Life of Lord Byron Volume I Part 4

"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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ma.s.sy 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 circ.u.mstance accounts for the use of the musket, the b.u.t.t-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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 Derbys.h.i.+re, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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 l.u.s.tre. 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, pa.s.sed 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical 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 ?e??, _young_--s?as??, _bodies_--a????p??? t??? a?a????, _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 ???s??

provided with its English representative in the margin.

But, notwithstanding his backwardness in the mere verbal scholars.h.i.+p, 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, s.n.a.t.c.hes of study which he caught in this way, gave to a mind like his an impulse forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding compet.i.tors 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 "h.e.l.luones 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 embarra.s.sing. 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 pa.s.s 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 Graeci," 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 grat.i.tude and devotion on the other;--the only relations,[47] according to Lord Bacon, in which the little friends.h.i.+p 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 ent.i.tled "The Cornelian," which were printed in his first, unpublished volume, and of which the following is a stanza:--

"Some, who can sneer at friends.h.i.+p'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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+llings. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed the summer together;--Long had gone into the Guards during the year I pa.s.sed in Notts, away from college. _His_ friends.h.i.+p, and a violent, though _pure_, love and pa.s.sion--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 circ.u.mstances 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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.