Within a year from leaving Cambridge, in 1807, Byron published a volume of his juvenile poems; and although they were remarkable for a young man of twenty, they were not of sufficient merit to attract the attention of the public.  At this time he was abstemious in eating, wishing to reduce a tendency to corpulence.  He could practise self-denial if it were to make his person attractive, especially to ladies.  Nor was he idle.  His reading, if desultory, was vast; and from the list of books which his biographer has noted it would seem that Macaulay never read more than Byron in a given time,—­all the noted historians of England, Germany, Rome, and Greece, with innumerable biographies, miscellanies, and even divinity, the raw material which he afterwards worked into his poems.  How he found time to devour so many solid books is to me a mystery.  These were not merely European works, but Asiatic also.  He was not a critical scholar, but he certainly had a passing familiarity with almost everything in literature worth knowing, which he subsequently utilized, as seen in his “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”  A college reputation was nothing to him, any more than it was to Swift, Goldsmith, Churchill, Gibbon, and many other famous men of letters, who left on record their dislike of the English system of education.  Among these were even such men as Addison, Cowper, Milton, and Dryden, who were scholars, but who alike felt that college honors and native genius did not go hand in hand,—­which might almost be regarded as the rule, but for a few remarkable exceptions, like Sir Robert Peel and Gladstone.  And yet it would be unwise to decry college honors, since not one in a hundred of those who obtain them by their industry, aptness, and force of will can lay claim to what is called genius,—­the rarest of all gifts.  Moreover, how impossible it is for college professors to detect in students, with whom they are imperfectly acquainted, extraordinary faculties, more especially if the young men are apparently idle and negligent, and contemptuous of the college curriculum.

It was a bitter pill for Lord Byron when his juvenile poems, called “Hours of Idleness,” were so severely attacked by the Edinburgh Review.  They might have escaped the searching eyes of the critics had the author not been a lord.  At that time the great Reviews had just been started; and it was the especial object of the Edinburgh Review to handle authors roughly,—­to condemn and not to praise.  Criticism was not then a science, as it became fifty years later, in the hands of Sainte-Beuve, who endeavored to review every production fairly and justly.  There was nothing like justice entering into the head of Jeffrey or Sydney Smith or Brougham, or later on of Macaulay, whose articles were often written for political party effect.  Critics, from the time of Swift down to the middle of the century, aimed to demolish enemies, and to make party capital; hence, as a general thing, their articles were not criticisms at all, but attacks.  And as even an Achilles was vulnerable in his heel, so most intellectual giants have some weak point for the shafts of malice to penetrate.  Yet it is the weaknesses of great men that people like to quote.