umbered among the happiest of my brief
chronicle of enjoyment. I am now getting into years, that is to say, I
was twenty a month ago, and another year will send me into the world, to
run my career of folly with the rest. I was then just fourteen--you were
almost the first of my Harrow friends, certainly the first in my esteem,
if not in date; but an absence from Harrow for some time shortly after,
and new connections on your side, and the difference in our conduct,
from that turbulent and riotous disposition of mine which impelled me
into every species of mischief, all these circumstances combined to
destroy our intimacy, which affection urged me to continue, and Memory
compels me to regret. But there is not a circumstance attending that
period, hardly a sentence we exchanged, which is not impressed on my
mind at this moment.

"There is another circumstance you do not know:--the first lines I ever
attempted at Harrow were addressed to you; but as on our return from the
holidays we were strangers, the lines were destroyed.

"I have dwelt longer on this theme than I intended, and I shall now
conclude with what I ought to have begun. Will you sometimes write to
me? I do not ask it often, and, if we meet, let us be what we should be,
and what we were."

Young Harness, gifted with a calm and mild temperament, was being
educated for the Church. Besides being always at Harrow, and four years
younger than Byron, the life which the latter led at Newstead and at
Cambridge did not suit one destined to a career which requires greater
severity of demeanor. But the two friends corresponded, and Lord Byron
sent him one of his early copies of "Hours of Idleness." In the letter
which the Rev. W. Harness wrote to Moore, after Byron's death, to tell
him the nature of the quarrel which he and Byron had had together, and
their subsequent reconciliation, he ends by saying:--

"Our conversation was renewed and continued from that time till his
going abroad. Whatever faults Lord Byron may have exhibited toward
others, to myself he was always uniformly affectionate.... I can not
call to mind a single instance of caprice or unkindness in the whole
course of our intimacy to allege against him."

The fault to which Harness alludes, and which he acknowledges, was one
of the kind to which Byron was most sensitive, namely, coldness. Having
lost some of his early and best friends, Edward Long, and all the others
being spread far and near, abroad