Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/677

Rh battle of Edgehill. None of the family would seem to have been stirred by the poetic impulse in the brightest period of English song, but later on, under Charles II., there was a Lord Byron who patronized literature, and himself wrote some verses in which he professed—

Sir Kgerton Brydges, however, has found a poetic ances try for Byron by connecting the Byrons of the 17th century with the family of Sydney. {{indent|The poverty into which Byron was born, and from which his accession to high rank did not free him, had much to do in determining his future career. That he would have written verses in whatever circumstances he had been born wo may safely believe; but if he had been born in affluence we may be certain that, with his impressionable disposition, he would never have been the poet of the Revolution the most powerful exponent of the modern spirit. By the time of his birth (at Holies Street, London, January 22, 1788), his father had " squandered the lands o Gight awa," and his mother was on her way back from the Continent with a small remnant of her wrecked fortune. Mrs Byron took up her residence in Aberdeen; and her^" lame brat," as she called him in her fits, was sent for a year to a private school at 5s. a quarter, and afterwards to the grammar school of the town. Many little stories are told of the boy's affectionate gratitude and venturesome chivalry, as well as of his exacting and passionate temper. The sisters Gray, who were his successive nurses, found him tractable enough under kind treatment. His mother, whose notions of discipline consisted in hurling things at him when he was disobedient, had no authority over him; he met her vio lence sometimes with sullen resistance, sometimes with defiant mockery; and once, he tells us, they had to wrench from him a knife which he was raising to his breast. At school he passed from the first to the fourth class, but with all his ambition to excel he was too self-willed to take kindly to prescribed tasks, too emotional for dry intellectual work; and he probably learned more from Mary Gray, who taught him the Psalms and the Bible, than he did from his schoolmaster. Before he left Aberdeen, which he did on the death of his grand-uncle and his accession to the peerage in May 1798, he gave a remarkable proof of the precocious intensity of his affections by falling in love v/ith his cousin Mary Duff. So strong a hold did this passion take of him, that six years afterwards he nearly went into convulsions on hearing of her marriage.

When Byron's name was first called in school with the prefix "Dominus," the tradition is that he burst into tears, from pride, M. Tainc conjectures, from pain at the gulf thus placed between him and his school-fellows, the Countess Guiccioli. Soon after, his mother, who had frequently taken advice for the cure of his lame foot, went with him to Nottingham, and placed him under the cure of an empiric, who tortured him to no purpose. The torture was renewed under the advice of a London physician at Dr Gieanie's school at Dulwich, at which he was entered in the summer of 1799; and at last the foot, as he wrote to his old Scotch nurse, was so far restored that he was able to put on a common boot. He was two years with Dr Glennie, and though he made little progress in his classical studies, he had the run of his master's library, and added greatly to his general information. Before he left for Harrow he had contracted another passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, so intense that he could not sleep nor eat when he was looking forward to meeting her. He went to Harrow in 1801, a wild northern colt,: as the head-master said of him, very much behind his age in Latin and Greek. This deficiency he never quite overcame, though he worked enough to get into the same form with boys of his own age. Antiquarian studies never had any charm for him. But though, according to his own account, he was always cricketing, rebelling, and getting into mischief, his brain was not idle. Partly to keep up his school repute for " general information," he read every history he could lay hands on, and not without system either, for he set himself deliberately to know something about every country. He also went through all the British classics, both in Johnson and in Anderson, and most of the living poets. Few boys left Harrow with such a store of useful learning. Many anecdotes are told of the warmth of his friendships at Harrow, and his chivalry in defending his juniors. In the vacation of 1803 he again fell in love this time more seriously with Miss Chaworth, whose grandfather " the wicked Lord Byron" had killed. In the melancholy moods of his after life her rejection of him was often a subject of passionate regret.

Byron's residence at Cambridge (Trinity College, 1805 to 1808, with interval of a year) added little to his know ledge of academical learning. The arts in which ho qualified himself to graduate were swimming, riding, fencing, boxing, drinking, gaming, and the other occupa tions of idle undergraduates. When he went up to Cambridge he was wretched, he tells us, partly from leaving Harrow, partly " from some private domestic circumstances of different kinds," chiefly, it may be presumed, the want of money; but his friend Scrope Davies lent him large sums, and he lived with a certain reckless happiness which had a great deal more to do with his moodiness and melancholy than the libertine excesses with which he is popularly credited. Much more important than his residence in Cambridge, as bearing on his mental development, was his year's residence at South well. From that happy period, which saw the serious dawn of his genius, M. Taine has picked out only the unhappy violent quarrel with his mother, which was the cause of its termination. His intimacy with the Pigotts, and the expansion of his poetic impulses under their genial encouragement, are much more worthy of notice than this culmination of miserable bickerings which he was now strong enough to laugh at, when the domestic storm was over. He had scribbled many verses at Harrow, but had been too shy to show them to his roystering friends; and now finding for the first time an admiring audience, he put forth his powers in earnest, as he could do only under the influence of love or defiance. The result came before the public in the Hours of Idleness, published by Ridge of Newark in March 1807. The poems in that collection have something of the insipidity of the circumstances that gave them birth, but the fact of publication bound him to his vocation to a degree of which he was not at all aware. Hitherto his ambition had pointed towards politics as his natural field, and he said as much in the somewhat dis dainful preface to his poems. Putting his ambition into verse, he characteristically compared himself to a slumbering volcano, and longed to burst on the world as a Fox or a Chatham. But the Hours of Idleness decided his career for him. When he went back to Trinity College he could not help eagerly watching their effect. Again and again he wrote to the friendly Miss Pigott to hear how they were succeeding. He was prepared for defeat, he said, and he promised to take vengeance on adverse critics. He was made a new man by the publication: he had tasted public applause and hungered for more of it. It was then that he carefully examined himself, and took stock of his acquirements in the very remarkable document dated {{rule}} {{smallref}}