Placed at Harrow--Progress there--Love for Miss Chaworth--His
Reading--Oratorical Powers
In passing from the quiet academy of Dulwich Grove to the public
school of Harrow, the change must have been great to any boy--to
Byron it was punishment; and for the first year and a half he hated
the place. In the end, however, he rose to be a leader in all the
sports and mischiefs of his schoolfellows; but it never could be said
that he was a popular boy, however much he was distinguished for
spirit and bravery; for if he was not quarrelsome, he was sometimes
vindictive. Still it could not have been to any inveterate degree;
for, undoubtedly, in his younger years, he was susceptible of warm
impressions from gentle treatment, and his obstinacy and arbitrary
humour were perhaps more the effects of unrepressed habit than of
natural bias; they were the prickles which surrounded his genius in
the bud.
At Harrow he acquired no distinction as a student; indeed, at no
period was he remarkable for steady application. Under Dr Glennie he
had made but little progress; and it was chiefly in consequence of
his backwardness that he was removed from his academy. When placed
with Dr Drury, it was with an intimation that he had a cleverness
about him, but that his education had been neglected.
The early dislike which Byron felt towards the Earl of Carlisle is
abundantly well known, and he had the magnanimity to acknowledge that
it was in some respects unjust. But the antipathy was not all on one
side; nor will it be easy to parallel the conduct of the Earl with
that of any guardian. It is but justice, therefore, to Byron, to
make the public aware that the dislike began on the part of Lord
Carlisle, and originated in some distaste which he took to Mrs
Byron's manners, and at the trouble she sometimes gave him on account
of her son.
Dr Drury, in his communication to Mr Moore respecting the early
history of Byron, mentions a singular circumstance as to this
subject, which we record with the more pleasure, because Byron has
been blamed, and has blamed himself, for his irreverence towards Lord
Carlisle, while it appears that the fault lay with the Earl.
"After some continuance at Harrow," says Dr Drury, "and when the
powers of his mind had begun to expand, the late Lord Carlisle, his
relation, desired to see me in town. I waited on his Lordship. His
object was to inform me of Lord Byron's expectations of property when
he came of age, which he represented as contracted, and to inquire
respecting his abilities. On the former circumstance I made no
remark; as to the latter, I replied, 'He has talents, my Lord, which
will add lustre to his rank.' 'Indeed,' said his Lordship, with a
degree of surprise, that, according to my feelings, did not express
in it all the satisfaction I expected."
Lord Carlisle had, indeed, much of the Byron humour in him. His
mother was a sister of the homicidal lord, and possessed some of the
family peculiarity: she was endowed with great talent, and in her
latter days she exhibited great singularity. She wrote beautiful
verses and piquant epigrams among others, there is a poetical
effusion of her pen addressed to Mrs Greville, on her Ode to
Indifference, which, at the time, was much admired, and has been,
with other poems of her Ladyship's, published in Pearch's collection.
After moving, for a long time, as one of the most brilliant orbs in
the sphere of fashion, she suddenly retired, and like her morose
brother, shut herself up from the world. While she lived in this
seclusion, she became an object of the sportive satire of the late Mr
Fox, who characterized her as
Carlisle, recluse in pride and rags.
I have heard a still coarser apostrophe by the same gentleman. It
seems they had quarrelled, and on his leaving her in the drawing-
room, she called after him, that he might go about his business, for
she did not care two skips of a louse for him. On coming to the
hall, finding paper and ink on the table, he wrote two lines in
answer, and sent it up to her Ladyship, to the effect that she always
spoke of what was running in her head.
Byron has borne testimony to the merits of his guardian, her son, as
a tragic poet, by characterizing his publications as paper books. It
is, however, said that they nevertheless showed some talent, and that
The Father's Revenge, one of the tragedies, was submitted to the
judgment of Dr Johnson, who did not despise it.
But to return to the progress of Byron at Harrow; it is certain that
notwithstanding the affectionate solicitude of Dr Drury to encourage
him, he never became an eminent scholar; at least, we have his own
testimony to that effect, in the fourth canto of Childe Harold; the
lines, however, in which that testimony stands recorded, are among
the weakest he ever penned.
May he who will his recollections rake
And quote in classic raptures, and awake
The hills with Latin echoes: I abhorr'd
Too much to conquer, for the poet's sake,
The drill'd, dull lesson forced down word by word,
In my repugnant youth with pleasure to record.
And, as an apology for the defect, he makes the following remarks in
a note subjoined:--
"I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can
comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by
heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and
advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an
age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of
compositions, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as
Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon. For the same reason,
we never can be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages
of Shakspeare ('To be, or not to be,' for instance), from the habit
of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise
not of mind but of memory; so that when we are old enough to enjoy
them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of
the Continent, young persons are taught from mere common authors, and
do not read the best classics until their maturity. I certainly do
not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place
of my education. I was not a slow or an idle boy; and I believe no
one could be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and
with reason: a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my
life; and my preceptor, the Rev. Dr Joseph Drury, was the best and
worthiest friend I ever possessed; whose warnings I have remembered
but too well, though too late, when I have erred; and whose counsels
I have but followed when I have done well and wisely. If ever this
imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes,
let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude
and veneration; of one who would more gladly boast of having been his
pupil if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect
any honour upon his instructor."
Lord Byron, however, is not singular in his opinion of the inutility
of premature classical studies; and notwithstanding the able manner
in which the late Dean Vincent defended public education, we have
some notion that his reasoning upon this point will not be deemed
conclusive. Milton, says Dr Vincent, complained of the years that
were wasted in teaching the dead languages. Cowley also complained
that classical education taught words only and not things; and
Addison deemed it an inexpiable error, that boys with genius or
without were all to be bred poets indiscriminately. As far, then, as
respects the education of a poet, we should think that the names of
Milton, Cowley, Addison, and Byron would go well to settle the
question; especially when it is recollected how little Shakspeare was
indebted to the study of the classics, and that Burns knew nothing of
them at all. I do not, however, adopt the opinion as correct;
neither do I think that Dean Vincent took a right view of the
subject; for, as discipline, the study of the classics may be highly
useful, at the same time, the mere hammering of Greek and Latin into
English cannot be very conducive to the refinement of taste or the
exaltation of sentiment. Nor is there either common sense or correct
logic in the following observations made on the passage and note,
quoted by the anonymous author of Childe Harold's Monitor.
"This doctrine of antipathies, contracted by the impatience of youth
against the noblest authors of antiquity, from the circumstance of
having been made the vehicle of early instruction, is a most
dangerous doctrine indeed; since it strikes at the root, not only of
all pure taste, but of all praiseworthy industry. It would, if acted
upon (as Harold by the mention of the Continental practice of using
inferior writers in the business of tuition would seem to recommend),
destroy the great source of the intellectual vigour of our
countrymen."
This is, undoubtedly, assuming too much; for those who have objected
to the years "wasted" in teaching the dead languages, do not admit
that the labour of acquiring them either improves the taste or adds
to the vigour of the understanding; and, therefore, before the
soundness of the opinion of Milton, of Cowley, of Addison, and of
many other great men can be rejected, it falls on those who are of
Dean Vincent's opinion, and that of Childe Harold's Monitor, to prove
that the study of the learned languages is of so much primary
importance as they claim for it.
But it appears that Byron's mind, during the early period of his
residence at Harrow, was occupied with another object than his
studies, and which may partly account for his inattention to them.
He fell in love with Mary Chaworth. "She was," he is represented to
have said, "several years older than myself, but at my age boys like
something older than themselves, as they do younger later in life.
Our estates adjoined, but owing to the unhappy circumstances of the
feud (the affair of the fatal duel), our families, as is generally
the case with neighbours, who happen to be near relations, were never
on terms of more than common civility, scarcely those. She was the
beau ideal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of the
beautiful! and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature
of women from the perfection my imagination created in her. I say
created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but
angelic. I returned to Harrow, after my trip to Cheltenham, more
deeply enamoured than ever, and passed the next holidays at Newstead.
I now began to fancy myself a man, and to make love in earnest. Our
meetings were stolen ones, and my letters passed through the medium
of a confidant. A gate leading from Mr Chaworth's grounds to those
of my mother, was the place of our interviews, but the ardour was all
on my side; I was serious, she was volatile. She liked me as a
younger brother, and treated and laughed at me as a boy; she,
however, gave me her picture, and that was something to make verses
upon. Had I married Miss Chaworth, perhaps the whole tenor of my
life would have been different; she jilted me, however, but her
marriage proved anything but a happy one." It is to this attachment
that we are indebted for the beautiful poem of The Dream, and the
stanzas beginning
Oh, had my fate been joined to thine!
Although this love affair a little interfered with his Greek and
Latin, his time was not passed without some attention to reading.
Until he was eighteen years old, he had never seen a review; but his
general information was so extensive on modern topics, as to induce a
suspicion that he could only have collected so much information from
reviews, as he was never seen reading, but always idle, and in
mischief, or at play. He was, however, a devourer of books; he read
eating, read in bed, read when no one else read, and had perused all
sorts of books from the time he first could spell, but had never read
a review, and knew not what the name implied.
It should be here noticed, that while he was at Harrow, his qualities
were rather oratorical than poetical; and if an opinion had then been
formed of the likely result of his character, the prognostication
would have led to the expectation of an orator. Altogether, his
conduct at Harrow indicated a clever, but not an extraordinary boy.
He formed a few friendships there, in which his attachment appears to
have been, in some instances, remarkable. The late Duke of Dorset
was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster. He
certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that
splendid career he was destined to run as a poet.