At Harrow, Byron proved himself capable of violent fits of work, but of “few continuous drudgeries.”  He would turn out an unusual number of hexameters, and again lapse into as much idleness as the teachers would tolerate.  His forte was in declamation:  his attitude and delivery, and power of extemporizing, surprised even critical listeners into unguarded praise.  “My qualities,” he says, “were much more oratorical and martial than poetical; no one had the least notion that I should subside into poesy.”  Unpopular at first, he began to like school when he had fought his way to be a champion, and from his energy in sports more than from the impression produced by his talents had come to be recognized as a leader among his fellows.  Unfortunately, towards the close of his course, in 1805, the headship of Harrow changed hands.  Dr. Drury retired, and was succeeded by Dr. Butler.  This event suggested the lines beginning,—­

  Where are those honours, Ida, once your own,
  When Probus fill’d your magisterial throne?

The appointment was generally unpopular among the boys, whose sympathies were enlisted in favour of Mark Drury, brother of their former master, and Dr. Butler seems for a time to have had considerable difficulty in maintaining discipline.  Byron, always “famous for rowing,” was a ringleader of the rebellious party, and compared himself to Tyrlaeus.  On one occasion he tore down the window gratings in a room of the school-house, with the remark that they darkened the hall; on another he is reported to have refused a dinner invitation from the master, with the impertinent remark that he would never think of asking him in return to dine at Newstead.  On the other hand, he seems to have set limits to the mutiny, and prevented some of the boys from setting their desks on fire by pointing to their fathers’ names carved on them.  Byron afterwards expressed regret for his rudeness; but Butler remains in his verse as Pomposus “of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul.”

Of the poet’s free hours, during the last years of his residence which he refers to as among the happiest of his life, many were spent in solitary musing by an elm-tree, near a tomb to which his name has been given—­a spot commanding a far view of London, of Windsor “bosomed high in tufted trees,” and of the green fields that stretch between, covered in spring with the white and red snow of apple blossom.  The others were devoted to the society of his chosen comrades.  Byron, if not one of the safest, was one of the warmest of friends; and he plucked the more eagerly at the choicest fruit of English public school and college life, from the feeling he so pathetically expresses,—­

  Is there no cause beyond the common claim,
  Endear’d to all in childhood’s very name? 
  Ah, sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
  Which whispers Friendship will be doubly dear
  To one who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
  And seek abroad the love denied at home. 
  Those hearts, dear Ida, have I found in thee—­
  A home, a world, a paradise to me.