His allowance was £500 a year; and he kept a servant and a horse. His general proceedings, except when he was writing verses were pretty similar to those of the average young nobleman who attends a University, not to instruct but to amuse himself. He rode, and fenced, and boxed, and swam, and dived; he gambled and backed horses; he was alternately guest and host at rather uproarious wine-parties, and was spoken of as a young man "of very tumultuous passions." The statement has been made--he has made it himself and his biographers have repeated it--that he lived quietly at first, and only latterly got into a dissipated set; but as we find him, in his second term, entreating his sister to back a bill for £800, the statement probably needs to be modified in order to square with the facts. Apparently Augusta did not comply with his request; but the proofs that he lived beyond his means are ample. Mrs. Byron was as loud in her wail on the subject as the widows of Asher. She complains--this also in the second term--of bills "coming in thick upon me to double the amount I expected"; and she protests, in Byron's first Easter vacation, against his wanton extravagance in subscribing thirty guineas to Pitt's statue; while, in the course of the next Easter vacation we find her consulting the family solicitor as to the propriety of borrowing £1000 to get her son out of the hands of the Jews, and declaring that, during the whole of his Cambridge career he has done "nothing but drink, gamble, and spend money." Very similar is the testimony of his own and his sister's letters. "I was much surprised," Augusta writes, in the second term, to the solicitor, "to see my brother a week ago at the Play, as I think he ought to be employing his time more profitably at Cambridge." Byron himself, writing to his intimates, confesses to several departures from sobriety. The first was in celebration of the Eton and Harrow match, which was followed by a convivial scene, foreshadowing those at the Empire on boat-race night, at some place of public entertainment. "How I got home after the play," Byron says, "God knows. I hardly recollect, as my brain was so much confused by the heat, the row, and the wine I drank, that I could not remember in the morning how I found my way to bed." Later, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Bridget Pigot of Southwell, he speaks of his life as "one continual routine of dissipation," talks of "a bottle of claret in my head," and concludes with the specific admission: "Sorry to say been drunk every day, and not quite sober yet."