As that propensity to self-delineation, which so strongly pervades his maturer works is, to the full, as predominant in his early productions, there needs no better record of his mode of life, as a school-boy, than what these fondly circumstantial effusions supply.  Thus the sports he delighted and excelled in are enumerated:—­

    “Yet when confinement’s lingering hour was done,
    Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one: 
    Together we impell’d the flying ball,

* * * * *

    Together join’d in cricket’s manly toil,
    Or shared the produce of the river’s spoil;
    Or, plunging from the green, declining shore,
    Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore;
    In every element, unchanged, the same,
    All, all that brothers should be, but the name.”

The danger which he incurred in a fight with some of the neighbouring farmers—­an event well remembered by some of his school-fellows—­is thus commemorated.—­

    “Still I remember, in the factious strife,
    The rustic’s musket aim’d against my life;
    High poised in air the massy weapon hung,
    A cry of horror burst from every tongue: 
    Whilst I, in combat with another foe,
    Fought on, unconscious of the impending blow. 
    Your arm, brave boy, arrested his career—­
    Forward you sprung, insensible to fear;
    Disarm’d and baffled by your conquering hand,
    The grovelling savage roll’d upon the sand.”

Some feud, it appears, had arisen on the subject of the cricket-ground, between these “clods” (as in school-language they are called) and the boys, and one or two skirmishes had previously taken place.  But the engagement here recorded was accidentally brought on by the breaking up of school and the dismissal of the volunteers from drill, both happening, on that occasion, at the same hour.  This circumstance accounts for the use of the musket, the butt-end of which was aimed at Byron’s head, and would have felled him to the ground, but for the interposition of his friend Tatersall, a lively, high-spirited boy, whom he addresses here under the name of Davus.

Notwithstanding these general habits of play and idleness, which might seem to indicate a certain absence of reflection and feeling, there were moments when the youthful poet would retire thoughtfully within himself, and give way to moods of musing uncongenial with the usual cheerfulness of his age.  They show a tomb in the churchyard at Harrow, commanding a view over Windsor, which was so well known to be his favourite resting-place, that the boys called it “Byron’s tomb;"[34] and here, they say, he used to sit for hours, wrapt up in thought,—­brooding lonelily over the first stirrings of passion and genius in his soul, and occasionally, perhaps, indulging in those bright forethoughts of fame, under the influence of which, when little more than fifteen years of age, he wrote these remarkable lines:—­