Good Lort,
deliver us!"
The whole letter, written in the poet's mature and natural style, gives a
vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days:
how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal
biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on
the road from London to Newstead. Of the others gathered round the same
centre, Scrope Davies enlisted the largest share of Byron's affections. To
him he wrote after the catastrophe:--"Come to me, Scrope; I am almost
desolate--left alone in the world. I had but you, and H., and M., and let
me enjoy the survivors while I can." Later he says, "Matthews, Davies,
Hobhouse, and myself formed a coterie of our own. Davies has always beaten
us all in the war of words, and by colloquial powers at once delighted and
kept us in order; even M. yielded to the dashing vivacity of S.D." The
last is everywhere commended for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee:
he was never afraid to speak the truth. Once when the poet in one of his
fits of petulance exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible impression,
"I shall go mad!" Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, "It is much more
like silliness than madness!" He was the only man who ever laid Byron
under any serious pecuniary obligation, having lent him 4800_l_.
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