"Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am returning _home_ without a hope, and almost without a desire. The first thing I shall have to encounter will be a lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair, and contested coal-pits. In short, I am sick and sorry, and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence." The writer of the above was barely twenty-four years of age, he bore one of the oldest names in the British Isles, he was a peer of England and was to become the leading poet of his time! The first canto of _Childe Harold_ was to reveal him in the latter capacity, and he sold his poem for two hundred pounds sterling. His mother died suddenly in Scotland two months after his return, in 1811. "One day," said Lord Byron, "I heard she was ill; the next, I learnt that she was dead!" Nor was this all. Almost at the same time his two best friends, Wingfield and Matthews, both died. Byron wrote to Mr. Davies:-- "Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? Come to me. I am almost desolate--left almost alone in the world." We find traces of these sorrows at the close of the second canto of _Childe Harold_:-- "All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death! thou hast; The parent, friend, and now the more than friend; Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend, Hath snatch'd the little joy that life had yet to lend. What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now. Before the Chastener humbly let me bow, O'er hearts divided and o'er hopes destroyed: Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow, Since Time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd, And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloy'd." Byron rejoiced greatly in the success that had greeted the first canto of his _Childe Harold_; the second was composed after his return to England, as the stanza upon his mother's death proves. Even the _Edinburgh Review_ made amends for its mistake in denying that the author of _Hours of Idleness_ had a vocation for poetry.