; afterwards, vicissitudes came,--mighty changes capable of
affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the
inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's
childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his
mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the
desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and
intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift
himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been
thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his,
which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been
rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer's
day,--for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
"Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:--

"From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve--
_A summer's day_."

And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all
his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian
god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that,
receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his
ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been
benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary,
a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest
hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images
of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of
their material substance.

"We,--the children of the house,--" says De Quincey, in his
"Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier
in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
Agur--'Give me neither poverty nor riches'--was realized for us. That
blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were
to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity;
obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished
with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means of health, of
intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we
knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the
consciousnes