oth with respect to Newstead and
his projected travels.

LETTER 31.

TO MRS. BYRON.

"Newstead Abbey, November 2. 1808.

"Dear Mother,

"If you please, we will forget the things you mention. I have no
desire to remember them. When my rooms are finished, I shall be happy
to see you; as I tell but the truth, you will not suspect me of
evasion. I am furnishing the house more for you than myself, and I
shall establish you in it before I sail for India, which I expect to
do in March, if nothing particularly obstructive occurs. I am now
fitting up the _green_ drawing-room; the red for a bed-room, and the
rooms over as sleeping-rooms. They will be soon completed;--at least I
hope so.

"I wish you would enquire of Major Watson (who is an old Indian) what
things will be necessary to provide for my voyage. I have already
procured a friend to write to the Arabic Professor at Cambridge, for
some information I am anxious to procure. I can easily get letters
from government to the ambassadors, consuls, &c., and also to the
governors at Calcutta and Madras. I shall place my property and my
will in the hands of trustees till my return, and I mean to appoint
you one. From H---- I have heard nothing--when I do, you shall have
the particulars.

"After all, you must own my project is not a bad one. If I do not
travel now, I never shall, and all men should one day or other. I have
at present no connections to keep me at home; no wife, or unprovided
sisters, brothers, &c. I shall take care of you, and when I return I
may possibly become a politician. A few years' knowledge of other
countries than our own will not incapacitate me for that part. If we
see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance:--it
is from _experience_, not books, we ought to judge of them. There is
nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses.

"Yours," &c.

In the November of this year he lost his favourite dog,
Boatswain,--the poor animal having been seized with a fit of madness,
at the commencement of which so little aware was Lord Byron of the
nature of the malady, that he more than once, with his bare hand,
wiped away the slaver from the dog's lips during the paroxysms. In a
letter to his friend, Mr. Hodgson,[96] he thus announces this
event:--"Boatswain is dead!--he expired in a state of madness on the
18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his
nature to the last, never attempting to do the lea