Courts of justice, public offices and shops were closed for three days; for three days dancing, public amusements and the sound of musical instruments were forbidden; and the public mourning lasted for three weeks. Poor Byron! he only desired to fight and to help to win a victory, or, if conquered, to die arms in hand. As a general, it would have given him great joy to lead the Souliotes at the siege of Lepanto; Lepanto, the land of Don Juan and of Charles the Fifth, seemed to him a fitting name with which to link his own; it was a noble land to bleed for and to die in. But he was not to realise that happiness; he died at Missolonghi, and it was he who made an unknown land famous, instead of himself receiving lustre from a sacred land; people say, "Byron died at Missolonghi," not "Missolonghi, the place where Byron died." The great man had no notion that, in dying for the Greeks, he was only dying so that Europe, as the Duc d'Orléans once expressed it to me, might have the pleasure of eating sauerkraut at the foot of the Parthenon! Poor immortal bard, who died in the hope that the news of his death would resound through all hearts! what would he have said if he could have heard, as I rushed in, the newspaper containing the fatal notice in my hand, crying despairingly, "Byron is dead," one of the assistants in our office ask, "Who was Byron?" Such a question caused me both pain and pleasure mixed; I had, then, found someone even more ignorant than myself, and he one of the chief clerks in the office. Had it been only an ordinary copying clerk I should not have felt so consoled. This unlooked for death of one of the greatest poets of the time made a deep impression upon me; I felt instinctively that Byron was more than a poet, that he was one of those leaders whose inspired utterances, in the silence of the night and in the obscurity in which art lives, are heard throughout all nations, whose shining rays lighten the whole world. Such men are usually not only prophets but also martyrs. They create from out their own sufferings the divine thoughts which act as incentives to others; it is at the spectacle of their own tortures that they utter cries which clutch the heart. Had Prometheus or Napoleon been poets, think what verses each would have engraved on his rock of doom! We will try, then, to give an account of the sufferings of this man, who was driven from his own country as though he were a Barabbas, to die for the Greeks as Christ did for the Jews. Death must be passed through before there can be transfiguration. CHAPTER II Byron's childhood--His grief at being lame--Mary Duff--The Malvern fortune-teller--How Byron and Robert Peel became acquainted--Miss Parker--Miss Chaworth--Verses on her portrait--Mrs. Musters--Lady Morgan--_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_--Byron's letters to his mother--He takes his seat in the House of Lords