rusted him to
the care of a quack named Lavender, truss-maker to the general hospital at
Nottingham. His nurse who was in charge of him maltreated him, and the
quack tortured him to no purpose. At his own request he read Virgil and
Cicero with a tutor.

In August 1799 he was sent to a preparatory school at Dulwich. The master,
Dr Glennie, perceived that the boy liked reading for its own sake and gave
him the free run of his library. He read a set of the _British Poets_ from
beginning to end more than once. This, too, was an initiation and a
preparation. He remained at Dulwich till April 1801, when, on his mother's
intervention, he was sent to Harrow. His school days, 1801-1805, were
fruitful in two respects. He learned enough Latin and Greek to make him a
classic, if not a classical scholar, and he made friends with his equals
and superiors. He learned something of his own worth and of the worth of
others. "My school-friendships," he says, "were with me passions." Two of
his closest friends died young, and from Lord Clare, whom he loved best of
all, he was separated by chance and circumstance. He was an odd mixture,
now lying dreaming on his favourite tombstone in the churchyard, now the
ring-leader in whatever mischief was afoot. He was a "record" swimmer, and,
in spite of his lameness, enough of a cricketer to play for his school at
Lord's, and yet he found time to read and master standard works of history
and biography, and to acquire more general knowledge than boys and masters
put together.

In the midsummer of 1803, when he was in his sixteenth year, he fell in
love, once for all, with his distant relative, Mary Anne Chaworth, a "minor
heiress" of the hall and park of Annesley which marches with Newstead. Two
years his senior, she was already engaged to a neighbouring squire. There
were meetings half-way between Newstead and Annesley, of which she thought
little and he only too much. What was sport to the girl was death to the
boy, and when at length he realized the "hopelessness of his attachment,"
he was "thrown out," as he said, "alone, on a wide, wide sea." She is the
subject of at least five of his early poems, including the pathetic
stanzas, "Hills of Annesley," and there are allusions to his love story in
_Childe Harold_ (c. i _s.v._), and in "The Dream" (1816).

Byron went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1805.
Cambridge did him no good. "The place is the devil," he said, and accor