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Byron continued his studies with a tutor named Rogers. One day Rogers, noticing that the boy was suffering from his foot, expressed his sympathy.

"Never mind, Mr. Rogers; you shan't see any signs of it again," was the answer.

The next year Mrs. Byron, who was granted a pension of three hundred pounds from the civil list, moved to London. Mary Gray, the nurse, returned to Scotland, and Byron, by the advice of his guardian and cousin, Earl Carlisle, was sent to Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich. Mrs. Byron constantly interfered with his progress. Dr. Glennie appealed to Lord Carlisle, who remonstrated, but Mrs. Byron was so outrageous that the earl refused to have any more to do with her. Dr. Glennie declared that Mrs. Byron, besides being a total stranger to English society and manners, had a lack of understanding and a mind wholly without cultivation. "Byron, your mother is a fool," exclaimed one of his schoolmates.

"I know it," was his reply.

He slept in the doctor's library and there browsed on an edition of the English poets from Chaucer to Churchill. He afterwards declared that he "first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work I could ever afford."

During this time, when he was about twelve, he fell 4 in love with another cousin, Margaret Parker, daughter of Admiral Parker, a girl with dark eyes, long eyelashes, a "completely Greek cast of face and figure," and an exquisite complexion. He declares that "she was one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. She looked

as if she had been made out of a rainbow-all beauty and peace."

This passion was as real as his first. Moreover, it inspired him to song. Byron says,

"My passion had its usual effect upon me. I could not sleep, I could not eat, I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation."

Margaret soon died of consumption, and Byron, when he learned of it, wrote an elegy in the style of Pope, beginning

"Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom,"

which was printed in Hours of Idleness.

In the summer of 1801 Byron accompanied his mother to Cheltenham: he afterwards recalled the indescribable sensations with which he watched the Malvern Hills at sunset. Here his mother was alarmed by the words of a fortune-teller who predicted that the lame boy would be in danger from poison before he was of age, and would be twice married the second time to a foreign lady.

The following autumn Byron was sent to Harrow, where he remained four years. He was at first under the charge of Dr. Joseph Drury, who assured Lord Carlisle that he had talents which would add lustre to his rank.

"Indeed," was the sceptical reply.

Byron stated in his journal that he hated Harrow till the last year and a half of his stay there.

He also de

clared that at first he was a most unpopular boy. It is certain that he was unnaturally fat, inordinately conceited, yet shy, uncouth, quick-tempered, and still afflicted with a Scotch brogue. Miss Pigott called him a perfect "gaby;" Dr. Drury regarded him as a "wild mountain colt." The older boys fagged and tormented him till he at last reached the upper forms, when he stood forth characteristically as the champion of the oppressed.

When Dr. Drury retired in 1805, and was succeeded by Dr. Butler, the boys resented the change, and Byron was a ringleader in the pranks played. He helped tear down the window-gratings, but withstood a wild scheme to set one of the class-rooms on fire, arguing that it would burn up the desks on which their grandfathers had carved their initials. Many of his classmates — Peel, Palmerston, Bankes, Hobhouse, Tavistock - became famous. Byron made little progress in his studies at Harrow, but he was an able declaimer and gave promise of becoming an eloquent orator.

While still at Harrow he made the acquaintance of his half-sister, Augusta, plain and dowdyish, but womanly and pious, and destined to be "from first to last the chief influence for good in her brother's life."

Lord

In 1803 he spent his vacation at Nottingham. Grey de Ruthen, the tenant of Newstead, gave him a standing invitation to the Abbey, and put a room at his disposal. He also frequently visited Annesley Hall, where lived his cousins, the Chaworths.

Mary Anne Chaworth

-

"the bright morning star of

then about eighteen, was a beautiful girl.

36

Byron fell in love with her. She unquestionably led him on, but she was already engaged to Mr. John Mas ters. Her remark, "Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?" was reported to him. Such wounds made in a boy's heart leave never-fading scars. The influence of this third grand passion remained all his life and colored his poetry: "The Dream," "Stanzas to a Lady," the "Epistle to a Friend," and other verses are full of that episode. Byron declared that he took all his fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection his imagination created in her.

Byron still spent his vacations with his mother, but quarrels between them were frequent and violent. On one occasion each went to the apothecary and begged him not to sell the other poison.

He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1805, where, as at Harrow, he paid more attention to his friendships than to his studies. Here also most of his friends were of a social rank lower than his own: he was most intimate with Eddlestone, a member of the college choir, whom, according to his own statement, he "loved more than any human being."

He published his juvenile poems for private circulation in November, 1806; his Hours of Idleness appeared in March, 1807. At that time he weighed over two hundred pounds, but he now began a system of banting which, while it succeeded in reducing his weight, also ruined his digestion. By vapor baths, vinegar, and a restricted diet he thenceforward kept himself down to about one hundred and fifty pounds. During his first terms at Cambridge he held aloof from general society,

but after the publication of Hours of Idleness he began to indulge in the usual dissipations of a wealthy nobleman. He lived much in London, but he had expensive furnished apartments in Cambridge, gave dinners, kept dogs, a couple of saddle horses, and a coronetted carriage, a groom and a valet, and gambled recklessly, as he confessed, with "no coolness of judgment, or calculation." By the time he was of age he was over ten thousand pounds in debt.

In anticipation of occupying Newstead he had a few rooms put in order for himself and Mrs. Byron. He spent the last month of his minority there, occasionally visited by the Brompton girl, whom, dressed in boy's attire, he introduced to his friends as his brother Gordon. He also entertained some of his Cambridge friends. An historical painter might find a congenial subject in depicting the dinner that Byron arranged when he dressed them all in monks' robes, and toasted them in Burgundy from a cup made out of a polished scull that had been dug up in the garden. The exaggerated rumor of such wild revels perhaps kept the gentry in the neighborhood from calling. The bear and wolf which he kept chained at the front entrance would not attract timid neighbors.

In spite of his pecuniary troubles, he, in the most delicate manner, gave £500 to the widow of the young Lord / Falkland, who was killed in a duel with Mr. Powell, leaving his family destitute.

Meantime, Hours of Idleness, left to itself, would have sunk out of sight even though it attracted the attention of "her Grace of Gordon" and "the rest of the fashionable world," had it not been for the folly of