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The young man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields and recline on the soft turf under a great spreading tree, reading aloud by turn from some good book. Such meetings always ended by Byron’s reading to his friends any chance rhymes he had written since they last met.

John Morley dates the birth of Byron’s poetic genius from his meeting with Miss Chaworth, while Taine names Southwell as the pivotal point. Probably both are right.

But this we know, that it was the Pigots who induced Byron to collect his rhymes and have them printed. This was done at the neighboring town of Newark, when Byron was nineteen years old. Possibly you have a few of these thin, poorly printed, crudely bound little books entitled “Juvenilia” around in the garret somewhere, and, if so, it might be well enough to take care of them. Quaritch says they are worth a hundred pounds apiece, although in the poet’s lifetime they were dear at sixpence.

Byron sent copies to all the leading literary men whom he knew, including Mackenzie, the man of feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron’s book, but we know that his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman–she inwardly congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and may not, but the logic holds when applied to fledgling authors. When it comes to praise he is quite willing to take your word for it.

Byron’s spirits arose to an ecstacy–he would be a poet.

About this time we find Hydra, as Byron pleasantly called his mother, rushing to the village apothecary and warning that worthy not to sell poison to the poet; and a few moments after her leaving, the astonished apothecary was visited by the poet, who begged that no poison should be sold to his mother. Each thought the other was going to turn Lucretia Borgia, or play the last act of Romeo and Juliet, at least.

There were wild bursts of rage on the mother’s part, stubborn mockery on the other, followed up once by a poker flung with almost fatal precision at the poet’s curly head.

Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as “Dear Madam,” and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash in his letters, as when he said, “Dear Mother–you know you are a vixen, but save me some champagne.” If Byron’s mother had been of the stuff of which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London, economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis at Cambridge. When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms, took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as “my corporeal pastor”), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy’s clothes, thus supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his “Quest of the Golden Girl.”