Of his Harrow intimates, the most prominent were the Duke of Dorset, the poet’s favoured fag; Lord Clare (the Lycus of the Childish Recollections); Lord Delawarr (the Euryalus); John Wingfield (Alonzo), who died at Coimbra, 1811; Cecil Tattersall (Davus); Edward Noel Long (Cleon); Wildman, afterwards proprietor of Newstead; and Sir Robert Peel.  Of the last, his form-fellow and most famous of his mates, the story is told of his being unmercifully beaten for offering resistance to his fag master, and Byron rushing up to intercede with an offer to take half the blows.  Peel was an exact contemporary, having been born in the same year, 1788.  It has been remarked that most of the poet’s associates were his juniors, and, less fairly, that he liked to regard them as his satellites.  But even at Dulwich his ostentation of rank had provoked for him the nickname of “the old English baron.”  To Wildman, who, as a senior, had a right of inflicting chastisement for offences, he said, “I find you have got Delawarr on your list; pray don’t lick him.”  “Why not?” was the reply.  “Why, I don’t know, except that he is a brother peer.”  Again, he interfered with the more effectual arm of physical force to rescue a junior protege—­lame like himself, and otherwise much weaker—­from the ill-treatment of some hulking tyrant.  “Harness,” he said, “if any one bullies you, tell me, and I’ll thrash him if I can;” and he kept his word.  Harness became an accomplished clergyman and minor poet, and has left some pleasing reminiscences of his former patron.  The prodigy of the school, George Sinclair, was in the habit of writing the poet’s exercises, and getting his battles fought for him in return.  His bosom friend was Lord Clare.  To him his confidences were most freely given, and his most affectionate verses addressed.  In the characteristic stanzas entitled “L’amitie est l’amour sans ailes,” we feel as if between them the qualifying phrase might have been omitted:  for their letters, carefully preserved on either side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the reconciliations of lovers.  In 1821 Byron writes, “I never hear the name Clare without a beating of the heart even now; and I write it with the feelings of 1803-4-5, ad infinitum.”  At the same date he says of an accidental meeting:  “It annihilated for a moment all the years between the present time and the days of Harrow.  It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like a rising from the grave to me.  Clare too was much agitated—­more in appearance than I was myself—­for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers’ ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think so.  We were but five minutes together on the public road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence that could be weighed against them.”  They were “all that brothers should be but the name;” and it is interesting to trace this relationship between the greatest genius of the new time and the son of the statesman who, in the preceding age, stands out serene and strong amid the swarm of turbulent rioters and ranting orators by whom he was surrounded and reviled.