with flashing eyes, cutting at her with a baby’s whip, cried out, “Dinna speak of it.”  His mother herself, in her violent fits, when the boy ran round the room laughing at her attempts to catch him, used to say he was a little dog, as bad as his father, and to call him “a lame brat”—­an incident, which, notoriously suggested the opening scene of the Deformed Transformed.  In the height of his popularity he fancied that the beggars and street-sweepers in London were mocking him.  He satirized and discouraged dancing; he preferred riding and swimming to other exercises, because they concealed his weakness; and on his death-bed asked to be blistered in such a way that he might not be called on to expose it.  The Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington, and others, assure us that in society few would have observed the defect if he had not referred to it; but it was never far from the mind, and therefore never far from the mouth, of the least reticent of men.

In 1792 he was sent to a rudimentary day school of girls and boys, taught by a Mr. Bowers, where he seems to have learnt nothing save to repeat monosyllables by rote.  He next passed through the hands of a devout and clever clergyman, named Ross, under whom according to his own account he made astonishing progress, being initiated into the study of Roman history, and taking special delight in the battle of Regillus.  Long afterwards, when standing on the heights of Tusculum and looking down on the little round lake, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old instructor.  He next came under the charge of a tutor called Paterson, whom he describes as “a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man.  He was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar.  With him I began Latin, and continued till I went to the grammar school, where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my uncle.”

Of Byron’s early school days there is little further record.  We learn from scattered hints that he was backward in technical scholarship, and low in his class, in which he seems to have had no ambition to stand high; but that he eagerly took to history and romance, especially luxuriating in the Arabian Nights.  He was an indifferent penman, and always disliked mathematics; but was noted by masters and mates as of quick temper, eager for adventures, prone to sports, always more ready to give a blow than to take one, affectionate, though resentful.

When his cousin was killed at Corsica, in 1794, he became the next heir to the title.  In 1797, a friend, meaning to compliment the boy, said, “We shall have the pleasure some day of reading your speeches in the House of Commons,” he, with precocious consciousness, replied, “I hope not.  If you read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of Lords.”  Similarly, when, in the course of the following year, the fierce old man at Newstead died, and the young lord’s name was called at school with “Dominus” prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he was unable to answer, and burst into tears.