when this failed, Mrs
Byron returned to Scotland. On her way thither she gave birth to a son,
christened George Gordon after his maternal grandfather, who was descended
from Sir William Gordon of Gight, grandson of James I. of Scotland. After a
while her husband rejoined her, but went back to France and died at
Valenciennes on the 2nd of August 1791. His wife was not a bad woman, but
she was not a good mother. Vain and capricious, passionate and
self-indulgent, she mismanaged her son from his infancy, now provoking him
by her foolish fondness, and now exciting his contempt by her paroxysms of
impotent rage. She neither looked nor spoke like a gentlewoman; but in the
conduct of her affairs she was praiseworthy. She hated and avoided debt,
and when relief came (a civil list pension of L300 a year) she spent most
of it upon her son. Fairly well educated, she was not without a taste for
books, and her letters are sensible and to the point. But the violence of
her temper was abnormal. Her father committed suicide, and it is possible
that she inherited a tendency to mental derangement. If Byron owed anything
to his parents it was a plea for pardon.

The poet's first years were spent in lodgings at Aberdeen. From 1794 to
1798 he attended the grammar school, "threading all classes" till he
reached the fourth. It was a good beginning, a solid foundation, enabling
him from the first to keep a hand over his talents and to turn them to a
set purpose. He was lame from his birth. His right leg and foot, possibly
both feet, were contracted by infantile paralysis, and, to strengthen his
muscles, his mother sent him in the summers of 1796, 1797 to a farm house
on Deeside. He walked with difficulty, but he wandered at will, soothed and
inspired by the grandeur of the scenery. To his Scottish upbringing he owed
his love of mountains, his love and knowledge of the Bible, and too much
Calvinism for faith or unfaith in Christianity. The death of his
great-uncle (May 19, 1798) placed him in possession of the title and
estates. Early in the autumn Mrs Byron travelled south with her son and his
nurse, and for a time made her home at Newstead Abbey. Byron was old enough
to know what had befallen him. "It was a change from a shabby Scotch flat
to a palace," a half-ruined palace, indeed, but his very own. It was a
proud moment, but in a few weeks he was once more in lodgings. The shrunken
leg did not improve, and acting on bad advice his mother ent