of early instruction, is a most
dangerous doctrine indeed; since it strikes at the root, not only of
all pure taste, but of all praiseworthy industry. It would, if acted
upon (as Harold by the mention of the Continental practice of using
inferior writers in the business of tuition would seem to recommend),
destroy the great source of the intellectual vigour of our
countrymen."

This is, undoubtedly, assuming too much; for those who have objected
to the years "wasted" in teaching the dead languages, do not admit
that the labour of acquiring them either improves the taste or adds
to the vigour of the understanding; and, therefore, before the
soundness of the opinion of Milton, of Cowley, of Addison, and of
many other great men can be rejected, it falls on those who are of
Dean Vincent's opinion, and that of Childe Harold's Monitor, to prove
that the study of the learned languages is of so much primary
importance as they claim for it.

But it appears that Byron's mind, during the early period of his
residence at Harrow, was occupied with another object than his
studies, and which may partly account for his inattention to them.
He fell in love with Mary Chaworth. "She was," he is represented to
have said, "several years older than myself, but at my age boys like
something older than themselves, as they do younger later in life.
Our estates adjoined, but owing to the unhappy circumstances of the
feud (the affair of the fatal duel), our families, as is generally
the case with neighbours, who happen to be near relations, were never
on terms of more than common civility, scarcely those. She was the
beau ideal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of the
beautiful! and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature
of women from the perfection my imagination created in her. I say
created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but
angelic. I returned to Harrow, after my trip to Cheltenham, more
deeply enamoured than ever, and passed the next holidays at Newstead.
I now began to fancy myself a man, and to make love in earnest. Our
meetings were stolen ones, and my letters passed through the medium
of a confidant. A gate leading from Mr Chaworth's grounds to those
of my mother, was the place of our interviews, but the ardour was all
on my side; I was serious, she was volatile. She liked me as a
younger brother, and treated and laughed at me as a boy; she,
however, gave me her picture, and that w