letter, too, which he wrote me, on leaving college to join the Guards, was as melancholy in its tenour as it could well be on such an occasion.  But he showed nothing of this in his deportment, being mild and gentle;—­and yet with much turn for the ludicrous in his disposition.  We were both much attached to Harrow, and sometimes made excursions there together from London to revive our schoolboy recollections.”

These affecting remembrances are contained in a Journal which he kept during his residence at Ravenna, in 1821, and they are rendered still more touching and remarkable by the circumstances under which they were noted down.  Domesticated in a foreign land, and even connected with foreign conspirators, whose arms, at the moment he was writing, were in his house, he could yet thus wholly disengage himself from the scene around him, and, borne away by the current of memory into other times, live over the lost friendships of his boyhood again.  An English gentleman (Mr. Wathen) who called upon him, at one of his residences in Italy, having happened to mention in conversation that he had been acquainted with Long, from that moment Lord Byron treated him with the most marked kindness, and talked with him of Long, and of his amiable qualities, till (as this gentleman says) the tears could not be concealed in his eyes.

In the summer of this year (1806) he, as usual, joined his mother at Southwell,—­among the small, but select, society of which place he had, during his visits, formed some intimacies and friendships, the memory of which is still cherished there fondly and proudly.  With the exception, indeed, of the brief and bewildering interval which he passed, as we have seen, in the company of Miss Chaworth, it was at Southwell alone that an opportunity was ever afforded him of profiting by the bland influence of female society, or of seeing what woman is in the true sphere of her virtues, home.  The amiable and intelligent family of the Pigots received him within their circle as one of themselves:  and in the Rev. John Becher[48] the youthful poet found not only an acute and judicious critic, but a sincere friend.  There were also one or two other families—­as the Leacrofts, the Housons—­among whom his talents and vivacity made him always welcome; and the proud shyness with which, through the whole of his minority, he kept aloof from all intercourse with the neighbouring gentlemen seems to have been entirely familiarised away by the small, cheerful society of Southwell.  One of the most intimate and valued of his friends, at this period, has given me the following account of her first acquaintance with him:—­“The first time I was introduced to him was at a party at his mother’s, when he was so shy that she was forced to send for him three times before she could persuade him to come into the drawing-room, to play with the young people at a round game.  He was then a fat bashful boy, with his hair combed straight over his forehead, and extremely like a miniature