In 1784, the father of the poet, Captain John Byron, nephew of the fifth Lord Byron, with the sole object of relieving his debts, married, as his second wife, Miss Catherine Gordon, a wealthy lady of illustrious Scottish ancestry. Her fortune was swallowed up, and she was reduced to £150 a year, before she gave birth, on January 22, 1788, in Holles Street, London, to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron. The boy was somewhat deformed, one of his feet being twisted. In 1790, we find the unhappy parents living in separate lodgings in Aberdeen; and this estrangement was followed by complete separation, the worthless Captain Byron proceeding to France, where he died in the following year. The mother, a woman of the most passionate extremes, sent the boy to day school and grammar school. His schoolmates remember him as lively, warm-hearted, and more ready to give a blow than to take one. To summer excursions with his mother in the Highlands the poet traces his love of scenery and especially of mountainous countries; and he refers many years after, still with keen feeling, to a little girl, Mary Duff, for whom, in his eighth year, he cherished a consuming attachment. So early were his sensibilities dominant. On the death, in 1794, of the grandson of the old lord, little George stood in immediate succession to the peerage; in May, 1798, the fifth Lord Byron died at Newstead Abbey, and the boy's name was called in school with the title "Dominus." The Earl of Carlisle was appointed his guardian in chancery, and in the same summer, Lord Byron, in his eleventh year, took possession, with his mother, of the seat of his ancestors. The next year Mrs. Byron was placed on the Civil List for a pension of £300 a year. Removing to London, she placed George at school with Dr. Glennie at Dulwich, but thwarted the progress of his education with her fondness and self-will, until Lord Carlisle gave up all hope of ruling her. It was at this period that a boyish love for Margaret Parker, his cousin, who died shortly after, led Byron into the practice of verse. From 1801 to 1805, from thirteen years of age to seventeen, George was at Harrow, where he sat beside Peel, the future statesman. This period of ardent friendship with his fellows includes also the romantic affection, in 1803, for Miss Chaworth, heiress of Annesley, near Newstead, who looked on her admirer as the mere schoolboy that he was. Leaving Harrow with the reputation of an idler who would never learn, Byron was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1805. His vacations were spent with his mother at Southwell, and her explosions of temper, in which she would throw poker and tongs, alienated him increasingly. In vacation and in term alike he read with extraordinary avidity and variety, wrote a great deal of verse, and in November, 1806, printed a small volume of poems for private circulation.