-left England, never to return alive.

When Byron trod the deck of the good ship bound for Ostend, and saw a
strip of tossing, blue water separating him from England, his spirits
rose. He was twenty-eight years old, and the thought that he would yet do
something and be somebody was strong in his heart. All the old pride came
back.

The idea that he would not sell the product of his brain for hire was
abandoned, and soon after arriving in Holland he began to write letters
home, making sharp bargains with publishers.

Further than this, his attorneys, on his order, made demand for a share of
his wife's estate. And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating
the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness. He was making money, and
had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a
conservative and written a book on "Getting on in the World, or Success as
I Have Found It."

Byron's pilgrimage down through Germany, along the Rhine to Switzerland,
was one of rest and recreation. At Berne, Basle, Lausanne and Geneva he
found food for literary thought, and many instances in his writings show
the reflected scenes he saw. No visitor at Lausanne fails to visit the
Castle of Chillon, and all the guides will recite you these sweeping
lines, so surcharged with feeling, beginning:

"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its many waters meet and flow."

At Geneva began the most interesting friendship between Byron and that
other young man, so like and yet so unlike him.

Only a few years and Byron was to search the shores of the Mediterranean
for Shelley's dead body, and finding it, be one of the friends who reduced
it to ashes.

Tiring of Geneva and the tourists who pointed him out as a curiosity, we
find Byron and his little party making their way across the Simplon, to
cross which is an epoch in the life of any man, and then down by the Lago
Maggiore to Milan.

"The Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron--the art of
painting never did--this was his most marked limitation. From Milan they
wandered down through Italy to Verona and Venice.

The third Canto of "Childe Harold," "Manfred," and dozens of shorter poems
had been sent to Murray. England read and paid for all that Byron wrote,
and accepted it all as autobiography. Possibly Byron's defiant manner lent
an excuse for this, but by applying similar rules we could convict
Sophocles, Schill