ns have done, the
contrary system, consent to pass for a dunce or idler in the schools,
in order to afford himself even a chance of attaining eminence in the
world.

From the memorandums scribbled by the young poet in his school-books,
we might almost fancy that, even at so early an age, he had a sort of
vague presentiment that everything relating to him would one day be an
object of curiosity and interest. The date of his entrance at
Harrow,[44] the names of the boys who were, at that time, monitors,
the list of his fellow pupils under Doctor Drury,[45]--all are noted
down with a fond minuteness, as if to form points of retrospect in his
after-life; and that he sometimes referred to them with this feeling
will appear from one touching instance. On the first leaf of his
"Scriptores Graeci," we find, in his schoolboy hand, the following
memorial:--"George Gordon Byron, Wednesday, June 26th, A. D. 1805, 3
quarters of an hour past 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 3d
school,--Calvert, monitor; Tom Wildman on my left hand and Long on my
right. Harrow on the Hill." On the same leaf, written five years
after, appears this comment:--

"Eheu fugaces, Posthume! Posthume!
Labuntur anni."

"B. January 9th, 1809.--Of the four persons whose names are here
mentioned, one is dead, another in a distant climate, _all_ separated,
and not five years have elapsed since they sat together in school, and
none are yet twenty-one years of age."

The vacation of 1804[46] he passed with his mother at Southwell, to
which place she had removed from Nottingham, in the summer of this
year, having taken the house on the Green called Burgage Manor. There
is a Southwell play-bill extant, dated August 8th, 1804, in which the
play is announced as bespoke "by Mrs. and Lord Byron." The gentleman,
from whom the house where they resided was rented, possesses a library
of some extent, which the young poet, he says, ransacked with much
eagerness on his first coming to Southwell; and one of the books that
most particularly engaged and interested him was, as may be easily
believed, the life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

In the month of October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College,
Cambridge, and his feelings on the change from his beloved Ida to this
new scene of life are thus described by himself:--

"When I first went up to college, it was a new and a heavy-hearted
scene for me: firstly, I so much disliked leaving Harrow, that though
it was ti