In 1804 Byron refers to the antipathy his mother had to his guardian.  Later he expresses gratitude for some unknown service, in recognition of which the second edition of the Hours of Idleness was dedicated “by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman,” to Lord Carlisle.  The tribute being coldly received, led to fresh estrangement, and when Byron, on his coming of age, wrote to remind the Earl of the fact, in expectation of being introduced to the House of Peers, he had for answer a mere formal statement of its rules.  This rebuff affected him as Addison’s praise of Tickell affected Pope, and the following lines, were published in the March of the same year:—­

  Lords too are bards! such things at times befall,
  And ’tis some praise in peers to write at all. 
  Yet did or taste or reason sway the times,
  Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes. 
  Roscommon!  Sheffield! with your spirits fled,
  No future laurels deck a noble head;
  No muse will cheer, with renovating smile
  The paralytic puling of Carlisle.

In prose he adds, “If, before I escaped from my teens, I said anything in favour of his lordship’s paper-books, it was in the way of dutiful dedication, and more from the advice of others than my own judgment; and I seize the first opportunity of pronouncing my sincere recantation.”  As was frequently the case with him, he recanted again.  In a letter of 1814 he expressed to Rogers his regret for his sarcasms; and in his reference to the death of the Hon. Frederick Howard, in the third canto of Childe Harold, he tried to make amends in the lines—­

  Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
  Partly because they blend me with his line,
  And partly that I did his sire some wrong.

This is all of any interest we know regarding the fitful connection of the guardian and ward.

Towards Dr. Drury the poet continued through life to cherish sentiments of gratitude, and always spoke of him with veneration.  “He was,” he says, “the best, the kindest (and yet strict too) friend I ever had; and I look on him still as a father, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late, when I have erred, and whose counsel I have but followed when I have done well or wisely.”

Great educational institutions must consult the greatest good of the greatest number of common-place minds, by regulations against which genius is apt to kick; and Byron, who was by nature and lack of discipline peculiarly ill fitted to conform to routine, confesses that till the last year and a half he hated Harrow.  He never took kindly to the studies of the place, and was at no time an accurate scholar.  In the Bards and Reviewers, and elsewhere, he evinces considerable familiarity with the leading authors of antiquity, but it is doubtful whether he was able to read any of the more difficult of them in the original.  His translations are generally commonplace, and from