CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP.

In October, 1805, on the advice of Dr. Drury, Byron was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, and kept up a connexion with the University for less than three years of very irregular attendance, during which we hear nothing of his studies, except the contempt for them expressed in some of the least effective passages of his early satires.  He came into residence in bad temper and low spirits.  His attachment to Harrow characteristically redoubled as the time drew near to leave it, and his rest was broken “for the last quarter, with counting the hours that remained.”  He was about to start by himself, with the heavy feeling that he was no longer a boy, and yet, against his choice, for he wished to go to Oxford.  The Hours of Idleness, the product of this period, are fairly named.  He was so idle as regards “problems mathematic,” and “barbarous Latin,” that it is matter of surprise to learn that he was able to take his degree, as he did in March, 1808.

A good German critic, dwelling on the comparatively narrow range of studies to which the energies of Cambridge were then mainly directed, adds somewhat rashly, that English national literature stands for the most part beyond the range of the academic circle, This statement is often reiterated with persistent inaccuracy; but the most casual reference to biography informs us that at least four-fifths of the leading statesmen, reformers, and philosophers of England, have been nurtured within the walls of her universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit.  From them have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our history, kindled the nation into a new life; from the age of Wycliffe, through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present reign of the Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age have been wholly “without the academic circle.”  Analysing with the same view the lives of the British poets of real note from Barbour to Tennyson, we find the proportion of University men increases.  “Poeta nascitur et fit;” and if the demands of technical routine have sometimes tended to stifle, the comparative repose of a seclusion “unravaged” by the fierce activities around it, the habit of dwelling on the old wisdom and harping on the ancient strings, is calculated to foster the poetic temper and enrich its resources.  The discouraging effect of a sometimes supercilious and conservative criticism is not an unmixed evil.  The verse-writer who can be snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone, is a poetaster silenced for his country’s good.  It is true, however, that to original minds, bubbling with spontaneity, or arrogant with the consciousness of power, the discipline is hard, and the restraint excessive; and that the men whom their colleges are most proud to remember, have handled them severely.  Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of the waste of time on litigious brawling; Locke mocks at the logic of the schools; Cowley complains of being taught words, not things; Gibbon rejoices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen; Wordsworth contemns the “trade in classic niceties,” and roves “in magisterial liberty” by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills.