This boy, whose
musical talents first drew them together, was, at the commencement of
their acquaintance, one of the choir at Cambridge, though he
afterwards, it appears, entered into a mercantile line of life; and
this disparity in their stations was by no means without its charm for
Byron, as gratifying at once both his pride and good-nature, and
founding the tie between them on the mutually dependent relations of
protection on the one side, and gratitude and devotion on the
other;--the only relations,[47] according to Lord Bacon, in which the
little friendship that still remains in the world is to be found. It
was upon a gift presented to him by Eddleston, that he wrote those
verses entitled "The Cornelian," which were printed in his first,
unpublished volume, and of which the following is a stanza:--
"Some, who can sneer at friendship's ties,
Have for my weakness oft reproved me;
Yet still the simple gift I prize,
For I am sure the giver loved me."
Another friendship, of a less unequal kind, which had been begun at
Harrow, and which he continued to cultivate during his first year at
Cambridge, is thus interestingly dwelt upon in one of his journals:--
"How strange are my thoughts!--The reading of the song of Milton,
Sabrina fair,' has brought back upon me--I know not how or why--the
happiest, perhaps, days of my life (always excepting, here and there,
a Harrow holiday in the two latter summers of my stay there) when
living at Cambridge with Edward Noel Long, afterwards of the
Guards,--who, after having served honourably in the expedition to
Copenhagen (of which two or three thousand scoundrels yet survive in
plight and pay), was drowned early in 1809, on his passage to Lisbon
with his regiment in the St.
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