he seems to have learnt nothing save to repeat
monosyllables by rote. He next passed through the hands of a devout and
clever clergyman, named Ross, under whom according to his own account he
made astonishing progress, being initiated into the study of Roman
history, and taking special delight in the battle of Regillus. Long
afterwards, when standing on the heights of Tusculum and looking down on
the little round lake, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old
instructor. He next came under the charge of a tutor called Paterson, whom
he describes as "a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man. He was the
son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar. With him I began Latin, and
continued till I went to the grammar school, where I threaded all the
classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my
uncle."

Of Byron's early school days there is little further record. We learn from
scattered hints that he was backward in technical scholarship, and low in
his class, in which he seems to have had no ambition to stand high; but
that he eagerly took to history and romance, especially luxuriating in the
_Arabian Nights_. He was an indifferent penman, and always disliked
mathematics; but was noted by masters and mates as of quick temper, eager
for adventures, prone to sports, always more ready to give a blow than to
take one, affectionate, though resentful.

When his cousin was killed at Corsica, in 1794, he became the next heir to
the title. In 1797, a friend, meaning to compliment the boy, said, "We
shall have the pleasure some day of reading your speeches in the House of
Commons," he, with precocious consciousness, replied, "I hope not. If you
read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of Lords." Similarly,
when, in the course of the following year, the fierce old man at Newstead
died, and the young lord's name was called at school with "Dominus"
prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he was unable to answer, and
burst into tears.

Belonging to this period is the somewhat shadowy record of a childish
passion for a distant cousin slightly his senior, Mary Duff, with whom he
claims to have fallen in love in his ninth year. We have a quaint picture
of the pair sitting on the grass together, the girl's younger sister
beside them playing with a doll. A German critic gravely remarks, "This
strange phenomenon places him beside Dante." Byron himself, dilating on
the strength of his attachmen