"No! Lady Byron will not make it up "with me now, lest the world should say "that her mother only was to blame!

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Lady Noel certainly identifies herself very 66 strongly in the quarrel, even by the ac"count of her last injunctions; for she di"rects in her will that my portrait, shut 66 up in a case by her orders, shall not be opened till her grand-daughter be of age, " and then not given to her if Lady Byron "shall be alive.

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"I might have claimed all the fortune for

my life, if I had chosen to do so; but "have agreed to leave the division of it "to Lord Dacre and Sir Francis Burdett. "The whole management of the affair is "confided to them; and I shall not inter"fere, nor make any suggestion or objection, "if they award Lady Byron the whole.”

I asked him how he became entitled?

"The late Lord Wentworth," said he,

bequeathed a life-interest in his Lanca"shire estates to Lady Byron's mother, and "afterwards to her daughter: that is the way I claim."

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Some time after, when the equal partition had been settled, he said:

"I have offered Lady Byron the family "mansion in addition to the award, but she "has declined it: this is not kind."

The conversation turned after dinner on the lyrical poetry of the day, and a question arose as to which was the most perfect ode that had been produced. Shelley contended

for Coleridge's on Switzerland, beginning "Ye clouds," &c.; others named some of Moore's Irish Melodies, and Campbell's Hohenlinden; and, had Lord Byron not been present, his own Invocation in Manfred, or Ode to Napoleon, or on Prometheus, might have been cited.

"Like Gray," said he, "Campbell smells "too much of the oil: he is never satisfied "with what he does; his finest things have "been spoiled by over-polish-the sharpness "of the outline is worn off. Like paintings, poems may be too highly finished. The

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great art is effect, no matter how pro❝duced.

"I will shew

you an ode you have never 66 seen, that I consider little inferior to the "best which the present prolific age has

"brought forth." With this he left the table, almost before the cloth was removed, and returned with a magazine, from which he read the following lines on Sir John Moore's burial, which perhaps require no apology for finding a place here:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the ramparts we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,—
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light,
And the lantern dimly burning.

No useless coffin confined his breast,

Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him; But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow:

But we stedfastly gazed on the face that was dead, And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed,
And smooth'd down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,

And we far away on the billow!

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,

And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him

;

But nothing he'll reck, if they let him sleep on In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done,

When the clock told the hour for retiring; And we heard the distant and random gun

Of the enemy sullenly firing.