at all from other children, being
neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, of my age, but rather
lively--except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a Devil.
They once (in one of my silent rages) wrenched a knife from me, which
I had snatched from table at Mrs. B.'s dinner (I always dined
earlier), and applied to my breast;--but this was three or four years
after, just before the late Lord B.'s decease.

"My _ostensible_ temper has certainly improved in later years; but I
shudder, and must, to my latest hour, regret the consequence of it and
my passions combined. One event--but no matter--there are others not
much better to think of also--and to them I give the preference....

"But I hate dwelling upon incidents. My temper is now under
management--rarely _loud_, and _when_ loud, never deadly. It is when
silent, and I feel my forehead and my cheek paling, that I cannot
control it; and then.... but unless there is a woman (and not any or
every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy."

Between a temper at all resembling this, and the loud hurricane bur