Of his charity and kind-heartedness he left behind him at Southwell—­as, indeed, at every place, throughout life, where he resided any time—­the most cordial recollections.  “He never,” says a person, who knew him intimately at this period, “met with objects of distress without affording them succour.”  Among many little traits of this nature, which his friends delight to tell, I select the following,—­less as a proof of his generosity, than from the interest which the simple incident itself, as connected with the name of Byron, presents.  While yet a school-boy, he happened to be in a bookseller’s shop at Southwell, when a poor woman came in to purchase a Bible.  The price, she was told by the shopman, was eight shillings.  “Ah, dear sir,” she exclaimed, “I cannot pay such a price; I did not think it would cost half the money.”  The woman was then, with a look of disappointment, going away,—­when young Byron called her back, and made her a present of the Bible.

In his attention to his person and dress, to the becoming arrangement of his hair, and to whatever might best show off the beauty with which nature had gifted him, he manifested, even thus early, his anxiety to make himself pleasing to that sex who were, from first to last, the ruling stars of his destiny.  The fear of becoming, what he was naturally inclined to be, enormously fat, had induced him, from his first entrance at Cambridge, to adopt, for the purpose of reducing himself, a system of violent exercise and abstinence, together with the frequent use of warm baths.  But the embittering circumstance of his life,—­that, which haunted him like a curse, amidst the buoyancy of youth, and the anticipations of fame and pleasure, was, strange to say, the trifling deformity of his foot.  By that one slight blemish (as in his moments of melancholy he persuaded himself) all the blessings that nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced.  His reverend friend, Mr. Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected, endeavoured to cheer and rouse him, by representing, in their brightest colours, all the various advantages with which Providence had endowed him,—­and, among the greatest, that of “a mind which placed him above the rest of mankind.”—­“Ah, my dear friend,” said Byron, mournfully,—­“if this (laying his hand on his forehead) places me above the rest of mankind, that (pointing to his foot) places me far, far below them.”

It sometimes, indeed, seemed as if his sensitiveness on this point led him to fancy that he was the only person in the world afflicted with such an infirmity.  When that accomplished scholar and traveller, Mr. D. Baillie, who was at the same school with him at Aberdeen, met him afterwards at Cambridge, the young peer had then grown so fat that, though accosted by him familiarly as his school-fellow, it was not till he mentioned his name that Mr. Baillie could recognise him.  “It is odd enough, too, that you shouldn’t know me,” said Byron—­“I thought nature had set such a mark upon me, that I could never be forgot.”