FRAGMENT. WRITTEN BY LORD BYRON, SHORTLY AFTER THE MARRIAGE OF MISS : CHAWORTH. HILLS of Annesley, bleak and barren, Where my thoughtless childhood stray'd, How the northern tempests, warring, Howl above thy tufted shade! Now no more, the hours beguiling, Makes ye seem a heaven to me. "This young lady herself combined, with the many worldly advantages that encircled her, much personal beauty, and a disposition the most amiable and attaching. Though already fully alive to her charms, it was at this period (1804) that the young poet seems to have drunk deepest of that fascination, whose effects were to be so lasting six short weeks which passed in her company, being sufficient to lay the foundation of a feeling for all life. With the summer holidays ended this dream of his youth. He saw Miss Chaworth once more in the succeeding year, and took his last farewell of her on that hill near Annesley, which, in his poem of The Dream,' he describes so happily, as crowned with a peculiar diadem." 6 "In August, 1805, she was married to John Musters, Esq.; and died at Wiverton Hall, in February, 1832, in consequence, it is believed, of the alarm and danger to which she had been exposed during the sack of Colwick Hall, by a party of rioters from Nottingham. The unfortunate lady had been in a feeble state of health for several years, and she and her daughter were obliged to take shelter from the violence of the mob in a shrubbery, where, partly from cold, partly from terror, her constitution sustained a shock which it wanted vigour to resist.”—Moore's Life of Byron. LUCID INTERVAL OF A MAD PRISONER. A PASSAGE FROM THE DIARY OF THE CLERGYMAN IN DEBT." MAD! exclaims the reader, Oh no, surely not! Will you tell me, that when the worst and dreariest calamity that in grief can visit virtue, or, in retribution, sin,— has fallen upon a fellow being; when the bosom is fevered, and the heart burns, and a storm is howling in the caverns of the brain, deserted as they are by reason, and shut out from light;-when love's blessed spirit is lost in frenzy, and memory makes way for despair—when all man's intellects lay prostrate, and all his affections are banished, all his hopes undone; can the law, holding a tyrant power over one who acknowledges no dictates, and is irresponsible as a child, follow up an awful divine visitation, with the hollow mockery of human vengeance, and take the madman from his fit asylum to close upon him the portals of a gaol? What the law can do it is no part of our vocation to establish; but what it has done we are free to tell, and we answer the question which we have imagined for our reader, with the assertion, that it has many times committed the insane to prison for the crime of debt. A few days since it was my lot to read the funeral service over the body of Frederic Storr. He was buried in some ground attached to a small chapel in the rules of the King's Bench, within which he had resided twelve years. A few hired mourners saw him committed to the tomb, and one woman who wept very bitterly, but who I afterwards ascertained was not connected with him by any positive tie of kindred. He had travelled friendless, from the living grave of his prison to the darker, but scarce drearier dwelling below the earth! I had known him for some years previous to his deathhe was mad, save at occasional lucid intervals, when memory seemed to return with sense, and he could converse with presence and rationality of mind. Strangely too, at those moments he could recal and talk of the tor menting visions of his insanity, and none was then more aware that he had been mad. He could go back, too, to the early events of his life, and often narrate the incidents that had brought him into gaol. I happened one morning in my ramble round the rules of the prison to meet Storr coming through the little gate before his dwelling, and by his salutation I perceived that he had an interval of sense-one of those beautiful episodes of light and reason that for a time restore order in the brain. I spent the whole of that day with him, endeavouring to amuse his mind, while it retained its empire, with rapid and changeful conversation, for of itself it seemed to revert, through the power of memory, to the stormy "Past" of Storr's unhappy life. Towards evening, Storr's uneasiness upon this point increased, and at last I was obliged to allow him to unburthen himself of the history, which he was fond of narrating, of what had fallen out in the dark page of his destiny. The story is here presented to the reader as from the lips of its melancholy hero! * * * * * "My mother died when I was sixteen. I shall never-no, not even in madness-forget my mother's death. I was with her to the last. I alone-for my father was away then-and she kissed me with her last kiss, and smiled upon me with her last sweet smile, and blessed me with her farewell words. I remember I had been a wild boy; I had given her many moments of pain and heart-ach, and she often feared that my irrepressible levity and impetuous folly would in the end be my ruin. A fear of this sort seemed to pervade her spirit before, on holy wings, it took its far flight to God; for just before she died she said, with her mild quiet voice and look, 'Dearest Fred,-do-do be steady when I am gone;' and I promised it fervently. I will, mother, I will indeed!'-See, see how memory makes me weep! "My father came home. He grieved a little, but his sorrow was shallow and unenduring: and it soon fled after mother was carried to her grave. my I know not even if it lasted out the mourning suit. But if my father soon forgot the dead, he did not neglect the living: he saw me keeping the promise I had made to my dying mother-to be steady after she was gone.' I had exchanged the theatres and saloons for study, and given up dissipation for my books. He began at once to interest himself in my pursuits, and set himself, well competent to the task, to complete my education. The channel into which he turned it blasted the better feelings, and blighted the flowers of my heart, and made me what you see me now. I had become steady with a good |