ife to which he
afterwards betook himself. Of his cruelty to Lady Byron, before her
separation from him, the most exaggerated stories are still current in
the neighbourhood; and it is even believed that, in one of his fits of
fury, he flung her into the pond at Newstead. On another occasion, it
is said, having shot his coachman for some disobedience of orders, he
threw the corpse into the carriage to his lady, and, mounting the box,
drove off himself. These stories are, no doubt, as gross fictions as
some of those of which his illustrious successor was afterwards made
the victim; and a female servant of the old lord, still alive, in
contradicting both tales as scandalous fabrications, supposes the
first to have had its origin in the following circumstance:--A young
lady, of the name of Booth, who was on a visit at Newstead, being one
evening with a party who were diverting themselves in front of the
abbey, Lord Byron by accident pushed her into the basin which receives
the cascades; and out of this little incident, as my informant very
plausibly conjectures, the tale of his attempting to drown Lady Byron
may have been fabricated.

After his lady had separated from him, the entire seclusion in which
he lived gave full scope to the inventive faculties of his neighbours.
There was no deed, however dark or desperate, that the village gossips
were not ready to impute to him; and two grim images of satyrs, which
stood in his gloomy garden, were, by the fears of those who had caught
a glimpse of them, dignified by the name of "the old lord's devils."
He was known always to go armed; and it is related that, on some
particular occasion, when his neighbour, the late Sir John Warren, was
admitted to dine with him, there was a case of pistols placed, as if
forming a customary part of the dinner service, on the table.

During his latter years, the only companions of his solitude--besides
that colony of crickets, which he is said to have amused himself with
rearing and feeding[20]--were old Murray, afterwards the favourite
servant of his successor, and the female domestic, whose authority I
have just quoted, and who, from the station she was suspected of being
promoted to by her noble master, received generally through the
neighbourhood the appellation of "Lady Betty."

Though living in this sordid and solitary style, he was frequently, as
it appears, much distressed for money; and one of the most serious of
the injuries inflicted