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At eight years of age he was violently in love with a young girl named Mary Duff. At ten his cousin, Margaret Parker, excited in him a strange, un-childish passion. At fifteen came one of the greatest crises of his life, when he became enamored of Mary Chaworth, whose grand-father had been killed in a duel by Byron's great-uncle.
He entered the naval service, and became a lieutenant under Admiral Balchen. In the year 1763 he was made Master of the Staghounds; and in 1765, he was sent to the Tower, and tried before the House of Peers, for killing his relation and neighbour, Mr Chaworth, in a duel fought at the Star and Garter Tavern, in Pall-mall. This Lord William was naturally boisterous and vindictive.
Byron awoke in one of his melancholy moods, and wandered alone in the grounds till called to be married. His wayward mind was full of all the associations that were least congenial with the day. His thoughts were full of Mary Chaworth, and of old scenes in his life, which he fancied he loved because he was now leaving them behind.
Musters saw her, and so things took their course." The simple soul now showed us into the favorite sitting-room of Miss Chaworth, with a small flower-garden under the windows, in which she had delighted. In this room Byron used to sit and listen to her as she played and sang, gazing upon her with the passionate, and almost painful devotion of a love-sick stripling.
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.
Byron was on this occasion in earnest; he wished to marry Miss Chaworth, an event which, he says, would have "joined broad lands, healed an old feud, and satisfied at least one heart." The intensity of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady and the Charon of the boat.
We continued our stroll about the waste apartments, of all shapes and sizes, and without much elegance of decoration. Some of them were hung with family portraits, among which was pointed out that of the Mr. Chaworth who was killed by the "wicked Lord Byron." These dismal looking portraits had a powerful effect upon the imagination of the stripling poet, on his first visit to the hall.
On going out, however, the disputants met on the stairs, and one of the two, it is uncertain which, cried out to the waiter to show them an empty room. This was done, and a single tallow candle being placed on the table, the door was shut. A few minutes later a bell was rung, and the hotel master rushing in, Mr. Chaworth was found mortally wounded.
Young as he was, he would have married her immediately; but Miss Chaworth was two years older than he, and absolutely refused to take seriously the devotion of a school-boy. Byron felt the disappointment keenly; and after a short stay at Cambridge, he left England, visited Portugal and Spain, and traveled eastward as far as Greece and Turkey.
In 1807 he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning, O had my fate been join'd with thine. In the following year he accepted an invitation to dine at Annesley, and was visibly affected by the sight of the infant daughter of Mrs. Chaworth, to whom he addressed a touching congratulation. Shortly afterwards, when about to leave England for the first time, he finally addressed her in the stanzas,
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