Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/139

 ). In the first period of residence, though sulky and solitary, he became the admiring friend of W. J. Bankes, was intimate with Edward Noel Long, and protected a chorister named Eddlestone. His friendship with this youth, he tells Miss Pigot (July 1807), is to eclipse all the classical precedents, and Byron means to get a partnership for his friend, or to take him as a permanent companion. Eddlestone died of consumption in 1811, and Byron then reclaimed from Miss Pigot a cornelian, which he had originally received from Eddlestone, and handed on to her. References to this friendship are in the ‘Hours of Idleness,’ and probably in the ‘Cornelian Heart’ (dated March 1812). Long entered the army, and was drowned in a transport in 1809, to Byron's profound affliction. He became intimate with two fellows of King's—Henry Drury and Francis Hodgson, afterwards provost of Eton. Byron showed his friendship for Hodgson by a present of 1,000l. in 1813, when Hodgson was in embarrassment and Byron not over rich (, Memoirs, i. 268). In his later residence a closer ‘coterie’ was formed by Byron, Hobhouse, Davies, and C. S. Matthews (Letter 66). John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, was his friend through life. Scrope Berdmore Davies, a man of wit and taste, delighted Byron by his ‘dashing vivacity,’ and lent him 4,800l., the repayment of which was celebrated by a drinking bout at the Cocoa on 27 March 1814. Hodgson reports (i. 104) that when Byron exclaimed melodramatically ‘I shall go mad,’ Davies used to suggest ‘silly’ as a probable emendation. Matthews was regarded as the most promising of the friends. Byron described his audacity, his swimming and boxing, and conversational powers in a letter to Murray (20 Nov. 1820), and tells Dallas (Letter 61) that he was a ‘most decided’ and outspoken ‘atheist.’

Among these friends Byron varied the pursuit of pleasure by literary efforts. He boasts in a juvenile letter (No. 20) that he has often been compared to ‘the wicked’ Lord Lyttelton, and has already been held up as ‘the votary of licentiousness and the disciple of infidelity.’ A list (dated 30 Nov. 1807) shows that he had read or looked through many historical books and novels ‘by the thousand.’ His memory was remarkable (see e.g., p. 148; , p. 134). Scott, however, found in 1815 that his reading did ‘not appear to have been extensive, either in history or poetry;’ and the list does not imply that he had strayed beyond the highways of literature.

At Southwell, in September 1806, he took the principal part (Penruddock, an ‘amiable misanthrope’) in an amateur performance of Cumberland's ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ and ‘spun a prologue’ in a postchaise. About the same time he confessed to Miss Pigot, who had been reading Burns to him, that he too was a poet, and wrote down the lines ‘In thee I fondly hoped to clasp.’ In November 1806 Ridge, a Newark bookseller, had privately printed for him a small volume of poems, entitled ‘Fugitive Pieces.’ His friend Mr. Becher, a Southwell clergyman [see ], remonstrated against the license of one poem. Byron immediately destroyed the whole impression (except one copy in Becher's hands and one sent to young Pigot, then studying medicine at Edinburgh). A hundred copies, omitting the offensive verses, and with some additions, under the title ‘Poems on Various Occasions,’ were distributed in January 1807. Favourable notices came to the author from Bankes, Henry Mackenzie (‘The Man of Feeling’), and Lord Woodhouselee. In the summer of 1807 Byron published a collection called ‘Hours of Idleness, a series of Poems, original and translated, by George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor,’ from which twenty of the privately printed poems were omitted and others added. It was praised in the ‘Critical Review’ of September 1807, and abused in the first number of the ‘Satirist.’ A new edition, with some additions and without the prefaces, appeared in March 1808 (see account of these editions in appendix to English translation of Byron (1872), p. 446). In January 1808 the famous criticism came out in the ‘Edinburgh’ (Byron speaks of this as about to appear in a letter (No. 24) dated 26 Feb. 1808). The critique has been attributed both to Brougham and Jeffrey. Jeffrey seems to have denied the authorship (see, p. 174), and the ponderous legal facetiousness is certainly not unlike Brougham, whom Byron came to regard as the author (see Notes and Queries, 4th ser. vi. 368, 480). The severity was natural enough. Scott, indeed, says that he remonstrated with Jeffrey, thinking that the poems contained ‘some passages of noble promise.’ But the want of critical acumen is less obvious than the needless cruelty of the wound inflicted upon a boy's harmless vanity. Byron was deeply stung. He often boasted afterwards (e.g. Letter 420) that he instantly drank three bottles of claret and began a reply. He had already in his desk (Letter 18), on 26 Oct. 1807, 380 lines of his satire, besides 214 pages of a novel, 560 lines in blank verse of a poem on Bosworth Field, and other pieces. He now carefully polished his satire, and had it put in type by Ridge.