In the month of October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College,
Cambridge, and his feelings on the change from his beloved Ida to this
new scene of life are thus described by himself:--

"When I first went up to college, it was a new and a heavy-hearted
scene for me: firstly, I so much disliked leaving Harrow, that though
it was time (I being seventeen), it broke my very rest for the last
quarter with counting the days that remained. I always _hated_ Harrow
till the last year and a half, but then I liked it. Secondly, I wished
to go to Oxford, and not to Cambridge. Thirdly, I was so completely
alone in this new world, that it half broke my spirits. My companions
were not unsocial, but the contrary--lively, hospitable, of rank and
fortune, and gay far beyond my gaiety. I mingled with, and dined, and
supped, &c., with them; but, I know not how, it was one of the
deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no
longer a boy."

But though, for a time, he may have felt this sort of estrangement at
Cambridge, to remain long without attaching himself was not in his
nature; and the friendship which he now formed with a youth named
Eddleston, who was two years younger than himself, even exceeded in
warmth and romance all his schoolboy attachments. This boy, whose
musical talents first drew them together, was, at the commencement of
their acquaintance, one of the choir at Cambridge, though he
afterwards, it appears, entered into a mercantile line of life; and
this disparity in their stations was by no means without its charm for
Byron, as gratifying at once both his pride and good-nature, and
founding the tie between them on the mutually dependent relations of
protection on the one side, and gratitude and devotion on the
other;--the only relations,[47] according to Lord Bacon, in which the