LETTERS AND JOURNALS OF LORD BYRON, WITH NOTICES OF HIS LIFE, from the
Period of his Return from the Continent, July, 1811, to January, 1814.
Having landed the young pilgrim once more in England, it may be worthwhile, before we accompany him into the scenes that awaited him at home,to consider how far the general character of his mind and dispositionmay have been affected by the course of travel and adventure, in whichhe had been, for the last two years, engaged. A life less savouring ofpoetry and romance than that which he had pursued previously to hisdeparture on his travels, it would be difficult to imagine. In hischildhood, it is true, he had been a dweller and wanderer among sceneswell calculated, according to the ordinary notion, to implant the firstrudiments of poetic feeling. But, though the poet may afterwards feed onthe recollection of such scenes, it is more than questionable, as hasbeen already observed, whether he ever has been formed by them. If achildhood, indeed, passed among mountainous scenery were so favourableto the awakening of the imaginative power, both the Welsh, amongourselves,Pg 2 and the Swiss, abroad, ought to rank much higher on thescale of poetic excellence than they do at present. But, even allowingthe picturesqueness of his early haunts to have had some share in givinga direction to the fancy of Byron, the actual operation of thisinfluence, whatever it may have been, ceased with his childhood; and thelife which he led afterwards during his school-days at Harrow, was,—asnaturally the life of so idle and daring a schoolboy must be,—the veryreverse of poetical. For a soldier or an adventurer, the course oftraining through which he then passed would have been perfect;—hisathletic sports, his battles, his love of dangerous enterprise, gaveevery promise of a spirit fit for the most stormy career. But to themeditative pursuits of poesy, these dispositions seemed, of all others,the least friendly; and, however they might promise to render him, atsome future time, a subject for bards, gave, assuredly, but little hopeof his shining first among bards himself.
The habits of his life at the university were even still lessintellectual and literary. While a schoolboy, he had read abundantly andeagerly, though desultorily; but even this discipline of his mind,irregular and undirected as it was, he had, in a great measure, givenup, after leaving Harrow; and among the pursuits that occupied hisacademic hours, those of playing at hazard, sparring, and keeping a bearand bull-dogs, were, if not the most favourite, at least, perhaps, themost innocent. His time in London passed equally unmarked either bymental cultivation or refined amusement. HavingPg 3 no resources in privatesociety, from his total want of friends and connections, he was left tolive loosely about town among the loungers in coffee-houses; and tothose who remember what his two favourite haunts, Limmer's andStevens's, were at that period, it is needless to say that, whateverelse may have been the merits of these establishments, they wereanything but fit schools for the formation of poetic character.
But however incompatible such a life must have been with those habits ofcontemplation, by which,