“When I first went up to college, it was a new and a heavy-hearted scene for me:  firstly, I so much disliked leaving Harrow, that though it was time (I being seventeen), it broke my very rest for the last quarter with counting the days that remained.  I always hated Harrow till the last year and a half, but then I liked it.  Secondly, I wished to go to Oxford, and not to Cambridge.  Thirdly, I was so completely alone in this new world, that it half broke my spirits.  My companions were not unsocial, but the contrary—­lively, hospitable, of rank and fortune, and gay far beyond my gaiety.  I mingled with, and dined, and supped, &c., with them; but, I know not how, it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy.”

But though, for a time, he may have felt this sort of estrangement at Cambridge, to remain long without attaching himself was not in his nature; and the friendship which he now formed with a youth named Eddleston, who was two years younger than himself, even exceeded in warmth and romance all his schoolboy attachments.  This boy, whose musical talents first drew them together, was, at the commencement of their acquaintance, one of the choir at Cambridge, though he afterwards, it appears, entered into a mercantile line of life; and this disparity in their stations was by no means without its charm for Byron, as gratifying at once both his pride and good-nature, and founding the tie between them on the mutually dependent relations of protection on the one side, and gratitude and devotion on the other;—­the only relations,[47] according to Lord Bacon, in which the little friendship that still remains in the world is to be found.  It was upon a gift presented to him by Eddleston, that he wrote those verses entitled “The Cornelian,” which were printed in his first, unpublished volume, and of which the following is a stanza:—­

    “Some, who can sneer at friendship’s ties,
      Have for my weakness oft reproved me;
    Yet still the simple gift I prize,
      For I am sure the giver loved me.”

Another friendship, of a less unequal kind, which had been begun at Harrow, and which he continued to cultivate during his first year at Cambridge, is thus interestingly dwelt upon in one of his journals:—­

“How strange are my thoughts!—­The reading of the song of Milton, Sabrina fair,’ has brought back upon me—­I know not how or why—­the happiest, perhaps, days of my life (always excepting, here and there, a Harrow holiday in the two latter summers of my stay there) when living at Cambridge with Edward Noel Long, afterwards of the Guards,—­who, after having served honourably in the expedition to Copenhagen (of which two or three thousand scoundrels yet survive in plight and pay), was drowned early in 1809, on his passage to Lisbon with his regiment in the St. George transport, which was run foul of in the night by another transport.  We were rival swimmers—­fond of riding—­reading—­and