-love, as it is called in the
country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the
bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile
sentiment is not, however, love--that strong masculine avidity,
which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike
of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is the
very reverse of the irrepressible passion it is a mean shrinking,
stealthy awe, and in no one of its symptoms, at least in none of
those which Byron describes, has it the slightest resemblance to that
bold energy which has prompted men to undertake the most improbable
adventures.

He was not quite eight years old, when, according to his own account,
he formed an impassioned attachment to Mary Duff; and he gives the
following account of his recollection of her, nineteen years
afterwards.

"I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff. How very odd
that I should have been so devotedly fond of that girl, at an age
when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word
and the effect! My mother used always to rally me about this
childish amour, and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen,
she told me one day, 'O Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh,
and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to Mr C***.' And what
was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at
that moment, but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed
my mother so much, that after I grew better she generally avoided the
subject--to ME--and contented herself with telling it to all her
acquaintance." But was this agitation the effect of natural feeling,
or of something in the manner in which his mother may have told the
news? He proceeds to inquire. "Now what could this be? I had never
seen her since her mother's faux pas at Aberdeen had been the cause
of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff. We were both the
merest children. I had, and have been, attached fifty times since
that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our
caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting
my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did to
quiet me. Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write
for myself, became my secretary. I remember too our walks, and the
happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their
house, not far from the Plainstones, at Aberdeen, w