considerable facility in this way. It
pleased him, and did the buxom young woman no harm.

Beyond the mere prettiness and pinky whiteness of a healthy country lass,
Miss Chaworth evidently had no beauties of character, save those conjured
forth from the inner consciousness of the poet--a not wholly original
condition.

Byron loved the Ideal. And this love-affair with Miss Chaworth is only
valuable as showing the evolution of imagination in the poet. The woman
hadn't the slightest idea that she was giving wings to a soul--to her the
affair was simply funny.

The fact that Byron's great-uncle, from whom he had inherited his title,
had killed the grandfather of Miss Chaworth in a duel, lent a romantic
tinge to the matter--the boy was doing a sort of penance, and in one of
his poems hints at the undoing of the sin of his kinsman by the lifelong
devotion that he will bestow. This calling up the past, and incautious
revealing of the fact that the ancestor Chaworth could not hold his own
with a Byron, but allowed himself to be run through the body by the Byron
cold steel, was not pleasing to Miss Chaworth.

"Don't imagine I am such a fool as to love that lame boy," cried Miss
Chaworth to her maid one day.

Unluckily, "the lame boy" was in the next room and heard the remark.

He rushed from the house with a something gripping at his heart.
Straightway he would go back to Harrow, which he had left in wrath only a
few months before.

So he went to Harrow.

When he next returned home, his mother met him with the remark, "I have
news for you; get out your handkerchief--Miss Chaworth is married."

In just another year Byron was home again, and was invited to dine with
the Chaworths. He accepted the invitation, and when he was introduced to a
baby girl, a month old, the child of his old sweetheart, his emotions got
the better of him and he had to leave the room. And to ease his woe he
indited a poem to the baby.

Miss Chaworth was not happy with her fox-hunting squire. Her mind became
clouded, and after some years she passed out, in poverty and alone. And if
there ever came to her mind any appreciation of the greatness of the man
who had given her name immortality, we do not know it.

The years from Eighteen Hundred Five to Eighteen Hundred Eight Byron spent
at Cambridge. The arts in which he perfected himself there were shooting,
swimming, fencing, drinking and gambling.

During vacations, and off and on, he lived at S