impossible, as he will find it, to combine a competent acquisition of useful knowledge with that round of antiquated studies which a pursuit of scholastic honours requires, he must either, by devoting the whole of his attention and ambition to the latter object, remain ignorant on most of those subjects upon which mind grapples with mind in life, or by adopting, as Lord Byron and other distinguished persons have done, the contrary system, consent to pass for a dunce or idler in the schools, in order to afford himself even a chance of attaining eminence in the world.

From the memorandums scribbled by the young poet in his school-books, we might almost fancy that, even at so early an age, he had a sort of vague presentiment that everything relating to him would one day be an object of curiosity and interest.  The date of his entrance at Harrow,[44] the names of the boys who were, at that time, monitors, the list of his fellow pupils under Doctor Drury,[45]—­all are noted down with a fond minuteness, as if to form points of retrospect in his after-life; and that he sometimes referred to them with this feeling will appear from one touching instance.  On the first leaf of his “Scriptores Graeci,” we find, in his schoolboy hand, the following memorial:—­“George Gordon Byron, Wednesday, June 26th, A. D. 1805, 3 quarters of an hour past 3 o’clock in the afternoon, 3d school,—­Calvert, monitor; Tom Wildman on my left hand and Long on my right.  Harrow on the Hill.”  On the same leaf, written five years after, appears this comment:—­

     “Eheu fugaces, Posthume!  Posthume! 
      Labuntur anni.”

“B.  January 9th, 1809.—­Of the four persons whose names are here mentioned, one is dead, another in a distant climate, all separated, and not five years have elapsed since they sat together in school, and none are yet twenty-one years of age.”

The vacation of 1804[46] he passed with his mother at Southwell, to which place she had removed from Nottingham, in the summer of this year, having taken the house on the Green called Burgage Manor.  There is a Southwell play-bill extant, dated August 8th, 1804, in which the play is announced as bespoke “by Mrs. and Lord Byron.”  The gentleman, from whom the house where they resided was rented, possesses a library of some extent, which the young poet, he says, ransacked with much eagerness on his first coming to Southwell; and one of the books that most particularly engaged and interested him was, as may be easily believed, the life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

In the month of October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, and his feelings on the change from his beloved Ida to this new scene of life are thus described by himself:—­