Life of Lord Byron Volume I Part 27

[Footnote 28: His letters to Mr. Sinclair, in return, are unluckily lost,--one of them, as this gentleman tells me, having been highly characteristic of the jealous sensitiveness of his n.o.ble schoolfellow, being written under the impression of some ideal slight, and beginning, angrily, "Sir."]

[Footnote 29: On a leaf of one of his note-books, dated 1808, I find the following pa.s.sage from Marmontel, which no doubt struck him as applicable to the enthusiasm of his own youthful friends.h.i.+ps:--"L'amitie, qui dans le monde est a peine un sentiment, est une pa.s.sion dans les cloitres."--_Contes Moraux_.]

[Footnote 30: Mr. D'Israeli, in his ingenious work "On the Literary Character," has given it as his opinion, that a disinclination to athletic sports and exercises will be, in general, found among the peculiarities which mark a youthful genius. In support of this notion he quotes Beattie, who thus describes his ideal minstrel:--

"Concourse, and noise, and toil, he ever fled, Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray Of squabbling imps, but to the forest sped."

His highest authority, however, is Milton, who says of himself,

"When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing."

Such general rules, however, are as little applicable to the dispositions of men of genius as to their powers. If, in the instances which Mr. D'Israeli adduces an indisposition to bodily exertion was manifested, as many others may be cited in which the directly opposite propensity was remarkable. In war, the most turbulent of exercises, aeschylus, Dante, Camoens, and a long list of other poets, distinguished themselves; and, though it may be granted that Horace was a bad rider, and Virgil no tennis-player, yet, on the other hand, Dante was, we know, a falconer as well as swordsman; Ta.s.so, expert both as swordsman and dancer; Alfieri, a great rider; Klopstock, a skaiter; Cowper, famous, in his youth, at cricket and foot-ball; and Lord Byron, pre-eminent in all sorts of exercises.]

[Footnote 31: "At eight or nine years of age the boy goes to school.

From that moment he becomes a stranger in his father's house. The course of parental kindness is interrupted. The smiles of his mother, those tender admonitions, and the solicitous care of both his parents, are no longer before his eyes--year after year he feels himself more detached from them, till at last he is so effectually weaned from the connection, as to find himself happier anywhere than in their company."--_Cowper, Letters._]

[Footnote 32: Even previously to any of these school friends.h.i.+ps, he had formed the same sort of romantic attachment to a boy of his own age, the son of one of his tenants at Newstead; and there are two or three of his most juvenile poems, in which he dwells no less upon the inequality than the warmth of this friends.h.i.+p. Thus:--

"Let Folly smile, to view the names Of thee and me in friends.h.i.+p twined; Yet Virtue will have greater claims To love, than rank with Vice combined.

"And though unequal is thy fate, Since t.i.tle deck'd my higher birth, Yet envy not this gaudy state, Thine is the pride of modest worth.

"Our souls at least congenial meet, Nor can thy lot my rank disgrace; Our intercourse is not less sweet Since worth of rank supplies the place.

"November, 1802."]

[Footnote 33: There are, in other letters of the same writer, some curious proofs of the pa.s.sionate 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 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."]

[Footnote 34: 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 reclined upon our favourite tomb."

[Footnote 35: I find this circ.u.mstance, of his having occasionally slept at the Hut, though a.s.serted by one of the old servants, much doubted by others.]

[Footnote 36: 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, So seen by the dying lamp's fitful light, Lifeless, but life-like and awful to sight; As they seem, through the dimness, about to come down From the shadowy wall where their images frown."

[Footnote 37: 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, How the northern tempests, warring, Howl above thy tufted shade!

"Now no more, the hours beguiling, Former favourite haunts I see; Now no more my Mary smiling, Makes ye seem a heaven to me."

[Footnote 38: The lady's husband, for some time, took her family name.]

[Footnote 39: 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 Ladys.h.i.+p in the year 1795.--(_Second edition._)]

[Footnote 40: 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_.]

[Footnote 41: This anecdote, which I have given on the testimony of one of Lord Byron's schoolfellows, Doctor Butler himself a.s.sures me has but very little foundation in fact.--(_Second Edition_.)]

[Footnote 42: "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_.]

[Footnote 43: "A finished scholar may emerge from the head of Westminster or Eton in total ignorance of the business and conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end of the eighteenth century."--_Gibbon_.]

[Footnote 44: "Byron, Harrow on the Hill, Middles.e.x, Alumnus Scholae; Lyonensis primus in anno Domini 1801, Ellison Duce."

"Monitors, 1801.--Ellison, Royston, Hunxman, Rashleigh, Rokeby, Leigh."]

[Footnote 45: "Drury's Pupils, 1804.--Byron, Drury, Sinclair, h.o.a.re, Bolder, Annesley, Calvert, Strong, Acland, Gordon, Drummond."]

[Footnote 46: During one of the Harrow vacations, he pa.s.sed some time in the house of the Abbe de Roufigny, in Took's-court, for the purpose of studying the French language; but he was, according to the Abbe's account, very little given to study, and spent most of his time in boxing, fencing, &c. to the no small disturbance of the reverend teacher and his establishment.]

[Footnote 47: Between superior and inferior, "whose fortunes (as he expresses it) comprehend the one and the other."]

[Footnote 48: A gentleman who has since honourably distinguished himself by his philanthropic plans and suggestions for that most important object, the amelioration of the condition of the poor.]

[Footnote 49: In a suit undertaken for the recovery of the Rochdale property.]

[Footnote 50: This precious pencilling is still, of course, preserved.]

[Footnote 51: The verses "To a beautiful Quaker," in his first volume, were written at Harrowgate.]

[Footnote 52: A horse of Lord Byron's:--the other horse that he had with him at this time was called Sultan.]

[Footnote 53: The favourite dog, on which Lord Byron afterwards wrote the well-known epitaph.]

[Footnote 54: Lord Byron and Dr. Pigot continued to be correspondents for some time, but, after their parting this autumn, they never met again.]

[Footnote 55: Of this edition, which was in quarto, and consisted but of a few sheets, there are but two, or, at the utmost, three copies in existence.]

[Footnote 56: His valet, Frank.]

[Footnote 57: Of this "Mary," who is not to be confounded either with the heiress of Annesley, or "Mary" of Aberdeen, all I can record is, that she was of an humble, if not equivocal, station in life,--that she had long, light golden hair, of which he used to show a lock, as well as her picture, among his friends; and that the verses in his "Hours of Idleness," ent.i.tled "To Mary, on receiving her Picture,"

were addressed to her.]

[Footnote 58: Here the imperfect sheet ends.]