So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
The Sleeping Children 1817 and remains there to this day. Above the statue is a black marble plaque dedicated to William Robinson (the father of the two children). In 1826 the poet, William Lisle Bowles wrote a poem about the sculpture: Look at those sleeping children; softly tread, Lest thou do mar their dream, and come not nigh Till their fond mother, with a kiss, shall cry, 'Tis morn, awake! awake! Ah! they are dead! Yet folded in each other's arms they lie, So still—oh, look! so still and smilingly, So breathing and so beautiful, they seem, As if to die in youth