"Yet when confinement's lingering hour was done, Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one: Together we impell'd the flying ball, choose it,) you cannot advance or promote sions supply. Thus the sports he delighted me, nor I you. Therefore I beg and entreat and excelled in are enumerated :— of you, if you value my friendship,—which, by your conduct, I am sure I cannot think you do, not to call me the names you do, nor abuse me. Till that time, it will be out of my power to call you friend. I shall be obliged for an answer as soon as it is convenient; till then "I remain yours, In a letter, dated two years afterwards, from the same boy, 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 effu 1 There are, in other letters of the same writer, some curious proofs of the passionate and jealous sensibility of Byron. From one of them, for instance, we collect that he had taken offence at his young friend's addressing him "my dear Byron," instead of "my dearest ;" and from another, that his jealousy had been awakened by some expressions of regret which his correspondent had expressed at the departure of Lord John Russell for Spain: "You tell me," says the young letter-writer, "that you never knew me in such an agitation as I was when I wrote my last letter; and do you not think I had reason to be so? I received a letter from you on Saturday, telling me you were going abroad for six years in March, and on Sunday John Russell set off for Spain. Was not that sufficient to make me rather melancholy? But how Together join'd in cricket's manly toil, Or shared the produce of the river's spoil; All, all that brothers should be, but the name." with some of the neighbouring farmers—an The danger which he incurred in a fight 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; 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 Tatersal, 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 can you possibly imagine that I was more agitated on John Russell's account, who is gone for a few months, and from whom I shall hear constantly, than at your going for six years to travel over most part of the world, when I shall hardly ever hear from you, and perhaps may never see you again? "It has very much hurt me your telling me that you might be excused if you felt rather jealous at my expressing more sorrow for the departure of the friend who was with me, than of that one who was absent. It is quite impossible you can think I am more sorry for John's absence than I shall be for yours; - I shall therefore finish the subject." 2 [The Rev. John Cecil Tatersal, B. A. of Christ Church, Oxford. He died, Dec. 1812, at Hall's-Place, Kent, in his twenty-fourth year.] 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;" 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, 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 per 1 To this tomb he thus refers in the "Childish Recollections," as printed in his first unpublished volume :"Oft when, oppress'd with sad, foreboding gloom, I sat reclin'd upon our favourite tomb." 2 ["That this affair gave a colour to all his future life we do not in the slightest degree believe. It was his own mind that gave the colour to the affair. It was his disposition to aim always at unattainable things. If he had married this idol, he would very soon have drawn the same conclusion respecting her, which he drew respecting all the objects of his more successful pursuit : 'Tis an old lesson; Time approves it true, And they who know it best deplore it most; When all is won that all desire to woo, The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost.' Westminster Rev.] 3 ["Neither this nor a thousand other instances - beg suasion, 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." An intimacy, however, soon sprung 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 66 ging Mr. Moore's pardon - can confirm the truth of any such senseless assertion. If unsuccessful, mean unrequited loves which here they manifestly must dothen all observation and all experience show that generally they are transient. It must be so. It is altogether unnatural to cling hopelessly to any passion of love or hate. It must die. If it lived long intensely, it would kill the soul of the sufferer. If it live long languidly, then we must not call it lasting; for languor is one thing and passion is another: and what right to the name of passion has a vague, aimless feeling, that now and then, to the touch of some accidental association, lifts its head up from sleep, and then lays it down again on the pillow of oblivion?"- WILSON.] 4 I find this circumstance, of his having occasionally slept at the Hut, though asserted by one of the old servants, much doubted by others. years my elder), and — and has been the result?" - and what her, much personal beauty, and a disposition the most amiable and attaching. Though already fully alive to her charms, it was at In the dances of the evening at Matlock, the period of which we are speaking that Miss Chaworth, of course, joined, while her the young poet, who was then in his six-lover sat looking on, solitary and mortified. teenth 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." 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 1 It may possibly have been the recollection of these pictures that suggested to him the following lines in the Siege of Corinth : "Like the figures on arras that gloomily glare, Stirr'd by the breath of the wintry air, 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 So seen by the dying lamp's fitful light, 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 ["This is beautifully expressed, and the sentiment is true to nature; but we cannot think it peculiarly applicable to the Dream.' The old hall of Annesley is not a common object, in itself, and still less so is the ancient oratory. A maiden and a youth,' are doubtless common objects; but have not such common objects many millions of times-are they not the only themes, of all most impassioned song? As to the lover's steed,'-no more poetical animal going than a horse! Had his lordship been about to mount a mule, or take his departure on a donkey, it might have required all his genius to throw an undying lustre over that object' and 'that event.' The reader might have thought of Peter Bell. With regard to the race-ground of Nottingham, as a portion of the earth's surface, it is not unromantic, but quite the reverse; merely as a race-ground, it will be neither the better nor the worse of Byron's Dream.' Let Mr. Moore, the next time he philosophises on the power of poetical genius to shed undying lustre on the commonest objects and events,' turn from Byron in all his glory, to Wordsworth in all his-and then he will be 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 2 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 $," -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 + :: "Oh Memory, torture me no more, 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?' just to Nature and to her chosen Bard."-Blackwood, 1830.] 2 Among the unpublished verses of his in my possession, I find the following fragment, written not long after this period: "Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren, Where my thoughtless childhood stray'd, "Now no more, the hours beguiling, [See Works, p. 384.] 3 The lady's husband, for some time, took her family name. 4 These stanzas, I have since found, are not Lord Byron's, but the production of Lady Tuite, and are contained in a volume published by her Ladyship in the year 1795.- Second Edition. '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." 66 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', 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 enter 1 Gibbon, in speaking of public schools, says "The mimic scene of a rebellion has displayed, in their true colours, the ministers and patriots of the rising generation." Such prognostics, however, are not always to be relied on; the mild, peaceful Addison was, when at school, the successful leader of a barring-out, 2 This anecdote, which I have given on the testimony of one of Lord Byron's schoolfellows, Dr. Butler himself assures me, has but very little foundation in fact.-Second Edition. tained 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, inquired 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."2 66 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 illfounded. 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 veot, young—owμασιν, bodies — ανθρωποις τοις αγαθοις, 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 xpvros 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 wasted3, 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 3 It is deplorable to consider the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing, or rather casting away, six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that very imperfectly."— Cowley, Essays. "Would not a Chinese, who took notice of our way of breeding, be apt to imagine that all our young gentlemen were designed to be teachers and professors of the dead languages of foreign countries, and not to be men of business in their own?"- Locke on Education. |