Byron | Page 7

scattered hints that he was backward in technical scholarship, and
low in his class, in which he seems to have had no ambition to stand

high; but that he eagerly took to history and romance, especially
luxuriating in the Arabian Nights. He was an indifferent penman, and
always disliked mathematics; but was noted by masters and mates as of
quick temper, eager for adventures, prone to sports, always more ready
to give a blow than to take one, affectionate, though resentful.
When his cousin was killed at Corsica, in 1794, he became the next
heir to the title. In 1797, a friend, meaning to compliment the boy, said,
"We shall have the pleasure some day of reading your speeches in the
House of Commons," he, with precocious consciousness, replied, "I
hope not. If you read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of
Lords." Similarly, when, in the course of the following year, the fierce
old man at Newstead died, and the young lord's name was called at
school with "Dominus" prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he
was unable to answer, and burst into tears.
Belonging to this period is the somewhat shadowy record of a childish
passion for a distant cousin slightly his senior, Mary Duff, with whom
he claims to have fallen in love in his ninth year. We have a quaint
picture of the pair sitting on the grass together, the girl's younger sister
beside them playing with a doll. A German critic gravely remarks,
"This strange phenomenon places him beside Dante." Byron himself,
dilating on the strength of his attachment, tells us that he used to coax a
maid to write letters for him, and that when he was sixteen, on being
informed, by his mother, of Mary's marriage, he nearly fell into
convulsions. But in the history of the calf-loves of poets it is difficult to
distinguish between the imaginative afterthought and the reality. This
equally applies to other recollections of later years. Moore
remarks--"that the charm of scenery, which derives its chief power
from fancy and association, should be felt at an age when fancy is yet
hardly awake and associations are but few, can with difficulty he
conceived." But between the ages of eight and ten, an appreciation of
external beauty is sufficiently common. No one doubts the accuracy of
Wordsworth's account, in the Prelude of his early half-sensuous delight
in mountain glory. It is impossible to define the influence of Nature,
either on nations or individuals, or to say beforehand what selection
from his varied surroundings a poet will for artistic purposes elect to

make. Shakespeare rests in meadows and glades, and leaves to Milton
"Teneriffe and Atlas." Burns, who lived for a considerable part of his
life in daily view of the hills of Arran, never alludes to them. But, in
this respect like Shelley, Byron was inspired by a passion for the
high-places of the earth. Their shadow is on half his verse. "The loftiest
peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow" perpetually remind him of one
of his constantly recurring refrains,--
He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of
those below.
In the course of 1790, after an attack of scarlet fever at Aberdeen he
was taken by his mother to Ballater, and on his recovery spent much of
his time in rambling about the country. "From this period," he says, "I
date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect,
years afterwards, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in
miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to
Cheltenham I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a
sensation which I cannot describe." Elsewhere, in The Island he returns,
amid allusions to the Alps and Apennines, to the friends of his youth:--
The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Lach-na-gair with Ida
look'd o'er Troy, Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount, And
Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount.
The poet, owing to his physical defect, was not a great climber, and we
are informed, on the authority of his nurse, that he never even scaled
the easily attainable summit of the "steep frowning" hill of which he
has made such effective use. But the impression of it from a distance
was none the less genuine. In the midst of a generous address, in Don
Juan, to Jeffrey, he again refers to the same associations with the
country of his early training:--
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred A whole one; and my heart flies
to my head As "Auld Lang Syne" brings Scotland, one and all-- Scotch
plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams, The Dee, the