manner....  He had the same droll sardonic way about everything.  A wild Irishman, named F., one evening beginning to say something at a large supper, Matthews roared ‘Silence!’ and then pointing to F., cried out, in the words of the oracle, ‘Orson is endowed with reason.’  When Sir Henry Smith was expelled from Cambridge for a row with a tradesman named ‘Hiron,’ Matthews solaced himself with shouting under Hiron’s windows every evening—­

  Ah me! what perils do environ
  The man who meddles with hot Hiron!

He was also of that band of scoffers who used to rouse Lort Mansel from his slumbers in the lodge of Trinity; and when he appeared at the window, foaming with wrath, and crying out, “I know you, gentlemen; I know you!” were wont to reply, “We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort.  Good Lort, deliver us!”

The whole letter, written in the poet’s mature and natural style, gives a vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days:  how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on the road from London to Newstead.  Of the others gathered round the same centre, Scrope Davies enlisted the largest share of Byron’s affections.  To him he wrote after the catastrophe:—­“Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate—­left alone in the world.  I had but you, and H., and M., and let me enjoy the survivors while I can.”  Later he says, “Matthews, Davies, Hobhouse, and myself formed a coterie of our own.  Davies has always beaten us all in the war of words, and by colloquial powers at once delighted and kept us in order; even M. yielded to the dashing vivacity of S.D.”  The last is everywhere commended for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee:  he was never afraid to speak the truth.  Once when the poet in one of his fits of petulance exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible impression, “I shall go mad!” Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, “It is much more like silliness than madness!” He was the only man who ever laid Byron under any serious pecuniary obligation, having lent him 4800_l_. in some time of strait.  This was repaid on March 27, 1814, when the pair sat up over champagne and claret from six till midnight, after which “Scrope could not be got into the carriage on the way home, but remained tipsy and pious on his knees.”  Davies was much disconcerted at the influence which the sceptical opinions of Matthews threatened to exercise over Byron’s mind.  The fourth of this quadrangle of amity was John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, the steadfast friend of the poet’s whole life, the companion of his travels, the witness of his marriage, the executor of his will, the zealous guardian and vindicator of his fame.  His ability is abundantly attested by the impression he left on his contemporaries, his published description of the Pilgrimage, and subsequent literary and political career.  Byron bears witness