In a country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other man who thinks—granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he had written. He had gotten into the habit—he wrote whenever his pulse ran up above eighty—he wrote because he could not help it; and he read his productions to his friends for the same reason. Every one who writes longs to read his work to some sympathetic soul. A thought is not ours until we repeat it to another, and this crying need of expression marks every poetic soul. All art is born of feeling, high, intense, holy feeling, and the creative faculty is largely a matter of temperature. We feel, and not to impart our feelings is stagnation—death. People who do not feel deeply never have anything to impart, either to individuals or to the world. They have no message. The young man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields and recline on the soft turf under a great spreading tree, reading aloud by turn from some good book. Such meetings always ended by Byron's reading to his friends any chance rhymes he had written since they last met. John Morley dates the birth of Byron's poetic genius from his meeting with Miss Chaworth, while Taine names Southwell as the pivotal point. Probably both are right. But this we know, that it was the Pigots who induced Byron to collect his rhymes and have them printed. This was done at the neighboring town of Newark, when Byron was nineteen years old. Possibly you have a few of these thin, poorly printed, crudely bound little books entitled "Juvenilia" around in the garret somewhere, and, if so, it might be well enough to take care of them. Quaritch says they are worth a hundred pounds apiece, although in the poet's lifetime they were dear at sixpence. Byron sent copies to all the leading literary men whom he knew, including Mackenzie, the man of feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron's book, but we know that his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman—she inwardly congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and may not, but the logic holds when applied to fledgling authors. When it comes to praise he is quite willing to take your word for it. Byron's spirits arose to an ecstacy—he would be a poet.