Edward Noel Long, son of E. B. Long of Hampton Lodge, Surrey, the "Cleon" of "Childish Recollections" (
Poems
, vol. i. pp. 101, 102), entered Harrow in April, 1801. He went with Byron to Trinity College, Cambridge, and till the end of the summer of 1806 was his most intimate friend.
"We were," says Byron, in his Diary (Life, p. 31), "rival swimmers, fond of riding, reading, and of conviviality. Our evenings we passed in music (he was musical, and played on more than one instrument — flute and violoncello), in which I was audience; and I think that our chief beverage was soda-water. In the day we rode, bathed, and lounged, reading occasionally. I remember our buying, with vast alacrity, Moore's new quarto (in 1806), and reading it together in the evenings. ... His friendship, and a violent though pure passion — which held me at the same period — were the then romance of the most romantic period of my life."
Long was Byron's companion at Littlehampton in August, 1806. In 1807 he entered the Guards, served with distinction in the expedition to Copenhagen, and was drowned early in 1809, "on his passage to Lisbon with his regiment in the
St. George
transport, which was run foul of in the night by another transport" (
Life
, p. 31. See also Byron's lines "To Edward Noel Long, Esq.,"