Lord Byron says to Medwin,-- 'I lost my father when I was only six years of age.

My mother, when she was in a passion with me (and I gave her cause enough), used to say, "O you little dog! you are a Byron all over; you are as bad as your father!"'-- Ibid., p.37.
By all the accounts of his childhood and early youth, it is made apparent that ancestral causes had sent him into the world with a most perilous and exceptional sensitiveness of brain and nervous system, which it would have required the most judicious course of education to direct safely and happily.
Lord Byron often speaks as if he deemed himself subject to tendencies which might terminate in insanity.

The idea is so often mentioned and dwelt upon in his letters, journals, and conversations, that we cannot but ascribe it to some very peculiar experience, and not to mere affectation.
But, in the history of his early childhood and youth, we see no evidence of any original malformation of nature.

We see only evidence of one of those organisations, full of hope and full of peril, which adverse influences might easily drive to insanity, but wise physiological training and judicious moral culture might have guided to the most splendid results.

But of these he had neither.