Some years
after, I made an attempt at an elegy--a very dull one.[25]
"I do not recollect scarcely any thing equal to the _transparent_
beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her temper, during the
short period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out
of a rainbow--all beauty and peace.
"My passion had its usual effects upon me--I could not sleep--I could
not eat--I could not rest: and although I had reason to know that she
loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which
must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve
hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser
now."
He had been nearly two years under the tuition of Dr. Glennie, when
his mother, discontented at the slowness of his progress--though
being, herself, as we have seen, the principal cause of it--entreated
so urgently of Lord Carlisle to have him removed to a public school,
that her wish was at length acceded to; and "accordingly," says Dr.
Glennie, "to Harrow he went, as little prepared as it is natural to
suppose from two years of elementary instruction, thwarted by every
art that could estrange the mind of youth from preceptor, from school,
and from all serious study."
This gentleman saw but little of Lord Byron after he left his care;
but, from the manner in which both he and Mrs. Glennie spoke of their
early charge, it was evident that his subsequent career had been
watched by them with interest; that they had seen even his errors
through the softening medium of their first feeling towards him, and
had never, in his most irregular aberrations, lost the traces of those
fine qualities which they had loved and admired in him when a child.
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