d I ever tell you that the day I came
of age I dined on eggs and bacon and a bottle of ale?--For once in a
way they are my favourite dish and drinkable; but as neither of them
agree with me, I never use them but on great jubilees,--in four or
five years or so." The pecuniary supplies necessary towards his
outset, at this epoch, were procured from money-lenders at an
enormously usurious interest, the payment of which for a long time
continued to be a burden to him.

It was not till the beginning of this year that he took his
Satire,--in a state ready, as he thought, for publication,--to London.
Before, however, he had put the work to press, new food was unluckily
furnished to his spleen by the neglect with which he conceived himself
to have been treated by his guardian, Lord Carlisle. The relations
between this nobleman and his ward had, at no time, been of such a
nature as to afford opportunities for the cultivation of much
friendliness on either side; and to the temper and influence of Mrs.
Byron must mainly be attributed the blame of widening, if not of
producing, this estrangement between them. The coldness with which
Lord Carlisle had received the dedication of the young poet's first
volume was, as we have seen from one of the letters of the latter,
felt by him most deeply. He, however, allowed himself to be so far
governed by prudential considerations as not only to stifle this
displeasure, but even to introduce into his Satire, as originally
intended for the press, the following compliment to his guardian:--

"On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle."

The crown, however, thus generously awarded, did not long remain where
it had been placed. In the interval between the inditing of this
couplet and the delivery of the manuscript to the press, Lord Byron,
under the impression that it was customary for a young peer, on first
taking his seat, to have some friend to introduce him, wrote to remind
Lord Carlisle that he should be of age at the commencement of the
session. Instead, however, of the sort of answer which he expected, a
mere formal, and, as it appeared to him, cold reply, acquainting him
with the technical mode of proceeding on such occasions, was all that,
in return to this application, he received. Disposed as he had been,
by preceding circumstances, to suspect his noble guardian of no very
friendly inclinations towards him, this backwardness in proposing to