ongs.

When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered,
"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of
twenty-four, when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through
Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the
first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of
his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's
surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.
_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry, the romance of travel, the
picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is
instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility
to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame
_Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe {250} Harold_ was
followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of
Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_, _Parasina_, and
_Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years 1813-1816. These poems
at once took the place of Scott's in popular interest, dazzling a public
that had begun to weary of chivalry romances, with pictures of Eastern
life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions as highly
colored, and a much greater intensity of passion. So far as they
depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the
effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans,
Zuleikas, and other Oriental properties, deluged English poetry for a
time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers,
hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall.

But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic {251}
school," which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better
w