d with salvos of
pistol-shots. Here they played games over the spacious grounds, wrestled,
boxed, swam, and at night feasted and drank deep damnation out of a skull
to all Scotch reviewers.

Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen
began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily
decamped and left the rogues to do their own cooking.

This brought them to their senses, sanity came back, and the company
disbanded. Then the servants, who had watched the orgies from afar,
returned and found a week's pile of dishes unwashed and a horse stabled in
the library.

* * * * *

Then Byron had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally
admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm. His titles and
pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out
of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching
a dunciad in their direction. His good nature was especially ruffled by
Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor.
The chief cause of the old Lord's prejudice against the young one lay in
the fact that the young 'un had ridiculed the old 'un's literary
pretensions.

They were rivals in letters, with a very beautiful, natural and mutual
disdain for each other.

Lord Byron was not welcomed into the House of Lords: he simply pushed in
the door because he had a right to. He thirsted for approbation, for
distinction, for notoriety. His sensitive soul hung upon newspaper
clippings with feverish expectations; and about all the attention he
received was in the line of being damned by faint praise, or smothered
with silence. Patriotism, as far as England was concerned, was not a part
of Byron's composition.

When all Great Britain was execrating Napoleon, picturing him as a devil
with horns and hoofs, Byron looked upon him as the world's hero.

In this frame of mind he went forth and borrowed a goodly sum, and started
cut to view the world. He was accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, and his
valet, Fletcher.

It was a two years' trip, this jolly trio made--down along the coast of
France, Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, lingering in queer old
cities, mousing over historic spots, alternately living like princes or
vagabonds. They frolicked, drank, made love to married women, courted
maidens, fought, feasted and did all the foolish things that sophomores