1830.^] Moore's Notices of Lord Byron. 185 



tionless, until he was spoiled as much as any of them for any thing but 

 being a Lord ! and Heaven only knows how small a portion of human 

 use, good, or dignity, is concentred in the name. But it was otherwise 

 decreed he was cast out into the desert, to wander, like the demoniac, 

 among the tombs ; but there to harden himself against the infirmities of 

 nature, and defy the accidents of fortune; until, like the daemoniac, a 

 mightier spirit stirred within him, and he raved against man in accents 

 more than of man. 



Byron remained in Aberdeen from five till ten years old, and was then 

 brought by his mother to London, for the double purpose of trying some 

 quackery with his foot, which her folly contrived to make a source of 

 perpetual torment to the poor boy, and of beginning his education. 

 Various doctors, JEsculapian and Priscianist, took his body and mind 

 into their successive charge, and with equally ill fortune ; his mother's 

 temper, of which the biographer has by no means deprived the public of 

 sufficient details, defeating the cares of guardians, masters, and physi- 

 cians, alike. 



At length he was sent to Harrow, where he boasts of having hated the 

 master, Dr. Butler, and made eternal friends of some of the pupils; 

 until he left the school with no more learning than he took into it, ex- 

 cept the learning of cricket, boxing, swimming, gaming, and the other 

 accomplishments of public schools. 



Byron's early judgment was too quick not to see the absurdity of 

 that system by which ten years are devoted to the worst education at 

 the highest price, He read much, but read after his own manner ; and, 

 accordingly, brought away with him more real knowledge than perhaps 

 was to be found in the whole school besides, masters and all. But he 

 brought away " small Latin and less Greek," and appears to have been 

 wise enough never, in after life, to have felt the slightest wish to bur- 

 then his memory with either. 



Byron's palpable feeling was that the whole system was a dull bur- 

 lesque. The tedious inutility of verse-making, in dead languages, by 

 men who will never be able to write a verse in any living one, is a fine 

 subject of ridicule. And the successful expedition with which every 

 English gentleman, unless he be doubly marked for boobyism, forgets 

 every syllable of his ten years' toils, is scarcely more demonstrative of 

 the intrinsic errors of the plan, than the recollection of those scenes and 

 excesses into which a great school initiates the early mind : scenes arid 

 excesses to which we unhesitatingly trace the broad and spreading de- 

 generacy of the national heart and the national understanding. 



In this we allude to no one great school more than another. 

 Their present masters, we take it for granted, make as good non- 

 sense verses as any of those who have made nonsense verses before 

 them. The old system is the sin. The national evil consists in 

 giving ten years to what might be acquired in two ; in the miserable 

 abandonment of the young to their own extravagance, their own pas- 

 sions, and their own resentments; in the encouragment of tyranny by 

 fagging ; and in the general growth of selfishness, waste, and arrogance, 

 by the allowed habits of those establishments, one and all. 



The death of his grand uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, in 1795, (this 

 lord's grandson having died the year before) gave him the title. The 

 old lord was reputed, in his own neighbourhood, to be a furious mad- 

 man. He always carried loaded pistols, and the country was filled wijtJi 



M.M. New Series. VOL. IX. No. 50. 2 B 



