’Twas a scene for Benjamin West to have painted in the spirit of Death on the Pale Horse, or for some later artist--loving bloody “impressions.” However, peace is established. Quiet reigns once more (we count by days only, now). There is a goodly scheme for attack upon the fortress which guards the Gulf of Lepanto (Corinth); the time is set; the guards are ready; the Suliotes are under bidding; the chieftains are (for once) agreed, when, on the 18th, he falters, sinks, murmurs some last words--“Ada--daughter--love--Augusta--” barely caught; doubtfully caught; but it is all--and the poet of _Childe Harold_ is gone, and that turbulent, brilliant career hushed in night. It was on April 19, 1824, that he died. His body was taken home for burial. I said _home_; ’twere better to have said to England, to the family vault, in which his mother had been laid; and at a later day, his daughter, Ada, was buried there beside him, in the old Hucknall-Torkard church. The building is heavy and bald, without the winning picturesqueness that belongs to so many old country churches of Yorkshire. The beatitudes that are intoned under its timbered arch are not born of any rural beatitudes in the surroundings. The town is small, straggly, bricky,[78] and neither church nor hamlet nor neighbors’ houses are suffused with those softened tints which verdure, and nice keeping, and mellow sunshine give to so many villages of southern England. Hucknall-Torkard is half way between Nottingham and Newstead, and lies upon that northern road which pushes past Annesley into the region of woods and parks where Sherwood forest once flung its shadows along the aisles in which the bugle notes of master Robin Hood woke the echoes. But Hucknall-Torkard church is bald and tame. Mr. Winter, in his pleasant descriptive sketch,[79] does indeed give a certain glow to the “grim” tower, and many a delightful touch to the gray surroundings; but even he would inhibit the pressure of the noisy market-folk against the church-yard walls, and their rollicking guffaw. And yet, somehow, the memory of Byron does not seem to me to mate well with either home or church quietudes, and their serenities. Is it not proper and fitting after all that the clangor of a rebellious and fitful world should voice itself near such a grave? Old mossy and ivied towers in which church bells are a-chime, and near trees where rooks are cawing with home-sounds, do not marry happily with our memories of Byron. Best of all if he had been given burial where his heart lies, in that Ætolian country, upon some shaggy fore-land from which could have been seen--one way, Ithaca and the Ionian seas, and to the southward, across the Straits of Lepanto, the woody depths of the Morea, far as Arcadia. But there is no mending the matter now; he lies beside his harsh Gordon mother in the middle of the flat country of stockings, lace curtains, and collieries.