It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact that Mary Duff's husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn's port. But we may also doubt, perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff's marriage was also the date of Byron's desperate passion for Mary Chaworth. Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron's daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to her mother. "Dear Madam," it began, "My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please." For the rest, one can only quote Byron's brief reminiscence: "My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her--her dark eyes--her long eyelashes--her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve--she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an elegy--a very dull one." And then Byron speaks of his cousin's "transparent" beauty--"she looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow"--and concludes: "My passion had its usual effect upon me--I could not eat--I could not sleep--I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now." The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked for it on the ground that it was "composed at the age of fourteen." It is very youthful in tone--quite on the conventional lines--as one would expect. A single quatrain may be given--not to be criticised, but merely to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his pastors and masters told him to look at it: