But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their animadversion.  Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light to Fruit in the Novum Organum, half of Comus and Lycidas, the stately periods of the Decline and Fall, and the severe beauties of Laodamia, to the better influences of academic training on the minds of their authors.  Similarly, the richest pages of Byron’s work—­from the date of The Curse of Minerva to that of the “Isles of Greece”—­are brightened by lights and adorned by allusions due to his training, imperfect as it was, on the slopes of Harrow, and the associations fostered during his truant years by the sluggish stream of his “Injusta noverca.”  At her, however, he continued to rail as late as the publication of Beppo, in the 75th and 76th stanzas of which we find another cause of complaint,—­

  One hates an author that’s all author, fellows
    In foolscap uniforms turn’d up with ink—­
  So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous,
    One don’t know what to say to them, or think.

Then, after commending Scott, Bogers, and Moore for being men of the world, he proceeds:—­

  But for the children of the “mighty mother’s,”
    The would-be wits and can’t-be gentlemen,
  I leave them to the daily “Tea is ready,”
    Snug coterie, and literary lady.

This attack, which called forth a counter invective of unusual ferocity from some unknown scribbler, is the expression of a sentiment which, sound enough within limits, Byron pushed to an extreme.  He had a rooted dislike, of professional litterateurs, and was always haunted by a dread that they would claim equality with him on the common ground of authorship.  He aspired through life to the superiority of a double distinction, that of a “lord among wits, and among wits a lord.”  In this same spirit lie resented the comparison frequently made between him and Rousseau, and insisted on points of contrast.  “He had a bad memory, I a good one.  He was of the people; I of the aristocracy.”  Byron was capable, of unbending, where the difference of rank was so great that it could not be ignored.  On this principle we may explain his enthusiastic regard for the chorister Eddlestone, from whom he received the cornelian that is the theme of some of his verses, and whose untimely death in 1811 he sincerely mourned.

Of his Harrow friends, Harness and Long in due course followed him to Cambridge, where their common pursuits were renewed.  With the latter, who was drowned in 1809, on a passage to Lisbon with his regiment, he spent a considerable portion of his time on the Cam, swimming and diving, in which art they were so expert as to pick up eggs, plates, thimbles, and coins from a depth of fourteen feet—­incidents recalled to the poet’s mind by reading Milton’s invocation to Sabrina.  During the, same period he distinguished himself at cricket, as in boxing, riding, and shooting.  Of his skill as a rider there are various accounts.  He was an undoubted marksman, and his habit of carrying about pistols, and use of them wherever he went, was often a source of annoyance and alarm.  He professed a theoretical objection to duelling, but was as ready to take a challenge as Scott, and more ready to send one.