grounds to those of my mother, was the place of our interviews, but the ardour was all on my side; I was serious, she was volatile.  She liked me as a younger brother, and treated and laughed at me as a boy; she, however, gave me her picture, and that was something to make verses upon.  Had I married Miss Chaworth, perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different; she jilted me, however, but her marriage proved anything but a happy one.”  It is to this attachment that we are indebted for the beautiful poem of The Dream, and the stanzas beginning

Oh, had my fate been joined to thine!

Although this love affair a little interfered with his Greek and Latin, his time was not passed without some attention to reading.  Until he was eighteen years old, he had never seen a review; but his general information was so extensive on modern topics, as to induce a suspicion that he could only have collected so much information from reviews, as he was never seen reading, but always idle, and in mischief, or at play.  He was, however, a devourer of books; he read eating, read in bed, read when no one else read, and had perused all sorts of books from the time he first could spell, but had never read a review, and knew not what the name implied.

It should be here noticed, that while he was at Harrow, his qualities were rather oratorical than poetical; and if an opinion had then been formed of the likely result of his character, the prognostication would have led to the expectation of an orator.  Altogether, his conduct at Harrow indicated a clever, but not an extraordinary boy.  He formed a few friendships there, in which his attachment appears to have been, in some instances, remarkable.  The late Duke of Dorset was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster.  He certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that splendid career he was destined to run as a poet.

CHAPTER V

Character at Harrow—­Poetical Predilections—­Byron at Cambridge—­His “Hours of Idleness”

In reconsidering the four years which Byron spent at Harrow, while we can clearly trace the development of the sensibilities of his character, and an increased tension of his susceptibility, by which impressions became more acute and delicate, it seems impossible not to perceive by the records which he has himself left of his feelings, that something morbid was induced upon them.  Had he not afterwards so magnificently distinguished himself as a poet, it is not probable that he would have been recollected by his schoolfellows as having been in any respect different from the common herd.  His activity and spirit, in their controversies and quarrels, were but the outbreakings of that temperament which the discipline of riper years, and the natural awe of the world, afterward reduced into his hereditary cast of character, in which so much of sullenness and