Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/121

 little set clustered round Byron in his days of residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. The poet came from school at Harrow, as everyone who has visited the churchyard that tops its hill will remember, but most of his friends came from the level meadows of Eton. Fullest of promise for the future was that "intellectual giant" Charles Skinner Matthews, Matthews major of boyish life, whose "infinite superiority" Byron stood in awe of, but Matthews at the time that he contemplated contesting the representation of the university, was whelm'd beneath the waters of the Cam (August 1811). Matthews minor of Eton, "the image, to the very voice of his brother Charles" left his contemporaries at Cambridge to travel through the south of Europe in pursuit of health, and produced the popular "diary of an invalid" which Byron pronounced "most excellent" as one of the three books "of truth or sense upon Italy." A stray reader or two will perhaps even at this date remember the work for; its passionate regrets at his change of life from warm rooms on the shore of England to the stone staircases and starving casements of Florence or Rome. A third of these friends, William John Bankes, Byron's "collegiate pastor and master and patron" penetrated the districts of Syria and Mesopotamia, returned to visit Byron in Venice, and after several years of parliamentary life in England died in that city. Best known of all was John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards lord Broughton de Gyfford whose "recollections of a long life" printed for the entertainment of his friends in 5 vols.