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.
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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
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Carlisle, recluse in pride and rags. |
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.
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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. |
“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
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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
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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
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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
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