Newstead Abbey fell out badly. In 1808, Lord Grey left at the end of his lease and Byron returned to live at Newstead and began extensive and expensive renovations. His works were mainly decorative, however, rather than structural, so that rain and damp obscured his changes within just a few years. Byron had a beloved Newfoundland dog named Boatswain, who died of rabies in 1808. Boatswain was buried at Newstead Abbey and has a monument larger than his master's. The inscription, from Byron's poem "Epitaph to a Dog", has become one of his best-known works: Near this Spot Are deposited the Remains
Lad, A Dog '30s and even into the '40s." In comparing the work to popular collie character Lassie, Boyle noted that rather than having Lassie's seeming immortality, Terhune's dogs "led epic lives and they had epic deaths". In the Fall 1996 issue of "Raritan Quarterly Review", Stephen D. Cox, freely admitting to never having read the book, nonetheless called Terhune a "hack writer" who lacked "storytelling skill" and denounced "Lad: A Dog" as non-literature with "sentences [that] are insufferably stilted and hammy" and "have a tendency to wander off on long romps with his personal obsessions." Terming it a "socially interesting" work, he