about Byron and Moore. But Pen was a sworn fire-worshipper and a Corsair; he had them by heart, and used to take little Laura into the window and say, “Zuleika, I am not thy brother,” in tones so tragic that they caused the solemn little maid to open her great eyes still wider. She sat, until the proper hour for retirement, sewing at Mrs. Pendennis’s knee, and listening to Pen reading out to her of nights without comprehending one word of what he read. 

 He read Shakspeare to his mother (which she said she liked, but didn’t), and Byron, and Pope, and his favourite Lalla Rookh, which pleased her indifferently. But as for Bishop Heber, and Mrs. Hemans above all, this lady used to melt right away, and be absorbed into her pocket-handkerchief, when Pen read those authors to her in his kind boyish voice. The ‘Christian Year’ was a book which appeared about that time. The son and the mother whispered it to each other with awe—faint, very faint, and seldom in after-life Pendennis heard that solemn church-music: but he always loved the remembrance of it, and of the times when it struck on his heart, and he walked over the fields full of hope and void of doubt, as the church-bells rang on Sunday morning. 

 It was at this period of his existence, that Pen broke out in the Poets’ Corner of the County Chronicle, with some verses with which he was perfectly well satisfied. His are the verses signed ‘NEP.,’ addressed ‘To a Tear;’ ‘On the Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo;’ ‘To Madame Caradori singing at the Assize Meetings;’ ‘On Saint Bartholomew’s Day’ (a tremendous denunciation of Popery, and a solemn warning to the people of England to rally against emancipating the Roman Catholics), etc., etc.—all which masterpieces, Mrs. Pendennis no doubt keeps to this day, along with his first socks, the first cutting of his hair, his bottle, and other interesting relics of his infancy. He used to gallop Rebecca over the neighbouring Dumpling Downs, or into the county town, which, if you please, we shall call Chatteris, spouting his own poems, and filled with quite a Byronic afflatus as he thought. 

 His genius at this time was of a decidedly gloomy cast. He brought his mother a tragedy, in which, though he killed sixteen people before the second act, it made her laugh so, that he thrust the masterpiece into the fire in a pet. He projected an epic poem in blank verse, ‘Cortez, or the Conqueror of Mexico, and the Inca’s Daughter.’ He wrote part of ‘Seneca, or the Fatal Bath,’ and ‘Ariadne in Naxos;’ classical pieces, with choruses and strophes and antistrophes, which sadly puzzled poor Mrs. Pendennis; and began a ‘History of the 

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