ntic build and of gigantic strength
became almost helpless from paralysis, and he was cared for till death
by his daughter, the mother of these favored little ones. Oh, it is sad
to think of it! Poor Christopher,--the active, the alert, the
keen-sighted, the fleet-footed, the gay and rollicking sportsman, the
famous angler, the champion boxer, too, upon occasions,--laid low, and
propped helpless upon pillows within walls, which he had always hated so
sincerely. He writes:--

"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our
feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those
fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's
breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and
circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death.
Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling
whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet
his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never
shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our
fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their
profoundest griefs."

It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same
genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other
engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his
countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and
hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had
done.

He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre
over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and
Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and
Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by
that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time
that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet
sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

LORD BYRON.

So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves
of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say
anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose
its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will
be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately
constituted