Possibly he exaggerates a little; but those who know the Universities best will be least likely to suspect him of exaggerating very much. There is always a set which lives in that style at any college frequented by young men of ample means. Their ways, _mutatis mutandis_, are faithfully described in the pages of "Verdant Green." Byron's career, once more _mutatis mutandis_, was not unlike the career of Charles Larkyns and Little Mr. Bouncer in Cuthbert Bede's picture of life at the sister University. He had, at any rate, one foot in such a set as that, though he was in a better set as well, and formed serious friendships with such men as Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, Charles Skinner Matthews, afterwards Fellow of Downing, Scrope Davies, afterwards Fellow of King's, and Francis Hodgson, ultimately Provost of Eton. It is not quite clear whether he was, or was not, one of the rowdy spirits who "ragged" Lort Mansell, the Master of Trinity.[4] He certainly annoyed the dons by keeping a bear as a pet, and asserting that he intended the animal to "sit for a fellowship." But the most characteristic picture, after all, is that which he draws (selecting his solicitor, of all persons in the world, for his confidant) of his mode of reducing his flesh. "I wear _seven_ waistcoats, and a great Coat, run and play cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the bath daily, eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher's Meat in 24 hours.... By these means my ribs display Skin of no great Thickness, and my clothes have been taken in nearly _half a yard_." That is the closing passage of a letter which begins with the confession that "_Wine_ and _women_ have _dished_ your _humble servant_." The two statements, taken in conjunction, furnish two-thirds of the picture. The remaining third of it may be deduced and constructed from the verses which Byron had then written or was then writing. It might be tempting to see in the period of dissipation a disappointed lover's desperate attempt to escape from an ineffaceable recollection; and the view might be supported by Byron's own subsequent declaration that "a violent, though _pure_, love and passion," was "the then romance of the most romantic period of my life." Undergraduate excesses, however, rarely require such recondite explanations; and Byron's reminiscences had, as we shall see, been coloured by intervening events. All the contemporary evidence that one can gather goes to show that they were inexact; that, though he had been hard hit by Mary Chaworth's disdainful reception of his suit, he did not mope, but, holding up his head, was in a fair way to live his trouble down; and that his theory of himself, put forward in the well-known lines in "Childe Harold": "_And I must from this land begone Because I cannot love but one_" is an after thought entirely inconsistent with his practices as a Cambridge undergraduate.