[ Gentleman's Magazine ]
The Gentleman's Magazine was an important and influential monthly magazine in the 18th and 19th Centuries; it began in 1731, ceased regular publication in 1907, and shut down completely in 1922.
The June 1824 issue featured a lengthy obituary of the hugely popular (and rather notorious) English poet Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron, the 6th Baron Byron), who had died in April of 1824 at the age of 36. At one point in the obituary Byron's Newfoundland, Boatswain, is mentioned, as follows:
In his aquatic exercises near Newstead Abbey, he had seldom any other companion than a large Newfoundland dog, to try whose sagacity and fidelity he would sometimes fall out of the boat, as if by accident, when the dog would seize him and drag him ashore. On losing this dog, in the autumn of 1808, his Lordship caused a monument to be erected, commemorative of its attachment, with an inscription, from which we extract the following lines:
"Ye who, perchance, behold this simple urn,
Pass on — it honours none you wish to mourn!
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies."
Lord Byron was in fact a very accomplished swimmer; it has been suggested he took to swimming to compensate for the fact his club foot prevented him from playing field sports.
"Newstead Abbey" was the ancestral home of Byron's family, though it had fallen into considerable disrepair due to the financial irresponsibility of the 5th Baron Byron, Lord Byron's great-uncle. Because that great-uncle managed to outlive his 4 children and only grandchild, the estate passed to George Gordon Lord Byron, who began some repairs and planned to live there, but he never had enough money for a proper renovation and eventually sold the estate. (Byron *would* have had enough money if he had accepted the royalties from the sale of his poetry, but as a nobleman he regarded the acceptance of payment for writing as beneath him. At least for a while; he eventually changed his mind and accepted his royalties to help pay for his lavish lifestyle.)
More about Boatswain and the memorial inscription to him may be found here at The Cultured Newf. And there is more about the monument to Boatswain here at The Cultured Newf.