While yet a school-boy, he happened to be in a bookseller's
shop at Southwell, when a poor woman came in to purchase a Bible. The
price, she was told by the shopman, was eight shillings. "Ah, dear
sir," she exclaimed, "I cannot pay such a price; I did not think it
would cost half the money." The woman was then, with a look of
disappointment, going away,--when young Byron called her back, and
made her a present of the Bible.
In his attention to his person and dress, to the becoming arrangement
of his hair, and to whatever might best show off the beauty with which
nature had gifted him, he manifested, even thus early, his anxiety to
make himself pleasing to that sex who were, from first to last, the
ruling stars of his destiny. The fear of becoming, what he was
naturally inclined to be, enormously fat, had induced him, from his
first entrance at Cambridge, to adopt, for the purpose of reducing
himself, a system of violent exercise and abstinence, together with
the frequent use of warm baths. But the embittering circumstance of
his life,--that, which haunted him like a curse, amidst the buoyancy
of youth, and the anticipations of fame and pleasure, was, strange to
say, the trifling deformity of his foot. By that one slight blemish
(as in his moments of melancholy he persuaded himself) all the
blessings that nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced. His
reverend friend, Mr. Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected,
endeavoured to cheer and rouse him, by representing, in their
brightest colours, all the various advantages with which Providence
had endowed him,--and, among the greatest, that of "a mind which
placed him above the rest of mankind.
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