“We both seem perfectly to recollect, with a mixture of pleasure and regret, the hours we once passed together, and I assure you, most sincerely, they are numbered among the happiest of my brief chronicle of enjoyment.  I am now getting into years, that is to say, I was twenty a month ago, and another year will send me into the world to run my career of folly with the rest.  I was then just fourteen,—­you were almost the first of my Harrow friends, certainly the first in my esteem, if not in date; but an absence from Harrow for some time, shortly after, and new connections on your side, and the difference in our conduct (an advantage decidedly in your favour) from that turbulent and riotous disposition of mine, which impelled me into every species of mischief,—­all these circumstances combined to destroy an intimacy, which affection urged me to continue, and memory compels me to regret.  But there is not a circumstance attending that period, hardly a sentence we exchanged, which is not impressed on my mind at this moment.  I need not say more,—­this assurance alone must convince you, had I considered them as trivial, they would have been less indelible.  How well I recollect the perusal of your ’first flights!’ There is another circumstance you do not know;—­the first lines I ever attempted at Harrow were addressed to you.  You were to have seen them; but Sinclair had the copy in his possession when we went home;—­and, on our return, we were strangers.  They were destroyed, and certainly no great loss; but you will perceive from this circumstance my opinions at an age when we cannot be hypocrites.

“I have dwelt longer on this theme than I intended, and I shall now conclude with what I ought to have begun.  We were once friends,—­nay, we have always been so, for our separation was the effect of chance, not of dissension.  I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences.  Will you sometimes write to me?  I do not ask it often; and, if we meet, let us be what we should be, and what we were.”

Of the tenaciousness with which, as we see in this letter, he clung to all the impressions of his youth, there can be no stronger proof than the very interesting fact, that, while so little of his own boyish correspondence has been preserved, there were found among his papers almost all the notes and letters which his principal school favourites, even the youngest, had ever addressed to him; and, in some cases, where the youthful writers had omitted to date their scrawls, his faithful memory had, at an interval of years after, supplied the deficiency.  Among these memorials, so fondly treasured by him, there is one which it would be unjust not to cite, as well on account of the manly spirit that dawns through its own childish language, as for the sake of the tender and amiable feeling which, it will be seen, the re-perusal of it, in other days, awakened in Byron:—­