----
"I cannot say your friend."
Endorsed on this letter, in the handwriting of Lord Byron, is the
following:--
"This and another letter were written at Harrow, by my _then_, and I hope
_ever_, beloved friend, Lord ----, when we were both school-boys, and sent
to my study in consequence of some childish misunderstanding,--the only
one which ever arose between us. It was of short duration, and I retain
this note solely for the purpose of submitting it to his perusal, that we
may smile over the recollection of the insignificance of our first and
last quarrel.
"BYRON."
In a letter, dated two years afterwards, from the same boy,[33] there
occurs the following characteristic trait:--"I think, by your last
letter, that you are very much piqued with most of your friends; and,
if I am not much mistaken, you are a little piqued with me. In one
part you say, 'There is little or no doubt a few years, or months,
will render us as politely indifferent to each other as if we had
never passed a portion of our time together.' Indeed, Byron, you wrong
me, and I have no doubt--at least, I hope--you wrong yourself."
As that propensity to self-delineation, which so strongly pervades his
maturer works is, to the full, as predominant in his early
productions, there needs no better record of his mode of life, as a
school-boy, than what these fondly circumstantial effusions supply.
Thus the sports he delighted and excelled in are enumerated:--
"Yet when confinement's lingering hour was done,
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one:
Together we impell'd the flying ball,
* * * * *
Together join'd in cricket's manly toil,
Or shared the produce of the river's spoil;
Or, plunging from the green, declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore;
In every element, unchanged, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name."
The danger which he incurred in a fight with some of the neighbouring
farmers--an event well remembered by some of his school-fellows--is
thus commemorated.--
"Still I remember, in the factious strife,
The rustic's musket aim'd against my life;
High poised in air the massy weapon hung,
A cry of horror burst from every tongue:
Whilst I, in combat with another foe,
Fought on, unconscious of the impending blow.
Your arm, brave boy, arrested his career--
Forward you sprung, insensible to fear;
Disarm'd and baffled by your conquering hand,
The grovelling savage roll'd upon the sand."
Some feud, it appears, had arisen on the subject of the
cricket-ground, between these "clods" (as in school-language they are
called) and the boys, and one or two skirmishes had previously taken
place. But the engagement here recorded was accidentally brought on by
the breaking up of school and the dismissal of the volunteers from
drill, both happening, on that occasion, at the same hour. This
circumstance accounts for the use of the musket, the butt-end of which
was aimed at Byron's head, and would have felled him to the ground,
but for the interposition of his friend Tatersall, a lively,
high-spirited boy, whom he addresses here under the name of Davus.
Notwithstanding these general habits of play and idleness, which might
seem to indicate a certain absence of reflection and feeling, there
were moments when the youthful poet would retire thoughtfully within
himself, and give way to moods of musing uncongenial with the usual
cheerfulness of his age. They show a tomb in the churchyard at Harrow,
commanding a view over Windsor, which was so well known to be his
favourite resting-place, that the boys called it "Byron's tomb;"[34]
and here, they say, he used to sit for hours, wrapt up in
thought,--brooding lonelily over the first stirrings of passion and
genius in his soul, and occasionally, perhaps, indulging in those
bright forethoughts of fame, under the influence of which, when little
more than fifteen years of age, he wrote these remarkable lines:--
"My epitaph shall be my name alone;
If that with honour fail to crown my clay,
Oh may no other fame my deeds repay;
That, only that, shall single out the spot,
By that remember'd, or with that forgot."
In the autumn of 1802, he passed a short time with his mother at Bath,
and entered, rather prematurely, into some of the gaieties of the
place. At a masquerade given by Lady Riddel, he appeared in the
character of a Turkish boy,--a sort of anticipation, both in beauty
and costume, of his own young Selim, in "The Bride." On his entering
into the house, some person in the crowd attempted to snatch the
diamond crescent from his turban, but was prevented by the prompt
interposition of one of the party. The lady who mentioned to me this
circumstance, and who was well acquainted with Mrs. Byron at that
period, adds the following remark in the communication with which she
has favoured me:--"At Bath I saw a good deal of Lord Byron,--his
mother frequently sent for me to take tea with her. He was always very
pleasant and droll, and, when conversing about absent friends, showed
a slight turn for satire, which after-years, as is well known, gave a
finer edge to."
We come now to an event in his life which, according to his own
deliberate persuasion, exercised a lasting and paramount influence
over the whole of his subsequent character and career.
It was in the year 1803 that his heart, already twice, as we have
seen, possessed with the childish notion that it loved, conceived an
attachment which--young as he was, even then, for such a
feeling--sunk so deep into his mind as to give a colour to all his
future life. That unsuccessful loves are generally the most lasting,
is a truth, however sad, which unluckily did not require this instance
to confirm it. To the same cause, I fear, must be traced the perfect
innocence and romance which distinguish this very early attachment to
Miss Chaworth from the many others that succeeded, without effacing it
in his heart;--making it the only one whose details can be entered
into with safety, or whose results, however darkening their influence
on himself, can be dwelt upon with pleasurable interest by others.
On leaving Bath, Mrs. Byron took up her abode, in lodgings, at
Nottingham,--Newstead Abbey being at that time let to Lord Grey de
Ruthen,--and during the Harrow vacations of this year, she was joined
there by her son. So attached was he to Newstead, that even to be in
its neighbourhood was a delight to him; and before he became
acquainted with Lord Grey, he used sometimes to sleep, for a night, at
the small house near the gate which is still known by the name of "The
Hut."[35] An intimacy, however, soon sprang up between him and his
noble tenant, and an apartment in the abbey was from thenceforth
always at his service. To the family of Miss Chaworth, who resided at
Annesley, in the immediate neighbourhood of Newstead, he had been made
known, some time before, in London, and now renewed his acquaintance
with them. The young heiress herself combined with the many worldly
advantages that encircled her, much personal beauty, and a disposition
the most amiable and attaching. Though already fully alive to her
charms, it was at the period of which we are speaking that the young
poet, who was then in his sixteenth year, while the object of his
admiration was about two years older, seems to have drunk deepest of
that fascination whose effects were to be so lasting;--six short
summer weeks which he now passed in her company being sufficient to
lay the foundation of a feeling for all life.
He used, at first, though offered a bed at Annesley, to return every
night to Newstead, to sleep; alleging as a reason that he was afraid
of the family pictures of the Chaworths,--that he fancied "they had
taken a grudge to him on account of the duel, and would come down from
their frames at night to haunt him."[36] At length, one evening, he
said gravely to Miss Chaworth and her cousin, "In going home last
night I saw a _bogle_;"--which Scotch term being wholly unintelligible
to the young ladies, he explained that he had seen a _ghost_, and
would not therefore return to Newstead that evening. From this time he
always slept at Annesley during the remainder of his visit, which was
interrupted only by a short excursion to Matlock and Castleton, in
which he had the happiness of accompanying Miss Chaworth and her
party, and of which the following interesting notice appears in one of
his memorandum-books:--
"When I was fifteen years of age, it happened that, in a cavern in
Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could
lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close
upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman
(a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time. The
companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had been long in love,
and never told it, though _she_ had discovered it without. I recollect
my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well. We were a
party, a Mr. W., two Miss W.s, Mr. and Mrs. Cl--ke, Miss R. and _my_
M.A.C. Alas! why do I say MY? Our union would have healed feuds in
which blood had been shed by our fathers,--it would have joined lands
broad and rich, it would have joined at least _one_ heart, and two
persons not ill matched in years (she is two years my elder),
and--and--and--_what_ has been the result?"
In the dances of the evening at Matlock, Miss Chaworth, of course,
joined, while her lover sat looking on, solitary and mortified. It is
not impossible, indeed, that the dislike which he always expressed for
this amusement may have originated in some bitter pang, felt in his
youth, on seeing "the lady of his love" led out by others to the gay
dance from which he was himself excluded. On the present occasion, the
young heiress of Annesley having had for her partner (as often happens
at Matlock) some person with whom she was wholly unacquainted, on her
resuming her seat, Byron said to her pettishly, "I hope you like your
friend?" The words were scarce out of his lips when he was accosted by
an ungainly-looking Scotch lady, who rather boisterously claimed him
as "cousin," and was putting his pride to the torture with her
vulgarity, when he heard the voice of his fair companion retorting
archly in his ear, "I hope _you_ like your friend?"
His time at Annesley was mostly passed in riding with Miss Chaworth
and her cousin, sitting in idle reverie, as was his custom, pulling at
his handkerchief, or in firing at a door which opens upon the terrace,
and which still, I believe, bears the marks of his shots. But his
chief delight was in sitting to hear Miss Chaworth play; and the
pretty Welsh air, "Mary Anne," was (partly, of course, on account of
the name) his especial favourite. During all this time he had the pain
of knowing that the heart of her he loved was occupied by
another;--that, as he himself expresses it,
"Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother--but no more."
Neither is it, indeed, probable, had even her affections been
disengaged, that Lord Byron would, at this time, have been selected as
the object of them. A seniority of two years gives to a girl, "on the
eve of womanhood," an advance into life with which the boy keeps no
proportionate pace. Miss Chaworth looked upon Byron as a mere
school-boy. He was in his manners, too, at that period, rough and odd,
and (as I have heard from more than one quarter) by no means popular
among girls of his own age. If, at any moment, however, he had
flattered himself with the hope of being loved by her, a circumstance
mentioned in his "Memoranda," as one of the most painful of those
humiliations to which the defect in his foot had exposed him, must
have let the truth in, with dreadful certainty, upon his heart. He
either was told of, or overheard, Miss Chaworth saying to her maid,
"Do you think I could care any thing for that lame boy?" This speech,
as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart. Though
late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house,
and scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found
himself at Newstead.
The picture which he has drawn of his youthful love, in one of the
most interesting of his poems, "The Dream," shows how genius and
feeling can elevate the realities of this life, and give to the
commonest events and objects an undying lustre. The old hall at
Annesley, under the name of "the antique oratory," will long call up
to fancy the "maiden and the youth" who once stood in it: while the
image of the "lover's steed," though suggested by the unromantic
race-ground of Nottingham, will not the less conduce to the general
charm of the scene, and share a portion of that light which only
genius could shed over it.
He appears already, at this boyish age, to have been so far a
proficient in gallantry as to know the use that may be made of the
trophies of former triumphs in achieving new ones; for he used to
boast, with much pride, to Miss Chaworth, of a locket which some fair
favourite had given him, and which probably may have been a present
from that pretty cousin, of whom he speaks with such warmth in one of
the notices already quoted. He was also, it appears, not a little
aware of his own beauty, which, notwithstanding the tendency to
corpulence derived from his mother, gave promise, at this time, of
that peculiar expression into which his features refined and kindled
afterwards.
With the summer holidays ended this dream of his youth. He saw Miss
Chaworth once more in the succeeding year, and took his last farewell
of her (as he himself used to relate) on that hill near Annesley[37]
which, in his poem of "The Dream," he describes so happily as
"crowned with a peculiar diadem." No one, he declared, could have told
how _much_ he felt--for his countenance was calm, and his feelings
restrained. "The next time I see you," said he in parting with her, "I
suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth[38],"--and her answer was, "I hope
so." It was before this interview that he wrote, with a pencil, in a
volume of Madame de Maintenon's letters, belonging to her, the
following verses, which have never, I believe, before been
published:--[39]
"Oh Memory, torture me no more,
The present's all o'ercast;
My hopes of future bliss are o'er,
In mercy veil the past.
Why bring those images to view
I henceforth must resign?
Ah! why those happy hours renew,
That never can be mine?
Past pleasure doubles present pain,
To sorrow adds regret,
Regret and hope are both in vain,
I ask but to--forget."
In the following year, 1805, Miss Chaworth was married to his
successful rival, Mr. John Musters; and a person who was present when
the first intelligence of the event was communicated to him, thus
describes the manner in which he received it.--"I was present when he
first heard of the marriage. His mother said, 'Byron, I have some news
for you.'--'Well, what is it?'--'Take out your handkerchief first,
for you will want it.'--'Nonsense!'--Take out your handkerchief, I
say.' He did so, to humour her. 'Miss Chaworth is married.' An
expression very peculiar, impossible to describe, passed over his pale
face, and he hurried his handkerchief into his pocket, saying, with an
affected air of coldness and nonchalance, 'Is that all?'--'Why, I
expected you would have been plunged in grief!'--He made no reply,
and soon began to talk about something else."
His pursuits at Harrow continued to be of the same truant description
during the whole of his stay there;--"always," as he says himself,
"cricketing, rebelling,[40] _rowing_, and in all manner of mischiefs."
The "rebelling," of which he here speaks, (though it never, I believe,
proceeded to any act of violence,) took place on the retirement of Dr.
Drury from his situation as head master, when three candidates for
the vacant chair presented themselves,--Mark Drury, Evans, and
Butler. On the first movement to which this contest gave rise in the
school, young Wildman was at the head of the party for Mark Drury,
while Byron at first held himself aloof from any. Anxious, however, to
have him as an ally, one of the Drury faction said to Wildman--"Byron,
I know, will not join, because he doesn't choose to act second to any
one, but, by giving up the leadership to him, you may at once secure
him." This Wildman accordingly did, and Byron took the command of the
party.
The violence with which he opposed the election of Dr. Butler on this
occasion (chiefly from the warm affection which he had felt towards
the last master) continued to embitter his relations with that
gentleman during the remainder of his stay at Harrow. Unhappily their
opportunities of collision were the more frequent from Byron's being a
resident in Dr. Butler's house. One day the young rebel, in a fit of
defiance, tore down all the gratings from the window in the hall; and
when called upon by his host to say why he had committed this
violence, answered, with stern coolness, "Because they darkened the
hall." On another occasion he explicitly, and so far manfully, avowed
to this gentleman's face the pique he entertained against him. It has
long been customary, at the end of a term, for the master to invite
the upper boys to dine with him; and these invitations are generally
considered as, like royal ones, a sort of command. Lord Byron,
however, when asked, sent back a refusal, which rather surprising Dr.
Butler, he, on the first opportunity that occurred, enquired of him,
in the presence of the other boys, his motive for this step:--"Have
you any other engagement?"--"No, sir."--"But you must have _some_
reason, Lord Byron."--"I have."--"What is it?"--"Why, Dr. Butler,"
replied the young peer, with proud composure, "if you should happen to
come into my neighbourhood when I was staying at Newstead, I certainly
should not ask you to dine with me, and therefore feel that I ought
not to dine with _you_."[41]
The general character which he bore among the masters at Harrow was that
of an idle boy, who would never learn anything; and, as far as regarded
his tasks in school, this reputation was, by his own avowal, not
ill-founded. It is impossible, indeed, to look through the books which
he had then in use, and which are scribbled over with clumsy interlined
translations, without being struck with the narrow extent of his
classical attainments. The most ordinary Greek words have their English
signification scrawled under them, showing too plainly that he was not
sufficiently familiarised with their meaning to trust himself without
this aid. Thus, in his Xenophon we find {~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}, _young_--{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~},
_bodies_--{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, _good men_, &c. &c.--and even in the
volumes of Greek plays which he presented to the library on his
departure, we observe, among other instances, the common word {~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}
provided with its English representative in the margin.
But, notwithstanding his backwardness in the mere verbal scholarship,
on which so large and precious a portion of life is wasted,[42] in all
that general and miscellaneous knowledge which is alone useful in the
world, he was making rapid and even wonderful progress. With a mind
too inquisitive and excursive to be imprisoned within statutable
limits, he flew to subjects that interested his already manly tastes,
with a zest which it is in vain to expect that the mere pedantries of
school could inspire; and the irregular, but ardent, snatches of study
which he caught in this way, gave to a mind like his an impulse
forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding competitors far
behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in
all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily
devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to
startle belief,--comprising, as it does, a range and variety of
study, which might make much older "helluones librorum" hide their
heads.
Not to argue, however, from the powers and movements of a mind like
Byron's, which might well be allowed to take a privileged direction of
its own, there is little doubt, that to _any_ youth of talent and
ambition, the plan of instruction pursued in the great schools and
universities of England, wholly inadequate as it is to the
intellectual wants of the age,[43] presents an alternative of evils
not a little embarrassing. Difficult, nay, utterly impossible, as he
will find it, to combine a competent acquisition of useful knowledge
with that round of antiquated studies which a pursuit of scholastic
honours requires, he must either, by devoting the whole of his
attention and ambition to the latter object, remain ignorant on most
of those subjects upon which mind grapples with mind in life, or by
adopting, as Lord Byron and other distinguished persons have done, the
contrary system, consent to pass for a dunce or idler in the schools,
in order to afford himself even a chance of attaining eminence in the
world.
From the memorandums scribbled by the young poet in his school-books,
we might almost fancy that, even at so early an age, he had a sort of
vague presentiment that everything relating to him would one day be an
object of curiosity and interest. The date of his entrance at
Harrow,[44] the names of the boys who were, at that time, monitors,
the list of his fellow pupils under Doctor Drury,[45]--all are noted
down with a fond minuteness, as if to form points of retrospect in his
after-life; and that he sometimes referred to them with this feeling
will appear from one touching instance. On the first leaf of his
"Scriptores Græci," we find, in his schoolboy hand, the following
memorial:--"George Gordon Byron, Wednesday, June 26th, A. D. 1805, 3
quarters of an hour past 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 3d
school,--Calvert, monitor; Tom Wildman on my left hand and Long on my
right. Harrow on the Hill." On the same leaf, written five years
after, appears this comment:--
"Eheu fugaces, Posthume! Posthume!
Labuntur anni."
"B. January 9th, 1809.--Of the four persons whose names are here
mentioned, one is dead, another in a distant climate, _all_ separated,
and not five years have elapsed since they sat together in school, and
none are yet twenty-one years of age."
The vacation of 1804[46] he passed with his mother at Southwell, to
which place she had removed from Nottingham, in the summer of this
year, having taken the house on the Green called Burgage Manor. There
is a Southwell play-bill extant, dated August 8th, 1804, in which the
play is announced as bespoke "by Mrs. and Lord Byron." The gentleman,
from whom the house where they resided was rented, possesses a library
of some extent, which the young poet, he says, ransacked with much
eagerness on his first coming to Southwell; and one of the books that
most particularly engaged and interested him was, as may be easily
believed, the life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
In the month of October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College,
Cambridge, and his feelings on the change from his beloved Ida to this
new scene of life are thus described by himself:--
"When I first went up to college, it was a new and a heavy-hearted
scene for me: firstly, I so much disliked leaving Harrow, that though
it was time (I being seventeen), it broke my very rest for the last
quarter with counting the days that remained. I always _hated_ Harrow
till the last year and a half, but then I liked it. Secondly, I wished
to go to Oxford, and not to Cambridge. Thirdly, I was so completely
alone in this new world, that it half broke my spirits. My companions
were not unsocial, but the contrary--lively, hospitable, of rank and
fortune, and gay far beyond my gaiety. I mingled with, and dined, and
supped, &c., with them; but, I know not how, it was one of the
deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no
longer a boy."
But though, for a time, he may have felt this sort of estrangement at
Cambridge, to remain long without attaching himself was not in his
nature; and the friendship which he now formed with a youth named
Eddleston, who was two years younger than himself, even exceeded in
warmth and romance all his schoolboy attachments. This boy, whose
musical talents first drew them together, was, at the commencement of
their acquaintance, one of the choir at Cambridge, though he
afterwards, it appears, entered into a mercantile line of life; and
this disparity in their stations was by no means without its charm for
Byron, as gratifying at once both his pride and good-nature, and
founding the tie between them on the mutually dependent relations of
protection on the one side, and gratitude and devotion on the
other;--the only relations,[47] according to Lord Bacon, in which the
little friendship that still remains in the world is to be found. It
was upon a gift presented to him by Eddleston, that he wrote those
verses entitled "The Cornelian," which were printed in his first,
unpublished volume, and of which the following is a stanza:--
"Some, who can sneer at friendship's ties,
Have for my weakness oft reproved me;
Yet still the simple gift I prize,
For I am sure the giver loved me."
Another friendship, of a less unequal kind, which had been begun at
Harrow, and which he continued to cultivate during his first year at
Cambridge, is thus interestingly dwelt upon in one of his journals:--
"How strange are my thoughts!--The reading of the song of Milton,
Sabrina fair,' has brought back upon me--I know not how or why--the
happiest, perhaps, days of my life (always excepting, here and there,
a Harrow holiday in the two latter summers of my stay there) when
living at Cambridge with Edward Noel Long, afterwards of the
Guards,--who, after having served honourably in the expedition to
Copenhagen (of which two or three thousand scoundrels yet survive in
plight and pay), was drowned early in 1809, on his passage to Lisbon
with his regiment in the St. George transport, which was run foul of
in the night by another transport. We were rival swimmers--fond of
riding--reading--and of conviviality. We had been at Harrow together;
but--_there_, at least--his was a less boisterous spirit than mine. I
was always cricketing--rebelling--fighting--_row_ing (from _row_, not
_boat_-rowing, a different practice), and in all manner of mischiefs;
while he was more sedate and polished. At Cambridge--both of
Trinity--my spirit rather softened, or his roughened, for we became
very great friends. The description of Sabrina's seat reminds me of
our rival feats in _diving_. Though Cam's is not a very translucent
wave, it was fourteen feet deep, where we used to dive for, and pick
up--having thrown them in on purpose--plates, eggs, and even
shillings. I remember, in particular, there was the stump of a tree
(at least ten or twelve feet deep) in the bed of the river, in a spot
where we bathed most commonly, round which I used to cling, and
'wonder how the devil I came there.'
"Our evenings we passed in music (he was musical, and played on more
than one instrument, flute and violoncello), in which I was audience;
and I think that our chief beverage was soda-water. In the day we
rode, bathed, and lounged, reading occasionally. I remember our
buying, with vast alacrity, Moore's new quarto (in 1806), and reading
it together in the evenings.
"We only passed the summer together;--Long had gone into the Guards
during the year I passed in Notts, away from college. _His_
friendship, and a violent, though _pure_, love and passion--which held
me at the same period--were the then romance of the most romantic
period of my life.
* * * * *
"I remember that, in the spring of 1809, H---- laughed at my being
distressed at Long's death, and amused himself with making epigrams
upon his name, which was susceptible of a pun--_Long, short_, &c. But
three years after, he had ample leisure to repent it, when our mutual
friend and his, H----'s, particular friend, Charles Matthews, was
drowned also, and he himself was as much affected by a similar
calamity. But _I_ did not pay him back in puns and epigrams, for I
valued Matthews too much myself to do so; and, even if I had not, I
should have respected his griefs.
"Long's father wrote to me to write his son's epitaph. I promised--but
I had not the heart to complete it. He was such a good amiable being
as rarely remains long in this world; with talent and accomplishments,
too, to make him the more regretted. Yet, although a cheerful
companion, he had strange melancholy thoughts sometimes. I remember
once that we were going to his uncle's, I think--I went to accompany
him to the door merely, in some Upper or Lower Grosvenor or Brook
Street, I forget which, but it was in a street leading out of some
square,--he told me that, the night before, he 'had taken up a
pistol--not knowing or examining whether it was loaded or no--and had
snapped it at his head, leaving it to chance whether it might or might
not be charged.' The letter, too, which he wrote me, on leaving
college to join the Guards, was as melancholy in its tenour as it
could well be on such an occasion. But he showed nothing of this in
his deportment, being mild and gentle;--and yet with much turn for the
ludicrous in his disposition. We were both much attached to Harrow,
and sometimes made excursions there together from London to revive our
schoolboy recollections."
These affecting remembrances are contained in a Journal which he kept
during his residence at Ravenna, in 1821, and they are rendered still
more touching and remarkable by the circumstances under which they
were noted down. Domesticated in a foreign land, and even connected
with foreign conspirators, whose arms, at the moment he was writing,
were in his house, he could yet thus wholly disengage himself from the
scene around him, and, borne away by the current of memory into other
times, live over the lost friendships of his boyhood again. An English
gentleman (Mr. Wathen) who called upon him, at one of his residences
in Italy, having happened to mention in conversation that he had been
acquainted with Long, from that moment Lord Byron treated him with the
most marked kindness, and talked with him of Long, and of his amiable
qualities, till (as this gentleman says) the tears could not be
concealed in his eyes.
In the summer of this year (1806) he, as usual, joined his mother at
Southwell,--among the small, but select, society of which place he
had, during his visits, formed some intimacies and friendships, the
memory of which is still cherished there fondly and proudly. With the
exception, indeed, of the brief and bewildering interval which he
passed, as we have seen, in the company of Miss Chaworth, it was at
Southwell alone that an opportunity was ever afforded him of profiting
by the bland influence of female society, or of seeing what woman is
in the true sphere of her virtues, home. The amiable and intelligent
family of the Pigots received him within their circle as one of
themselves: and in the Rev. John Becher[48] the youthful poet found
not only an acute and judicious critic, but a sincere friend. There
were also one or two other families--as the Leacrofts, the
Housons--among whom his talents and vivacity made him always welcome;
and the proud shyness with which, through the whole of his minority,
he kept aloof from all intercourse with the neighbouring gentlemen
seems to have been entirely familiarised away by the small, cheerful
society of Southwell. One of the most intimate and valued of his
friends, at this period, has given me the following account of her
first acquaintance with him:--"The first time I was introduced to him
was at a party at his mother's, when he was so shy that she was forced
to send for him three times before she could persuade him to come into
the drawing-room, to play with the young people at a round game. He
was then a fat bashful boy, with his hair combed straight over his
forehead, and extremely like a miniature picture that his mother had
painted by M. de Chambruland. The next morning Mrs. Byron brought him
to call at our house, when he still continued shy and formal in his
manner. The conversation turned upon Cheltenham, where we had been
staying, the amusements there, the plays, &c.; and I mentioned that I
had seen the character of Gabriel Lackbrain very well performed. His
mother getting up to go, he accompanied her, making a formal bow, and
I, in allusion to the play, said, "Good by, Gaby." His countenance
lighted up, his handsome mouth displayed a broad grin, all his shyness
vanished, never to return, and, upon his mother's saying 'Come, Byron,
are you ready?'--no, she might go by herself, he would stay and talk a
little longer; and from that moment he used to come in and go out at
all hours, as it pleased him, and in our house considered himself
perfectly at home."
To this lady was addressed the earliest letter from his pen that has
fallen into my hands. He corresponded with many of his Harrow
friends,--with Lord Clare, Lord Powerscourt, Mr. William Peel, Mr.
William Bankes, and others. But it was then little foreseen what
general interest would one day attach to these school-boy letters; and
accordingly, as I have already had occasion to lament, there are but
few of them now in existence. The letter, of which I have spoken, to
his Southwell friend, though containing nothing remarkable, is perhaps
for that very reason worth insertion, as serving to show, on comparing
it with most of its successors, how rapidly his mind acquired
confidence in its powers. There is, indeed, one charm for the eye of
curiosity in his juvenile manuscripts, which they necessarily want in
their printed form; and that is the strong evidence of an irregular
education which they exhibit,--the unformed and childish handwriting,
and, now and then, even defective spelling of him who, in a very few
years after, was to start up one of the giants of English literature.