In that gloomy frame of mind, in the solitude of a ruin--for Newstead at that time was but little better than a ruin--Byron, on August 12, drew up some directions for his will, in which he desired to be buried in the garden at Newstead, by the side of his favourite dog Boatswain. On the same day he wrote to Dallas, who was superintending the printing of the first and second cantos of 'Childe Harold': 'Peace be with the dead! Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose. Besides her who gave me being, I have lost more than one who made that being tolerable. Matthews, a man of the first talents, and also not the worst of my narrow circle, has perished miserably in the muddy waves of the Cam, always fatal to genius; my poor schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra--within a month; and whilst I had heard from _all three_, but not seen _one_.... But let this pass; we shall all one day pass along with the rest. The world is too full of such things, and our very sorrow is selfish.... I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had _four_ in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious. Surely, the Romans did well when they burned the dead.' The writer of this letter was in his twenty-fourth year! Ten days later Byron writes to Hodgson: 'Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before.' At about the same date, in a letter to Dallas, Byron writes: 'At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life? It is odd how few of my friends have died a quiet death--I mean, in their beds! 'I cannot settle to anything, and my days pass, with the exception of bodily exercise to some extent, with uniform indolence and idle insipidity.' The verses, 'Oh! banish care,' etc., were written at this time. In the following lines we see that his grief at the losses he had sustained was deepened by the haunting memory of Mary Chaworth: