He rejoiced in the pose, only outlined as yet, which was presently to make him the most interesting man (to women at all events) in Europe; but he also rejoiced in his youth. He flirted, as we have seen; he took part in amateur theatrical performances; he engaged energetically in most of the sports of the day, fencing with Angelo, boxing with Gentleman Jackson, swimming the Thames from Lambeth to the Tower; he accumulated debts with the fine air of a man heaping Pelion on Ossa; he flung down his defiant challenge to the literary bigwigs in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"; he drew his plans for the grand tour. The world, in short, was just then "so full of a number of things" that Mary Chaworth's importance in it can easily be, as it has often been, exaggerated. Presently we shall see Byron exaggerating it; and we shall also see how he came to do so--how the boy's occasional pose became the determining reality of the man's life. But before we come to that, we must turn back. CHAPTER V REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS" One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor: "My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are lessened." They were increased before they were lessened--unless the explanation be that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher: "_Entre nous_, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, _everything_ inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one." But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of the same year, when Byron is contemplating his "grand tour," he once more calls his solicitor into council: "You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds, and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out, with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me." A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs. Byron, who made a luminous suggestion: "I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He must marry a woman of _fortune_ this Spring; love matches is all nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."