These early poems are well characterized by the impression which they produced upon Sir Robert Dallas, a man of taste and talent, who, though a bigot and a prey to prejudices of all kinds, hastened, nevertheless, after reading them, to compliment the author in the following words:—"Your poems are not only beautiful as compositions, but they also denote an honorable and upright heart, and one prone to virtue."
This eulogium is well deserved, and I pity those who could read the "Hours of Idleness" without liking their youthful writer. If we had space enough, we fain would follow the young man from Cambridge to the mysterious Abbey of Newstead, where he loved to invite his friends and institute with them a monastery of which he proclaimed himself the Abbot—an amusement really most innocent in itself, and which bigotry and folly alone could consider reprehensible. With what pleasure he would show that in the monastery of Newstead its abbot lived the simplest and most austere existence,—"a life of study," as Washington Irving describes it, from what he heard Nanna Smyth say of it some years after Byron's death. How delighted we should be to follow him in his first travels in search of experience of life, and when his genius revealed itself in that light which was shortly to make him the idol of the public and the hatred of the envious. We could show him to have been always the same kind-hearted man, by whom severity and injustice were never had recourse to except against himself, and whose melancholy was too often the result of broken illusions and disappointments. His simple and noble character, having always before it an ideal perfection, perpetually by comparison, thought itself at fault; and the world, who could not comprehend the exquisite delicacy of his mind, took for granted the reputation he gave himself, and made him a martyr till heaven should give him time to become a saint.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] See chapter upon Generosity.
[21] Marston Moor, where the adherents of Charles I. were defeated. Prince Rupert, son of the Elector Palatine, and nephew to Charles I. He afterward commanded the fleet in the reign of Charles II.
[22] This alludes to the public speeches delivered at the school where the author was educated.
[23] Harrow.