"The hero of
my Cornelian
" was a Cambridge chorister named Edleston, whose life, as Harness has recorded in a MS. note, Byron saved from drowning. This began their acquaintance. (See Byron's lines on "The Cornelian,"
Poems
, vol. i. 66-67.) Edleston died of consumption in May, 1811. Byron, writing to Mrs. Pigot, gives the following account of his death:—
"Cambridge, Oct. 28, 1811.
Dear Madam, — I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a cornelian, which some years ago I consigned to Miss Pigot, indeed gave to her, and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is dead, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss Pigot should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8, St. James's Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption, at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August.
"Believe me, dear Madam, yours very sincerely,
"Byron.
"P.S. — I go to London to-morrow."
The cornelian heart was, of course, returned, and Lord Byron, at the same time, reminded that he had left it with Miss Pigot as a deposit,
not
a gift (Moore).