cotch maid of religious character
gave him early serious impressions of religion, and thus added the
element of an awakened conscience to the conflicting ones of his
character.

Education, in the proper sense of the word, did not exist in England in
those days. Physiological considerations of the influence of the body on
the soul, of the power of brain and nerve over moral development, had
then not even entered the general thought of society. The school and
college education literally taught him nothing but the ancient classics,
of whose power in exciting and developing the animal passions Byron often
speaks.

The morality of the times is strikingly exemplified even in its literary
criticism.

For example: One of Byron's poems, written while a schoolboy at Harrow,
is addressed to 'My Son.' Mr. Moore, and the annotator of the standard
edition of Byron's poems, gravely give the public their speculations on
the point, whether Lord Byron first became a father while a schoolboy at
Harrow; and go into particulars in relation to a certain infant, the
claim to which lay between Lord Byron and another schoolfellow. It is
not the nature of the event itself, so much as the cool, unembarrassed
manner in which it is discussed, that gives the impression of the state
of public morals. There is no intimation of anything unusual, or
discreditable to the school, in the event, and no apparent suspicion that
it will be regarded as a serious imputation on Lord Byron's character.

Modern physiological developments would lead any person versed in the
study of the reciprocal influence of physical and moral laws to
anticipate the most serious danger to such an organisation as Lord
Byron's, from a precocious development of the passions. Alcoholic and
narcotic stimulants, in the case of such a person, would be regarded as
little less than suicidal, and an early course of combined drinking and
licentiousness as tending directly to establish those unsound conditions
which lead towards moral insanity. Yet not only Lord Byron's testimony,
but every probability from the licence of society, goes to show that this
was exactly what did take place.

Neither restrained by education, nor warned by any correct physiological
knowledge, nor held in check by any public sentiment, he drifted directly
upon the fatal rock.

Here we give Mr. Moore full credit for all his abatements in regard to
Lord Byron's excesses in his early days. Moore makes the