Among those lesser traits of his conduct through which an observer can trace a filial wish to uphold, and throw respect around, the station of his mother, may be mentioned his insisting, while a boy, on being called "George Byron Gordon"--giving thereby precedence to the maternal name,--and his continuing, to the last, to address her as "the Honourable Mrs. Byron,"--a mark of rank to which, he must have been aware, she had no claim whatever. Neither does it appear that, in his habitual manner towards her, there was any thing denoting a want of either affection or deference,--with the exception, perhaps, occasionally, of a somewhat greater degree of familiarity than comports with the ordinary notions of filial respect. Thus, the usual name he called her by, when they were on good-humoured terms together, was "Kitty Gordon;" and I have heard an eye-witness of the scene describe the look of arch, dramatic humour, with which, one day, at Southwell, when they were in the height of their theatrical rage, he threw open the door of the drawing-room, to admit his mother, saying, at the same time, "Enter the Honourable Kitty." The pride of birth was a feeling common alike to mother and son, and, at times, even became a point of rivalry between them, from their respective claims, English and Scotch, to high lineage. In a letter written by him from Italy, referring to some anecdote which his mother had told him, he says,--"My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the _old Gordons_,--_not_ the _Seyton Gordons_, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch,--told me the story, always reminding me how superior _her_ Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine, descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother's Gordons had done in her own person." If, to be able to depict powerfully the painful emotions, it is necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if, for the poet to be great, the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be owned, paid early this dear price of mastery. Few as were the ties by which his affections held, whether within or without the circle of relationship, he was now doomed, within a short space, to see the most of them swept away by death.[17] Besides the loss of his mother, he had to mourn over, in quick succession, the untimely fatalities that carried off, within a few weeks of each other, two or three of his most loved and valued friends. "In the short space of one month," he says, in a note on Childe Harold, "I have lost _her_ who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable."[18] Of these young Wingfield, whom we have seen high on the list of his Harrow favourites, died of a fever at Coimbra; and Matthews, the idol of his admiration at college, was drowned while bathing in the waters of the Cam.