treme consequences, must lead to the disastrous and
deplorable doctrine of fatalism, and would make of man a mere
machine--it is, however, impossible to deny that races and their
amalgamation do exercise a great influence over our species.

It is to this very influence of race, which was so evident in Lord
Byron, that we attribute, in a measure, the exceptional nature of the
great English poet.

As the reader knows, Lord Byron was descended, by his father, from the
noble race of the Birons of France. His ancestors accompanied William
the Conqueror to England, aided him in the conquest of that country, and
distinguished themselves in the various fields of battle which
ultimately led to the total subjugation of the island.

In his family, the sympathies of the original race always remained
strong.

His father, a youthful and brilliant officer, was never happy except in
France. He was very intimate with the Marechal de Biron, who looked upon
him as a connection. He even settled in Paris with his first wife, the
Marchioness of Carmarthen. Soon after his second marriage, he brought
his wife over to France, and it was in France that she conceived the
future poet. When obliged to return to England to be confined, she was
so far advanced in pregnancy that she could not reach London in time,
but gave birth to Lord Byron at Dover. It was in France that Byron's
father died at thirty-five years of age. Through his mother--a Scotch
lady connected with the royal house of Stuart--he had Scotch blood in
his veins.

The powerful influence exercised by the Norman Conquest, in the
modification of all the old habits of Great Britain, and in making the
English that which they now are, has descended as an heirloom to some
old aristocratic families of the kingdom, where it discovers itself at
different times in different individuals. Nowhere, perhaps, did this
influence show itself more clearly than in the person of Lord Byron.

His duplicate or triplicate origin was already visible in the cast of
his features. Without any analogy to the type of beauty belonging to the
men of his country (a beauty seldom found apart from a kind of cold
reserve), Lord Byron's beauty appeared to unite the energy of the
western with the splendor and the mildness of the southern climes.

The influence of this mixture of races was equally visible in his moral
and intellectual character.

He belonged to the Gallic race (modified by the Latin and Celtic
el