I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,--while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems.

He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _Incondita_, and his parents sought to publish them.

No publisher could be found; but they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J.Fox, who feared too much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his eye on him nevertheless.
[Footnote 4: _To E.B.B._, Aug.

22, 1846.] Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with far more intimate power.

His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years before.