conduct at Harrow indicated a clever, but not an extraordinary boy.
He formed a few friendships there, in which his attachment appears to
have been, in some instances, remarkable. The late Duke of Dorset
was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster. He
certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that
splendid career he was destined to run as a poet.



CHAPTER V



Character at Harrow--Poetical Predilections--Byron at Cambridge--His
"Hours of Idleness"

In reconsidering the four years which Byron spent at Harrow, while we
can clearly trace the development of the sensibilities of his
character, and an increased tension of his susceptibility, by which
impressions became more acute and delicate, it seems impossible not
to perceive by the records which he has himself left of his feelings,
that something morbid was induced upon them. Had he not afterwards
so magnificently distinguished himself as a poet, it is not probable
that he would have been recollected by his schoolfellows as having
been in any respect different from the common herd. His activity and
spirit, in their controversies and quarrels, were but the
outbreakings of that temperament which the discipline of riper years,
and the natural awe of the world, afterward reduced into his
hereditary cast of character, in which so much of sullenness and
misanthropy was exhibited. I cannot, however, think that there was