ght be well
enough to take care of them. Quaritch says they are worth a hundred
pounds apiece, although in the poet's lifetime they were dear at sixpence.

Byron sent copies to all the leading literary men whom he knew, including
Mackenzie, the man of feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and
so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such
juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt
exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron's book, but we know that
his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said
that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman--she inwardly
congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences
that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and may not, but the logic
holds when applied to fledgling authors. When it comes to praise he is
quite willing to take your word for it.

Byron's spirits arose to an ecstacy--he would be a poet.

About this time we find Hydra, as Byron pleasantly called his mother,
rushing to the village apothecary and warning that worthy not to sell
poison to the poet; and a few moments after her leaving, the astonished
apothecary was visited by the poet, who begged that no poison should be
sold to his mother. Each thought the other was going to turn Lucretia
Borgia, or play the last act of Romeo and Juliet, at least.

There were wild bursts of rage on the mother's part, stubborn mockery on
the other, followed up once by a poker flung with almost fatal precision
at the poet's curly head.

Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and
lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly
shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as "Dear Madam,"
and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash
in his letters, as when he said, "Dear Mother--you know you are a vixen,
but save me some champagne." If Byron's mother had been of the stuff of
which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled
at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in
time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a
respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too
much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London,