in any discreditable way. So
long as his friend of Christ's Hospital, Middleton, remained in
Cambridge, Coleridge pursued his studies with a great deal of
regularity and in his first year won the prize for a Greek ode. But
after awhile his industry slackened, and a kind of dreamy
idleness--implying no languor of the soul or common reluctance to
mental work, but rather, it would seem, a disinclination to work in
the usual grooves, and do what was expected of him--took possession of
the young scholar. "He was very studious, but his reading was
desultory and capricious," writes a fellow-student. "He was ready at
any time to shed his mind in conversation, and for the sake of this
his rooms were a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends.
What evenings I have spent in these rooms! What little suppers, or
_sizings_, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus and
Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside with a pile of lexicons and the
like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a pamphlet
issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book
before us; Coleridge had read it in the morning and in the evening he
would repeat whole pages _verbatim_."

--Adapted from _Blackwood's Magazine_.

XIV

BYRON AS SWIMMER AND FEASTER

In 1858 Trelawney published his _Recollections of the Last Days of
Shelley and Byron_. In many ways this is a remarkable book. It is the
one source of information as to the last days of Shelley; concerning
Byron's, others have furnished material. Trelawney is suspected of
mingling some fiction with his truth, but the general tendency
nowadays is to place confidence in these _Recollections_. He may not
always give us a literal report, but he has likely reproduced the
spirit. He is much more sympathetic in his treatment of Shelley than
he is in his account of Byron. Trelawney himself was a remarkable
character. He lived far into the time of a new generation, dying in
his eighty-ninth year in 1881. Mary Shelley, in a letter to Maria
Gisborne, February, 1822, describes him as "A kind of half-Arab
Englishman.... He is clever: for his moral qualities I am yet in the
dark. He is a strange web which I am endeavoring to unravel."

In the _Recollections_ occurs this interesting account of Byron:

Byron has been accused of drinking deeply. Our universities,
certainly, did turn out more famous drinkers than scholars. In the
good old times, to dri