Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/137

 schoolfellow, 'Your mother is a fool,' he replied, 'I know it.' Another phrase is said to have been the germ of the 'Deformed Transformed.' His mother reviling him as a 'lame beast,' he replied, 'I was born so, mother.' The child was passionately fond of his nurse, May Gray, to whom at the final parting he gave a watch and his miniature —afterwards in the possession of Dr. Ewing of Aberdeen —and by whose teaching be acquired a familiarity with the Bible, preserved through life by a very retentive memoir. At first be went to school to one 'Boday Bowers,' and afterwards to a clergyman named Rose. The son of his shoemaker, Paterson, taught him some Latin, and he was at the grammar school from 1794 to 1798 (, Life of Arnott, in the papers of the Aberdeen Philosopbical Society, gives his places in the school). He was rewarded as warm-hearted, pugnacious, and idle. Visits to his mother's relations and excursion to Ballater for change of air in 1796 varied his schooldays. In a note to the 'Island' (1813) he dates his lore of mountainous scenery from this period ; and in a note to 'Dun Juan' (canto x. staza 18) be recalls the delicious horror with which he leaned over the bridge of Balgounie, destined in an old rhyme to fall with 'a wife's ae son and a mare's ae foal.' An infantile passion for a consin, Mary Duff, in his eighth year was so intense that he was nearly thrown into convulasions by hearing, when he was sixteen, of her marriage to Mr. Robert Cockburn (a well- known wine merchant, brother of Lord Cockburn). She died 10 March 1858 (Notes and Queries, 2nd series, iii. 331 ; she is described in Mr. Ruskin's 'Præterita').

In 1794, by the death of the fifth Lord Byron's grandson at the siege of Calvi in Corsica, Byron became heir to the peerage. A Mr. Ferguson suggested to Mrs. Byron that an application to the civil list for a pension might be successful if sanctioned by the actual peer. (Letters in Morrison MSS.) The grand-uncle would not help the appeal, but after his death (19 May 1798) a pension of 300l. was given to the new peer's mother (warrant dated 2 Oct. 1790). In the autumn Mrs. Byron with her boy and May Gray left Aberdeen for Newstead. The house was ruinous. The Rochdale property was only recoverable by a lawsuit. The actual income of the Newstead estate was estimated at 1,100l. a year, which might be doubled when the leases fell in. Byron told Medwin (p. 40) that it was about l,500l. a year. Byron was made a ward in chancery, and Lord Carlisle, son of the old lord's sister, was appointed his guardian.

Mrs. Byron settled at Nottingham, and sent the boy to be prepared for public school by Mr. Rogers. He was tortured by the remedies applied to his feet by a quack named Lavender. His talent for satire was already shown in a lampoon on an old lady and in an exposure of Lavender's illiteracy. In 1799 he was taken to London by his mother, examined for his lameness by Dr. Baillie, and sent to Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich, where the treatment prescribed by Baillie could be carried out. Glennie found him playful, amiable, and intelligent, ill-grounded in scholarship, but familiar with scripture, and a devourer of poetry. At Glennie'e he read a pamphlet on the shipwreck of the Juno in 1795, which was afterwards worked up in 'Don Juan;' and here, about 1800, he wrote his first love poem, addressed to his cousin Margaret Parker. Byron speaks of her transparent and evanescent beauty, and says that his passion had its 'usual effects' of preventing sleep and appetite. She died of consumption a year or two later. Meanwhile Mrs. Byron's tempers had become insupportable to Glennie, whose discipline was spoilt by her meddling, and to Lord Carlisle, who ceased to see her. Her importunity prevailed upon the guardian to send the boy to Harrow, where (in the summer of 1801) he became a pupil of the Rev. Joseph Drury.

Drury obtained the respect and affection of his pupil. A note to 'Childe Harold' (canto IV.), upon a passage in which be describes his repugnance to the 'daily drug' of classical lessons, expresses his enthusiastic regard for Drury, and proves that he had not profited by Drury's teaching, His notes in the books which he gave to the school library show that he never became a tolerable scholar. He was always 'idle, in mischief, or at play,' though reading voraciously by fits. He shone in declamation, and Drury tells how he quite unconsciously interpolated a vigorous passage into a prepared composition. Unpopular and unhappy at first, he hated Harrow (, ch. iv.) till his last year and a half; but he became attached to it on rising to be a leader. Glennie had noticed that his deformity had increased his desire for athletic glory. His strength of arm made him formidable in spite of his lameness. He fought Lord Calthorpe for writing 'd——d atheist' under his name (, p. 68). He was a cricketer (Notes and Queries, 6th ser. viii. 245), and the late Lord Stratford de Radcliffe remembered seeing him playing in the match against Eton with another boy to run for him. Byron was of the ringleaders in a childish revolt again the appointment of Dr. Butler (March 1805) as Drury's successor, and in favour of Mark Drury. Byron said that he saved the hall from