es as unlike each other
as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without
issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten. Though a
liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his
rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he was idle and {253} dissipated, but did a
great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge
set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral
seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.
Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a
classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A
deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, though it did
not greatly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon his powers as
a swimmer.

In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in London,
he married. In February of the following year he was separated from Lady
Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged
respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of
cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switzerland,
where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys; from Venice,
Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild
debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after
poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling
defiance at English public opinion. The third and fourth cantos of
_Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great advance upon the first two, and
contain the best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his name all
over the continent of Europe, and on a hundred memorable spots has made
the scenery his own. On the field of Waterloo, on "the castled {254}
crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," in
Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the
"Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and
under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his later poems, such as
_Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed into his second
manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagy gloom
of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. _Don
Juan_, though morally the worst, is intellectually the most vital and
represen