The Life of Lord Byron

Placed at Harrow.—Progress there.—Love for Miss Chaworth.—His reading.—Oratorical powers.

In passing from the quiet academy of Dulwich Grove to the public school of Harrow, the change must have been great to any boy—to Byron it was punishment; and for the first year and a half he hated the place. In the end, however, he rose to be a leader in all the sports and mischiefs of his schoolfellows; but it never could be said that he was a popular boy, however much he was distinguished for spirit and bravery; for if he was not quarrelsome, he was sometimes vindictive. Still it could not have been to any inveterate degree; for undoubtedly, in his younger years, he was susceptible of warm impressions from gentle treatment, and his obstinacy and arbitrary humour were perhaps more the effects of unrepressed habit than of natural bias; they were the prickles which surrounded his genius in the bud.

At Harrow he acquired no distinction as a student; indeed, at no period was he remarkable for steady application. Under Dr. Glennie he had made but little progress; and it was chiefly in consequence of his backwardness that he was removed from his academy. When placed with Dr. Drury, it was with an intimation that he had a cleverness about him, but that his education had been neglected.

THE LIFE OF

The early dislike which Byron felt towards the Earl of Carlisle is abundantly well known, and he had the magnanimity to acknowledge that it was in some respects unjust. But the antipathy was not all on one side; nor will it be easy to parallel the conduct of the Earl with that of any guardian. It is but justice, therefore, to Byron, to make the public aware that the dislike began on the part of Lord Carlisle, and originated in some distaste which he took to Mrs. Byron’s manners, and at the trouble she sometimes gave him on account of her son.

Dr. Drury, in his communication to Mr. Moore respecting the early history of Byron, mentions a singular circumstance as to this subject, which we record with the more pleasure, because Byron has been blamed, and has blamed himself, for his irreverence towards Lord Carlisle, while it appears that the fault lay with the Earl.

“After some continuance at Harrow,” says Dr. Drury, “and when the powers of his mind had begun to expand, the late Lord Carlisle, his relation, desired to see me in town. I waited on his Lordship. His object was to inform me of Lord Byron’s expectations of property when he came of age, which he represented as contracted, and to inquire respecting his abilities. On the former circumstance I made no remark; as to the latter, I replied, ‘He has talents, my Lord, which will add lustre to his rank.’ ‘Indeed,’ said his Lordship, with a degree of surprise that, according to my feelings, did not express in it all the satisfaction I expected.”

Lord Carlisle had, indeed, much of the Byron humour in him. His mother was a sister of the homicidal lord, and possessed some of the family peculiarity: she was endowed with great talent, and in her latter days she exhibited great singularity. She wrote beautiful verses and piquant epigrams; among
LORD BYRON 33
others, there is a poetical effusion of her pen addressed to Mrs. Greville, on her Ode to Indifference, which, at the time, was much admired, and has been, with other poems of her Ladyship’s, published in Pearch’s collection. After moving, for a long time, as one of the most brilliant orbs in the sphere of fashion, she suddenly retired, and like her morose brother, shut herself up from the world. While she lived in this seclusion, she became an object of the sportive satire of the late Mr. Fox, who characterized her as
Carlisle, recluse in pride and rags.
I have heard a still coarser apostrophe by the same gentleman. It seems they had quarrelled, and on his leaving her in the drawing-room, she called after him, that he might go about his business, for she did not care two skips of a louse for him. On coming to the hall, finding paper and ink on the table, he wrote two lines in answer, and sent it up to her Ladyship, to the effect that she always spoke of what was running in her head.

Byron has borne testimony to the merits of his guardian, her son, as a tragic poet, by characterizing his publications as paper books. It is, however, said that they nevertheless showed some talent, and that The Father’s Revenge, one of the tragedies, was submitted to the judgment of Dr. Johnson, who did not despise it.

But to return to the progress of Byron at Harrow; it is certain that notwithstanding the affectionate solicitude of Dr. Drury to encourage him, he never became an eminent scholar; at least, we have his own testimony to that effect, in the fourth canto of Childe Harold; the lines, however, in which that testimony stands recorded, are among the weakest he ever penned.
34 THE LIFE OF

May he who will his recollections rake
And quote in classic raptures, and awake
The hills with Latin echoes: I abhorr’d
Too much to conquer, for the poet’s sake,
The drill’d, dull lesson forced down word by word,
In my repugnant youth with pleasure to record.
And, as an apology for the defect, he makes the following remarks in a note subjoined:—

“I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakspeare (‘To be, or not to be,’ for instance), from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise not of mind but of memory; so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the continent, young persons are taught from mere common authors, and do not read the best classics until their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I was not a slow or an idle boy; and I believe no one could be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason: a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Drury, was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed; whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late, when I have erred; and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well and wisely. If ever this imperfect record of my
LORD BYRON 35
feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration; of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect any honour upon his instructor.”

Lord Byron, however, is not singular in his opinion of the inutility of premature classical studies; and notwithstanding the able manner in which the late Dean Vincent defended public education, we have some notion that his reasoning upon this point will not be deemed conclusive. Milton, says Dr. Vincent, complained of the years that were wasted in teaching the dead languages. Cowley also complained that classical education taught words only and not things; and Addison deemed it an inexpiable error, that boys with genius or without were all to be bred poets indiscriminately. As far, then, as respects the education of a poet, we should think that the names of Milton, Cowley, Addison, and Byron would go well to settle the question; especially when it is recollected how little Shakspeare was indebted to the study of the classics, and that Burns knew nothing of them at all. I do not, however, adopt the opinion as correct; neither do I think that Dean Vincent took a right view of the subject; for, as discipline, the study of the classics may be highly useful, at the same time, the mere hammering of Greek and Latin into English cannot be very conducive to the refinement of taste or the exaltation of sentiment. Nor is there either common sense or correct logic in the following observations made on the passage and note, quoted by the anonymous author of Childe Harold’s Monitor.

“This doctrine of antipathies, contracted by the impatience of youth against the noblest authors of antiquity, from the circumstance of having been made the vehicle of early instruction, is a most dangerous doctrine indeed; since it strikes at the root, not only
36 THE LIFE OF
of all pure taste, but of all praiseworthy industry. It would, if acted upon (as Harold by the mention of the Continental practice of using inferior writers in the business of tuition would seem to recommend), destroy the great source of the intellectual vigour of our countrymen.”

This is, undoubtedly, assuming too much; for those who have objected to the years “wasted” in teaching the dead languages, do not admit that the labour of acquiring them either improves the taste or adds to the vigour of the understanding; and, therefore, before the soundness of the opinion of Milton, of Cowley, of Addison, and of many other great men can be rejected, it falls on those who are of Dean Vincent’s opinion, and that of Childe Harold’s Monitor, to prove that the study of the learned languages is of so much primary importance as they claim for it.

But it appears that Byron’s mind, during the early period of his residence at Harrow, was occupied with another object than his studies, and which may partly account for his inattention to them. He fell in love with Mary Chaworth. “She was,” he is represented to have said, “several years older than myself, but at my age boys like something older than themselves, as they do younger later in life. Our estates adjoined, but owing to the unhappy circumstances of the feud (the affair of the fatal duel), our families, as is generally the case with neighbours, who happen to be near relations, were never on terms of more than common civility, scarcely those. She was the beau ideal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of the beautiful! and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her. I say created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but angelic. I returned to Harrow, after my trip to Cheltenham, more deeply enamoured than ever, and passed the next holidays at Newstead. I now began to fancy
LORD BYRON 37
myself a man, and to make love in earnest. Our meetings were stolen ones, and my letters passed through the medium of a confidant. A gate leading from Mr. Chaworth’s grounds to those of my mother, was the place of our interviews, but the ardour was all on my side; I was serious, she was volatile. She liked me as a younger brother, and treated and laughed at me as a boy; she, however, gave me her picture, and that was something to make verses upon. Had I married Miss Chaworth, perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different; she jilted me, however, but her marriage proved anything but a happy one.” It is to this attachment that we are indebted for the beautiful poem of The Dream, and the stanzas beginning
Oh, had my fate been joined to thine!

Although this love affair a little interfered with his Greek and Latin, his time was not passed without some attention to reading. Until he was eighteen years old, he had never seen a review; but his general information was so extensive on modern topics, as to induce a suspicion that he could only have collected so much information from reviews, as he was never seen reading, but always idle, and in mischief, or at play. He was, however, a devourer of books; he read eating, read in bed, read when no one else read, and had perused all sorts of books from the time he first could spell, but had never read a review, and knew not what the name implied.

It should be here noticed, that while he was at Harrow, his qualities were rather oratorical than poetical; and if an opinion had then been formed of the likely result of his character, the prognostication would have led to the expectation of an orator. Altogether, his conduct at Harrow indicated a clever, but not an extraordinary boy. He formed a few
38 THE LIFE OF
friendships there, in which his attachment appears to have been, in some instances, remarkable. The late Duke of Dorset was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster. He certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that splendid career he was destined to run as a poet.

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Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828)

An article was written in “The Westminster Review” (Medwin says by Mr. Hobhouse) to show that the Conversations were altogether unworthy of credit. There are doubtless many inaccuracies in the latter; but the spirit remains undoubted; and the author of the criticism was only vexed, that such was the fact. He assumes, that Lord Byron could not have made this or that statement to Captain Medwin, because the statement was erroneous or untrue; but an anonymous author has no right to be believed in preference to one who speaks in his own name: there is nothing to show that Mr. Hobhouse might not have been as mistaken about a date or an epigram as Mr. Medwin; and when we find him giving us his own version of a fact, and Mr. Medwin asserting that Lord Byron gave him another, the only impression left upon the mind of any body who knew his Lordship is, that the fault most probably lay in the loose corners of the noble Poet’s vivacity. Such is the impression made upon the author of an unpublished Letter to Mr. Hobhouse, which has been shown me in print; and he had a right to it. The reviewer, to my knowledge, is mistaken upon some points, as well as the person he reviews. The assumption, that nobody can know any thing about Lord Byron but two or three persons who were conversant with him for a certain space of time, and whom he spoke of with as little ceremony, and would hardly treat with more confidence than he did a hundred others, is ludicrous; and can only end, as the criticism has done, in doing no good either to him or them. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

“Dear Sir;—Amongst the agreeable things which you say of me in your life of Lord Byron, you conjecture that I ‘condemned’ Childe Harold previously to its publication. There is not the slightest foundation for this supposition—nor is it true as you state, ‘that I was the only person who had seen the poem in manuscript, as I was with Lord Byron whilst he was writing it.’ I had left Lord Byron before he had finished the two cantos, and, excepting a few fragments, I had never seen them until they were printed. My own persuasion is, that the story told in Dallas’s Recollections of some person, name unknown, having dissuaded Lord Byron from publishing Childe Harold, is a mere fabrication, for it is at complete variance with all Lord Byron himself told me on the subject. At any rate, I was not that person; if I had been, it is not very likely that the poem which I had endeavoured to stifle in its birth, should, in its complete, or, as Lord Byron says, in its ‘concluded state,’ be dedicated to me. I must, therefore, request you will take the earliest opportunity of relieving me from this imputation, which, so far as a man can be written down by any other author than himself, cannot fail to produce a very prejudicial effect, and to give me more uneasiness than I think it can be your wish to inflict on any man who has never given you provocation or excuse for injustice. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

I am glad to find my college stories administered relief to your nerves, when we were together in the Malta packet some one and twenty years ago; and I am not sorry that my wearing a red coat at Cagliari, and cutting my finger in the quarries of Pentelicus, should have furnished materials for your present volume; but to repay me for having supplied these timely episodes, as well as for your copious extracts from my travels in Albania, and also for inserting my note about Madame Guiccioli without my leave, you must positively cancel the passage respecting Childe Harold in page 161 of your little volume. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

I wonder that even common policy did not induce you to be more cautious in making statements which might be so easily disproved, and which have, indeed, been already incontrovertibly refuted. The very conversation, which you have judiciously selected from Medwin, as one of those parts of his trumpery book to the truth of which you can speak, I know to be a lie; for I never went the tour of the lake of Geneva with Lord Byron. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

You tell me that your wish has been to give only an outline of his intellectual character. I am at a loss to understand how your gossip about him and me, and the silly anecdotes you have copied from very discreditable authorities, can be said to be fairly comprised in such an outline. But your plan ought certainly to have compelled you to make yourself thoroughly acquainted with his poetry, and to quote him just as he wrote. Nevertheless, you have misrepresented him at least nine times in the ten stanzas of that poem which you call the last, and which was not the last, he ever wrote. Oh, for shame! stick to your acknowledged fictions—there you are safe—you may deal with Leddy Grippy and Laurie Todd as you please, but not with those who have really lived, or who are still alive. . . .

[John Wilson et. al.], “Noctes Ambrosianae XVII” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 16 No. 94 (November 1824)

And there was another funny thing o’ his, till a queer looking lad, one Mr. Skeffington, that wrote a tragedy, that was called “The Mysterious Bride,” the whilk thing made the Times newspaper for once witty—for it said no more o’t, than just “Last night a play called The Mysterious Bride, by the Honorable Mr. Skeffington, was performed at Drury Lane. The piece was damned.” Weel, ye see it happened that there was a masquerade some nights after, and Mr. Cam Hobhouse gaed till’t in the disguise o’ a Spanish nun, that had been ravished by the French army— . . .

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English politician and man of letters, with his friend Richard Steele he edited The Spectator (1711-12). He was the author of the tragedy Cato (1713).

Robert Burns (1759-1796) Scottish poet and song collector; author of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786).

Catherine Byron [née Gordon] (1764-1811) Byron's mother, who married Capt. John Byron 12 May 1785.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan.

William Byron, fifth baron Byron (1722-1798) Byron's misanthropic great-uncle, from whom he inherited Newstead Abbey.

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) English royalist poet; his most enduring work was his posthumously-published Essays (1668).

Joseph Drury (1751-1834) Byron's instructor at Harrow School, where he was headmaster from 1784 to 1805.

Charles James Fox (1749-1806) Whig statesman and the leader of the Whig opposition in Parliament after his falling-out with Edmund Burke.

William Glennie (1761-1828) Originally of Aberdeen; Byron studied at Dr. Glennie's Academy at Dulwich in 1799.

Frances Greville [née Macartney] (1727 c.-1789) Daughter of James Macartney (1692-1770); in 1744 she married Fulke Greville (1717-1806). Her “Ode to Indifference” was frequently reprinted.

Francis Hodgson (1781-1852) Provost of Eton College, translator of Juvenal (1807) and close friend of Byron. He wrote for the Monthly and Critical Reviews, and was author of (among other volumes of poetry) Childe Harold's Monitor; or Lines occasioned by the last Canto of Childe Harold (1818).

Frederick Howard, fifth earl of Carlisle (1748-1825) The Earl of Carlisle was appointed Lord Byron's guardian in 1799; they did not get along. He published a volume of Poems (1773) that included a translation from Dante.

Isabella Howard [née Byron] (1721-1795) The second wife of the fourth earl of Carlisle; she was the daughter of William Byron, fourth Lord Byron.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English man of letters, among many other works he edited A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote Lives of the Poets (1779-81).

John Milton (1608-1674) English poet and controversialist; author of Comus (1634), Lycidas (1638), Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) Irish poet and biographer, author of the Irish Melodies (1807-34), The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Lalla Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.

Mary Ann Musters [née Chaworth] (1785-1832) The grand-niece of the Chaworth who was killed by “Wicked Jack” Byron; she was the object of Byron's affections before and after she married John Musters in 1805.

George John Frederick Sackville, fourth duke of Dorset (1793-1815) Byron's acquaintance at Harrow; he was killed in a hunting accident in Ireland.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) The Bard of Avon.

William Vincent (1739-1815) Educated at Westminster and Trinity College, he was headmaster of Westminster School (1788); his A Defence of Public Education (1801) ran to three editions. He was Dean of Westminster (1803-15).

A Collection of Poems in Four Volumes. 4 vols (London: G. Pearch, 1770). A collection of fugitive poems published as a supplement to Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: a Romaunt. (London: John Murray, 1812-1818). A burlesque topographical poem in Spenserian stanzas; Cantos I-II were published in 1812, III in 1816, and IV in 1818.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “The Dream” in The Prisoner of Chillon, and other Poems. (London: J. Murray, 1816). Composed in July 1816.

Frances Greville [née Macartney] (1727 c.-1789) “Ode to Indifference” in The Poetical Calendar. 12 vols (London: J. Coote, 1763). Written in 1756 or 1757.

Francis Hodgson (1781-1852) Childe Harold's Monitor; or, Lines occasioned by the last Canto of Childe Harold, including Hints to other Contemporaries. (London: J. Porter, 1816). An argument for neoclassical standards in English poetry.

Frederick Howard, fifth earl of Carlisle (1748-1825) The Father’s Revenge. A Tragedy. (London: H. Hughs, 1783). Reprinted in 1800.

Isabella Howard [née Byron] (1721-1795) “The Fairy's Answer to Mrs. Greville” in A Collection of Poems in Four Volumes. 4 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1770). An answering poem to Frances Greville's “Ode to Indifference” published in the second edition of Pearch's supplement to Dodsley.

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Author: Galt, John, 1779-1839

Title: The Life of Lord Byron (London: Henry Colburn, 1830).

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