may be granted that Horace
was a bad rider, and Virgil no tennis-player, yet, on the other hand,
Dante was, we know, a falconer as well as swordsman; Tasso, expert
both as swordsman and dancer; Alfieri, a great rider; Klopstock, a
skaiter; Cowper, famous, in his youth, at cricket and foot-ball; and
Lord Byron, pre-eminent in all sorts of exercises.]

[Footnote 31: "At eight or nine years of age the boy goes to school.
From that moment he becomes a stranger in his father's house. The
course of parental kindness is interrupted. The smiles of his mother,
those tender admonitions, and the solicitous care of both his parents,
are no longer before his eyes--year after year he feels himself more
detached from them, till at last he is so effectually weaned from the
connection, as to find himself happier anywhere than in their
company."--_Cowper, Letters._]

[Footnote 32: Even previously to any of these school friendships, he
had formed the same sort of romantic attachment to a boy of his own
age, the son of one of his tenants at Newstead; and there are two or
three of his most juvenile poems, in which he dwells no less upon the
inequality than the warmth of this friendship. Thus:--

"Let Folly smile, to view the names
Of thee and me in friendship twined;
Yet Virtue will have greater claims
To love, than rank with Vice combined.

"And though unequal is thy fate,
Since title deck'd my higher birth,
Yet envy not this gaudy state,
Thine is the pride of modest worth.

"Our souls at least congenial meet,
Nor can thy lot my rank disgrace;
Our intercourse is not less sweet
Since worth of rank supplies the place.

"November, 1802."]

[Footnote 33: There are, in other letters of the same writer, some
curious proofs of the passionate and jealous sensibility of Byron.
From one of them, for instance, we collect that he had taken offence
at his young friend's addressing him "my dear Byron," instead of "my
dearest;" and from another, that his jealousy had been awakened by
some expressions of regret which his correspondent had expressed at
the departure of Lord John Russell for Spain:--

"You tell me," says the young letter-writer, "that you never knew me
in such an agitation as I was when I wrote my last letter; and do you
not think I had reason to be so? I received a letter from you on
Saturday, telling me you were going abroad for six years in March, and
on Sunday Joh