It was not long before Dr Glennie began to discover what instructors of youth must too often experience that the parent was a much more difficult subject to deal with than the child. Though professing entire acquiescence in the representations of this gentleman, as to the propriety of leaving her son to pursue his studies without interruption, Mrs Byron had neither sense nor self-denial enough to act up to these professions; but, in spite of the remonstrances of Dr Glennie, and the injunctions of Lord Carlisle, continued to interfere with and thwart the progress of the boy's education in every way that a fond, wrong-headed, and self-willed mother could devise. In vain was it stated to her that, in all the elemental parts of learning which are requisite for a youth destined to a great public school, young Byron was much behind other youths of his age, and that, to retrieve this deficiency, the undivided application of his whole time would be necessary. Though appearing to be sensible of the truth of these suggestions, she not the less embarrassed and obstructed the teacher in his task. Not content with the interval between Saturday and Monday, which, contrary to Dr Glennie's wish, the boy generally passed at Sloane Terrace, she would frequently keep him at home a week beyond this time, and, still further to add to the distraction of such interruptions, collected around him a numerous circle of young acquaintances, without exercising, as may be supposed, much discrimination, in her choice. "How indeed could she?" asks Dr Glennie ;-" Mrs Byron was a total stranger to English society and English manners; with an exterior far from prepossessing, an understanding where nature had not been more bountiful, a mind almost wholly without cultivation, and the peculiarities of northern opinions, northern habits, and northern accent, I trust I do no great prejudice to the memory of my country woman, if I say Mrs Byron | was not a Madame de Lambert, endowed with powers to retrieve the fortune, and form the character and manners of a young nobleman, her son." The interposition of Lord Carlisle, to whose authority it was found necessary to appeal, had more than once given a check to these disturbing indulgences. Sanctioned by such support, Dr Glennie even ventured to oppose himself to the privilege, so often abused, of the usual visits on a Saturday; and the scenes which he had to encounter on each new case of refusal were such as would have wearied out the patience of any less zealous and conscientious schoolmaster. Mrs Byron, whose paroxysms of passion were not, like those of her son, "silent rages," would, on all these occasions, break out into such audible fits of temper as it was impossible to keep from reaching the ears of the scholars and the servants; and Dr Glennie had, one day, the pain of overhearing a schoolfellow of his noble pupil say to him, "Byron, your mother is a fool;" to which the other answered gloomily, "I know it." In consequence of all this violence and impracticability of temper, Lord Carlisle at length ceased to have any intercourse with the mother of his ward; and on a further application from the instructor, for the exertion of his influence, said, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs Byron,-you must now manage her as you can." Among the books that lay accessible to the boys in Doctor Glennie's study, was a pamphlet written by the brother of one of his most intimate friends, entitled "Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno on the coast of Arracan, in the year 1795." The writer had been the second officer of the ship, and the account which he had sent home to his friends of the sufferings of himself and his fellow-passengers, had appeared to them so touching and strange, that they determined to publish it. The pamphlet attracted but little, it seems, of public attention, but among the young students of Dulwich Grove it was a favourite study; and the impression which it left on the retentive mind of Byron may have had some share, perhaps, in suggesting that curious research, through all the various Accounts of Shipwrecks upon record, by which he prepared himself to depict with such power a scene of the same description in Don Juan. The following affecting incident, mentioned by the author of this pamphlet, has been adopted, it will be seen, with but little change either of phrase or circumstance, by the poet : "Of those who were not immediately near me I knew little, unless by their cries. Some struggled hard, and died in great agony; but it was not always those whose strength was most impaired that died the easiest, though, in some cases, it might have been so. I particularly remember the following instances. Mr Wade's servant, a stout and healthy boy, died early and almost without a groan; while another of the same age, but of a less promising appearance, held out much longer. The fate of these unfortunate boys differed also in another respect highly deserving of notice. Their fathers were both in the fore-top when the lads were taken ill. The father of Mr Wade's boy hearing of his son's illness, answered with indifference, that he could do nothing for him,' and left him to his fate. The other, when the accounts reached him, hurried down, and watching for a favourable moment, crawled on all fours along the weather gunwale to his son, who was in the mizen rigging. By that time, only three or four planks of the quarter-deck remained, just over the weather-quarter gallery; and to this spot the unhappy man led his son, making him fast to the rail to prevent his being washed away. Whenever the boy was seized with a fit of retching, the father lifted him up and wiped the foam from his lips; and, if a shower came, he made him open his mouth to receive the drops, or gently squeezed them into it from a rag. In this affecting situation both remained four or five days, till the boy expired. The unfortu nate parent, as if unwilling to believe the fact, then raised the body, gazed wistfully at it, and, when he could no longer entertain any doubt, watched it in silence till it was carried off by the sea; then, wrapping himself in a piece of canvas, sunk down and rose no more; though he must have lived two days longer, as we judged from the quivering of his limbs, when a wave broke over him.”* The following is Lord Byron's version of this touching narrative, and it will be felt, I think, by every reader, that this is one of the instances in which poetry must be contest sentences of the seaman's recital, which the artifices of to yield the palm to prose. There is a pathos in the last metre and rhyme were sure to disturb, and which, indeed It was probably during one of the vacations of this year, that the boyish love for his young cousin, Miss Parker, to which he attributes the glory of having first inspired him with poetry, took possession of his fancy. "My first dash into poetry (he says) was as early as 1800. .It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker (daughter and granddaughter of the two Admirals Parker), one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her her dark eyes-her long eyelashesher completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve-she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards, in consequence of a fall, which injured her spine, and induced consumption. Her sister Augusta (by some thought still more beautiful) died of the same malady; and it was, indeed, in attending her, that Margaret met with the accident which occasioned her own death. | My sister told me, that when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes, to the great astonishment of my sister, who (residing with her grandmother, Lady Holderness, and seeing but little of me, for family reasons) knew nothing of our attachment, nor could conceive why my name should affect her at such a time. I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after, I made an attempt at an elegy-a very dull one*. 66 "I do not recollect scarcely any thing equal to the no verses, however beautiful, could half so naturally and powerfully express. There were two fathers in this ghastly crew, And with them their two sons, of whom the one But he died early; and when he was gone, One glance on him, and said, "Heaven's will be done, The other father had a weaklier child, Of a soft cheek, and aspect delicate; With the deep, deadly thought, that they must part. And o'er him bent his sire, and never raised His eyes from off his face, but wiped the foam And when the wish'd-for shower at length was come, And look'd upon it long, and when at last 'Twas borne by the rude wave wherein 't was cast; Don Juan, Canto II. In the collection of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea," to which Lord Byron so skilfully had recourse for the technical knowledge and facts out of which he has composed his own powerful description, the reader will find the account of the loss of the Juno here referred to. * This elegy is in his first (unpublished) volume. transparent beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow-all beauty and peace. 64 My passion had its usual effects 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! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now." He had been nearly two years under the tuition of Doctor Glennie, when his mother, discontented at the slowness of his progress-though being herself, as we have seen, the principal cause of it-entreated so urgently of Lord Carlisle to have him removed to a public school, that her wish was at length acceded to; and "accordingly," says Doctor Glennie, "to Harrow he went, as little prepared as it is natural to suppose from two years of elementary instruction, thwarted by every art that could estrange the mind of youth from preceptor, from school, and from all serious study." This gentleman saw but little of Lord Byron after he left his care, but, from the manner in which both he and Mrs Glennie spoke of their early charge, it was evident that his subsequent career had been watched by them with interest; that they had seen even his errors through the softening medium of their first feeling towards him, and had never, in his most irregular aberrations, lost the traces of those fine qualities which they had loved and admired in him when a child. Of the constancy, too, of this feeling, Doctor Glennie had to stand no ordinary trial, having visited Geneva in 1817, soon after Lord Byron had left it, when the private character of the poet was in the very crisis of its unpopularity, and when, among those friends who knew that Dr Glennie had once been his tutor, it was made a frequent subject of banter with this gentleman, that he had not more strictly disciplined his pupil, or, to use their own words, "made a better boy of him." About the time when young Byron was removed for his education, to London, his nurse May Gray left the service of Mrs Byron, and returned to her native country, where she died about three years since. She had married respectably, and, in one of her last illnesses, was attended professionally by Doctor Ewing of Aberdeen, who, having been always an enthusiastic admirer of Lord Byron, was no less surprised than delighted to find that the person under his care had for so many years been an attendant on his favourite poet. With avidity, as may be supposed, he noted down from the lips of his patient all the particulars she could remember of his lordship's early days; and it is to the communications with which this gentleman has favoured me, that I am indebted for many of the anecdotes of that period which I have related. As a mark of gratitude for her attention to him, Byron had, in parting with May Gray, presented her with his watch,-the first of which he had ever been possessor. This watch the faithful nurse preserved fondly through life, and, when she died, it was given by her husband to Doctor Ewing, by whom, as a relic of genius, it is equally valued. The affectionate boy had also presented her with a fulllength miniature of himself, which was painted by Kay of Edinburgh, in the year 1795, and which represents him standing with a bow and arrows in his hand, and a profusion of hair falling over his shoulders. This curious little drawing has likewise passed into the possession of Dr Ewing. The same thoughtful gratitude was evinced by Byron towards the sister of this woman, his first nurse, to whom he wrote some years after he left Scotland, in the most cordial terms, making inquiries of her welfare, and informing her, with much joy, that he had at last got his foot so far restored as to be able to put on a common boot,-“ an event, for which he had long anxiously wished, and which he was sure would give her great pleasure." Dr Busby, will long associate together honourably the names of the poet and the master. From this vene rable scholar I have received the following brief, bu important, statement of the impressions which hi early intercourse with the young noble left upo him: 66 Mr Hanson, Lord Byron's solicitor, consigne him to my care at the age of thirteen and a half, wit remarks, that his education had been neglected; tha he was ill prepared for a public school, but that h thought there was a cleverness about him. After hi departure I took my young disciple into my study and endeavoured to bring him forward by inquirie as to his former amusements, employments, and as sociates, but with little or no effect;-and I soo found that a wild mountain colt had been submitted to my management. But there was mind in his eye In the first place, it was necessary to attach him to a elder boy, in order to familiarize him with the object before him, and with some parts of the system in which he was to move. But the information he re In the summer of the year 1801 he accompanied his mother to Cheltenham, and the account which he himself gives of his sensations at that period shows at what an early age those feelings that lead to poetry had unfolded themselves in his heart. A boy, gazing with emotion on the hills at sunset, be-ceived from his conductor gave him no pleasure, whe cause they remind him of the mountains among which he passed his childhood, is already, in heart and imagination, a poet. It was during their stay at Cheltenham that a fortune-teller, whom his mother consulted, pronounced a prediction concerning him which, for some time, left a strong impression on his mind. Mrs Byron had, it seems, in her first visit to this person (who, if I mistake not, was the celebrated fortune-teller, Mrs Williams) endeavoured to pass herself off as a maiden lady. The Sibyl, however, was not so easily deceived;-she pronounced her wise consulter to be not only a married woman, but the mother of a son who was lame, and to whom, among other events which she read in the stars, it was predestined that his life should be in danger from poison before he was of age, and that he should be twice married, the second time, to a foreign lady. About two years afterwards he himself mentioned these particulars to the person from whom I heard the story, and said that the thought of the first part of the prophecy very often occurred to him. The latter part, however, seems to have been the nearer guess of the two. To a shy disposition, such as Byron's was in his youth and such as, to a certain degree, it continued all his life-the transition from a quiet establishment, like that of Dulwich Grove, to the bustle of a great public school, was sufficiently trying. Accordingly, we find from his own account, that, for the first year and a half, he "hated Harrow." The activity, however, and sociableness of his nature soon conquered this repugnance; and, from being, as he himself says, " a most unpopular boy," he rose at length to be a leader in all the sports, schemes, and mischief of the school. For a general notion of his disposition and capacities at this period, we could not have recourse to a more trustworthy or valuable authority than that of the Rev. Dr Drury, who was at this time head master of the school, and to whom Lord Byron has left on record a tribute of affection and respect, which, like the reverential regard of Dryden for * See page 6. he heard of the advances of some in the school, mucl younger than himself, and conceived by his own de ficiency that he should be degraded and humbled, by being placed below them. This I discovered, and having committed him to the care of one of the mas ters, as his tutor, I assured him he should not be placed till, by diligence, he might rank with those o his own age. He was pleased with this assurance. and felt himself on easier terms with his associates ;for a degree of shyness hung about him for some time. His manner and temper soon convinced me. that he might be led by a silken string to a point, rather than by a cable;-on that principle I acted. After some continuance at Harrow, and when the powers of his mind had begun to expand, the late Lord Carlisle, his relation, desired to see me in town;-I waited on his lordship. His object was to inform me of Lord Byron's expectations of property when he came of age, which he represented as contracted, and to inquire respecting his abilities. On the former circumstance I made no remark; as to the latter, I replied, He has talents, my lord, which will add lustre to his rank.' Indeed!!!' said his lordship, with a degree of surprise, that, according to my feeling, did not express in it all the satisfaction I expected. The circumstance to which you allude, as to his declamatory powers, was as follows. The upper part of the school composed declamations, which, after a revisal by the tutors, were submitted to the master to him the authors repeated them, that they might be improved in manner and action, before their public delivery. I certainly was much pleased with Lord Byron's attitude, gesture, and delivery, as well as with his composition. All who spoke on that day adhered, as usual, to the letter of their composition, as, in the earlier part of his delivery, did Lord Byron. But to my surprise he suddenly diverged from the written composition, with a boldness and rapidity sufficient to alarm me, lest he should fail in memory as to the conclusion. There was no failure;-he came round to the close of his composition without discovering any impediment and irregularity on the whole. I questioned him, why he had altered his declamation? He declared he had made no alteration, and did not know, in speaking, that he had deviated from it one letter. I believed him, and from a knowledge of his temperament am convinced, that, fully impressed with the sense and substance of the subject, he was hurried on to expressions and colourings more striking than what his pen had expressed." In communicating to me these recollections of his illustrious pupil, Dr Drury has added a circumstance which shows how strongly, even in all the pride of his fame, that awe with which he had once regarded the opinions of his old master still hung around the poet's sensitive mind: - 66 After my retreat from Harrow, I received from him two very affectionate letters. In my occasional visits subsequently to London, when he had fascinated the public with his productions, I demanded of him, why, as in duty bound, he had sent none to me? Because,' said he, you are the only man I never wish to read them:'-but, in a few moments, he added- What do you think of the Corsair?' I shall now lay before the reader such notices of his school life as I find scattered through the various note-books he has left behind. Coming, as they do, from his own pen, it is needless to add, that they afford the liveliest and best records of this period that can be furnished. Till I was eighteen years old (odd as it may seem) I had never read a Review. But while at Harrow, my general information was so great on modern topics as to induce a suspicion that I could only collect so much information from Reviews, because I was never seen reading, but always idle, and in mischief, or at play. The truth is, that I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else read and had read all sorts of reading since I was five years old, and yet never met with a Review, which is the only reason I know of why I should not have read them. But it is true; for I remember when Hunter and Curzon, in 1804, told me this opinion at Harrow, I made them laugh by my ludicrous astonishment in asking them What is a Review? To be sure, they were then less common. In three years more, I was better acquainted with that same; but the first I ever read was in 1806-7. "At school I was (as I have said) remarked for the extent and readiness of my general information; but in all other respects idle, capable of great sudden exertions (such as thirty or forty Greek hexameters, of course with such prosody as it pleased God), but of few continuous drudgeries. My qualities were much more oratorical and martial than poetical, and Dr Drury, my grand patron (our head master), had a great notion that I should turn out an orator, from my fluency, my turbulence, my voice, my copiousness of declamation, and my actio. I remember that my first declamation astonished him into some unwonted For the display of his declamatory powers, on the speech-days, be selected always the most vehement passages, such as the speech of Zanga over the body of Alonzo, and Lear's address to the storm. On one of these public occasions, when it was arranged that he should take the part of Drances, and young Peel that of Turnus, Lord Byron suddenly changed his mind, and preferred the speech of Latinus,-fearing, it was supposed, some ridicule from the inappropriate taunt of Turnus, Ventosa in lingua, pedibusque fugacibus istis." (for he was economical of such) and sudden compliments, before the declaimers at our first rehearsal. My first Harrow verses (that is, English, as exercises), a translation of a chorus from the Prometheus of Eschylus, were received by him but coolly. No one had the least notion that I should subside into poesy. "Peel, the orator and statesman (' that was, or is, or is to be'), was my form-fellow, and we were both at the top of our remove (a public-school phrase). We were on good terms, but his brother was my intimate friend. There were always great hopes of Peel, amongst us all, masters and scholars-and he has not disappointed them. As a scholar he was greatly my superior; as a declaimer and actor, I was reckoned at least his equal; as a schoolboy, out of school, I was always in scrapes, and he never; and in school, he always knew his lesson, and I rarely,but when I knew it, I knew it nearly as well. In general information, history, &c. &c., I think I was his superior, as well as of most boys of my standing. "The prodigy of our school-days was George Sinclair (son of Sir John); he made exercises for half the school (literally), verses at will, and themes without it. *** He was a friend of mine, and in the same remove, and used at times to beg me to let him do my exercise,-a request always most readily accorded upon a pinch, or when I wanted to do something else, which was usually once an hour. On the other hand, he was pacific and I savage; so I fought for him, or thrashed others for him, or thrashed himself to make him thrash others, when it was necessary, as a point of honour and stature, that he should so chastise;-or we talked politics, for he I have some of his letters, written to me from school, was a great politician, and were very good friends. still.* "Clayton was another school-monster of learning, and talent, and hope; but what has become of him I do not know. He was certainly a genius. "My school-friendships were with me passions + (for I was always violent), but I do not know that there is one which has endured (to be sure some have been cut short by death) till now. That with Lord Clare begun one of the earliest and lasted know of. I never hear the word Clare' without a longest-being only interrupted by distance that I beating of the heart even now, and I write it with the feelings of 1803-4-5 ad infinitum." The following extract is from another of his manuscript journals. think I lost but one battle out of seven; and that "At Harrow I fought my way very fairly. I His letters to Mr Sinclair, in return, are unluckily lost, one of them, as this gentleman telis me, having been highly characteristic of the jealous sensitiveness of his no ble schoolfellow, being written under the impression of some ideal slight, and beginning, angrily, Sir." On a leaf of one of his note-books, dated 1808, I find the following passage from Marmontel, which no doubt struck him as applicable to the enthusiasm of his own youthful friendships: L'amitié, qui dans le monde est à peine un sentiment, est une passion dans les cloitres."-Contes Moraux. 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 youth of ge was to H-;-and the rascal did not win it but by the unfair treatment of his own boarding-house, where we boxed-I had not even a second. I never forgave him, and I should be sorry to meet him now, as I am sure we should quarrel. My most memorable combats were with Morgan, Rice, Rainsford, and Lord Jocelyn,-but we were always friendly afterwards. I was a most unpopular boy, but led latterly, and have retained many of my school-friendships, and all my dislikes-except to Doctor Butler, whom I treated rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since. Doctor Drury, whom I plagued sufliciently too, was the best, the kindest (and yet strict, too) friend I ever had-and I look upon him still as a father. "P. Hunter, Curzon, Long, and Tatersall, were my principal friends. Clare, Dorset, C. Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and Jno. Wingfield, were my juniors and favourites, whom I spoilt by indulgence. Of all human beings, I was, perhaps, at one time, the most attached to poor Wingfield, who died at Coimbra, 1811, before I returned to England.” One of the most striking results of the English system of education is, that while in no country are there so many instances of manly friendships early formed and steadily maintained, so in no other country, perhaps, are the feelings towards the parental home so early estranged, or, at the best, feebly cherished. Transplanted as boys are from the domestic circle, at a time of life when the affections are most disposed to cling, it is but natural that they should seek a substitute for the ties of home* in those boyish friendships which they form at school, and which, connected as they are with the scenes and events over which youth threw its charm, retain ever after the strongest hold upon their hearts. In Ireland and, I believe, also in France, where the system of education is more domestic, a different result is accordingly observable :-the paternal home comes nius. In support of this notion he quotes Beattie, who thus describes his ideal minstrel : Concourse, and noise, and toil, he ever fled, 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, Æschylus, 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; Tasso, 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. 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 connexion, as to find himself happier any where than in their company."-Cowper, Letters. in for its due and natural share of affection, and the growth of friendships, out of this domestic circle, is proportionably diminished. To a youth like Byron, abounding with the most passionate feelings, and finding sympathy with only the ruder parts of his nature at home, the little world of school afforded a vent for his affections, which was sure to call them forth in their most ardent form. Accordingly, the friendships which he contracted both at school and college were little less than what he himself describes them, "passions.” The want he felt at home of those kindred dispositions, which greeted him among "Ida's social band," is thus strongly described in one of his early poems :-* Is there no cause beyond the common claim, This early volume, indeed, abounds with the most affectionate tributes to his school-fellows. Even his expostulations to one of them, who had given him some cause for complaint, are thus tenderly con veyed: You knew that my soul, that my heart, my existence, If danger demanded, were wholly your own; You knew me unalter'd by years or by distance, Devoted to love and to friendship alone. You knew-but away with the vain retrospection, The bond of affection no longer endures. Too late you may droop o'er the fond recollection, And sigh for the friend who was formerly yours. The following description of what he felt after leaving Harrow, when he encountered in the world any of his old school-fellows, falls far short of the scene which actually occurred but a few years before his death, in Italy,-when, on meeting with his friend, Lord Clare, after a long separation, he was affected almost to tears by the recollections which rushed on him. -If chance some well remember'd face, It will be seen, by the extracts from his memoran dum-book, which I have given, that Mr Peel was Even previously to any of these school friendships, be had formed the same sort of romantic attachment to a br of his own age, the son of one of his tenants at Newstead and there are two or three of his most juvenile poems, a which he dwells no less upon the inequality than the warml of this friendship. Thus : Let folly smile, to view the names Of thee and me in friendship twined; And though unequal is thy fate, |