Dejection--College life-- Edward Noel Long--The Thinning Cam-
paign--Thomas Little and Strangford--Edleston--Byron's lack of
originality--His dissipations--Pugilism and fencing: Jackson and
Angelo--John Cam Hobhouse; William Bankes; Charles Skinner
Matthews; Scrope Berdmore Davies--Leaves Cambridge--Financial
affairs--The statue at Trinity College

HE went up to Cambridge in the October of 1805, feeling
miserable. To go there at all had been a great dis-
appointment. He had chosen Oxford, but there proved
to be no vacancy at Christ Church, the desired college--and
moreover, Dr. Drury strongly recommended Cambridge, which
had been his own University. Byron acquiesced, but the decision
was unfortunate. Oxford would have suited him better--being,
as Mr. E. M. Forster has amusingly said, "not a mere receptacle
for youth, like Cambridge". There, too, he might have read for
Honours, while at Cambridge the rule then prevailed that Honours
were only for mathematicians--and Byron as a mathematician
is unthinkable. But Elze maintains that neither would Oxford
have suited him: "his mind, with its universal tendency, could
never be attracted by either of the two centres"; and Moore,
more wordily, has much the same judgment to deliver. It is
probably a just one. He was impatient, wilful, avid of experience
--that is not the stuff of which scholars are made.

In his diary he recorded the mood of dejection in which he
entered University life. "I was so completely alone in this
new world that it half broke my spirits. . . . It was one of
the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life that I was no longer
a boy". Yet with him to Cambridge went an old and dear
Harrow intimate, that Edward Noel Long who was the Cleon
of Childish Recollections; they lived in close intercourse until
the summer of 1806 ¹ ; and in the Ravenna Journal of 1821 Byron

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