at nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced. His
reverend friend, Mr. Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected,
endeavoured to cheer and rouse him, by representing, in their
brightest colours, all the various advantages with which Providence
had endowed him,--and, among the greatest, that of "a mind which
placed him above the rest of mankind."--"Ah, my dear friend," said
Byron, mournfully,--"if this (laying his hand on his forehead) places
me above the rest of mankind, that (pointing to his foot) places me
far, far below them."

It sometimes, indeed, seemed as if his sensitiveness on this point led
him to fancy that he was the only person in the world afflicted with
such an infirmity. When that accomplished scholar and traveller, Mr.
D. Baillie, who was at the same school with him at Aberdeen, met him
afterwards at Cambridge, the young peer had then grown so fat that,
though accosted by him familiarly as his school-fellow, it was not
till he mentioned his name that Mr. Baillie could recognise him. "It
is odd enough, too, that you shouldn't know me," said Byron--"I
thought nature had set such a mark upon me, that I could never be
forgot."

But, while this defect was such a source of mortification to his
spirit, it was also, and in an equal degree, perhaps, a stimulus:--and
more especially in whatever depended upon personal prowess or
attractiveness, he seemed to feel himself piqued by this stigma, which
nature, as he thought, had set upon him, to distinguish himself above
those whom she had endowed with her more "fair proportion." In
pursuits of gallantry he was, I have no doubt, a good deal actuated by
this incentive; and the hope of astonishing the world, at some future
period, as a chieftain and hero, mingled little less with his young
dreams than the prospect of a poet's glory. "I will, some day or
other," he used to say, when a boy, "raise a troop,--the men of which
shall be dressed in black, and ride on black horses. They shall be
called 'Byron's Blacks,' and you will hear of their performing
prodigies of valour."

I have already adverted to the exceeding eagerness with which, while
at Harrow, he devoured all sorts of learning,--excepting only that
which, by the regimen of the school, was prescribed for him. The same
rapid and multifarious course of study he pursued during the holidays;
and, in order to deduct as little as possible from his hours of
exercise, he had given himself the habit, while