took the honorary (nobleman's) degree of M.A., and left Cambridge for London.

Here he was wilder than ever, and boasted of being so; for he always took a foolish delight in thinking himself very wicked, and in telling everybody about it, with exaggerations. He had an almost insane desire to shock people. Sensitive, moody, he was forever disclosing and falsifying his most intimate nature. His gifts he had not yet disclosed; till a savage, "tomahawk" criticism of the Hours of Idleness, in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1808, roused him into a rage. Mere rage, but also a stinging wit, made his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers something more than a reply to his critics. It was the most notable satirical poem since the age of Pope. It scoffed at men he knew, and men he did not know; at books he had read, and books he had never seen the covers of. Wholesale ridicule by a youngster of twenty-one, often shallow and unjust, it showed power. A few days before the poem appeared, Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords, haughtily, or at least negligently. He now retired with a few friends to Newstead, for a long and strange carousal, with the popping of corks and pistols, with a wolf and a bear to tease, and with fencing and swimming, and late hours of wild discussion and ghost stories, while they drank wine from the skull of an old monk. These orgies were doubtless bad enough, but not at all so dark as the readers of Childe Harold afterward imagined.

The travels which led to that famous poem now

began. From Newstead, Byron went with Hobhouse and a few servants to Falmouth, and sailed thence for Lisbon. He journeyed for two years through Greece, Turkey, the Troad, and the Greek isles. He dined with Ali Pasha, the, Albanian bandit, assassin, and despot; he met the Maid of Athens; and with Lieutenant Ekenhead, he swam Leander's Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos. After many adventurous wanderings, he returned to England in 1811, "without a hope," he said, "and almost without a desire, . sick of poesy," but with "some 4000 lines, of one kind and another," written on his travels.

Within a month his mother died. For all their constant battles and patched-up truces, Byron was deeply affected. Sorrow and renown came to him in the same year. Matthews, drowned in the Cam, was the fourth friend he had lost. On the 1st of March, 1812, when the first and second cantos of Childe Harold appeared, Byron "woke and found himself famous." In four weeks the book ran through seven editions. The success was electric. The first edition of Burns, and Scott's Lays, were the only popular triumphs of poetry to be compared with this. Sir Walter himself soon gave up writing poetry, he said, " because Byron beat me." Byron, indeed, rapidly followed up his first success with others: in 1813, The Waltz, The Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos, which last he dashed off in four nights; next year, The Corsair, written in ten days, sold to the extent of 14,000 copies in one day; in the same year appeared Lara; and in 18:6, The Siege of

Corinth and Parisina. In ten years, £75,000 had passed over the publisher Murray's counter, from Lord Byron's pen alone. Byron and Byronic romance became the fashion, not only in England, but all over the continent.

The two most popular English poets of the day, Scott and Byron (for you must remember that Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats were long neglected and obscure), met in London in 1815. They became friends, and afterwards exchanged gifts, "like the old heroes of Homer." Scott found the new-risen genius irritable, suspicious, but also gay and generous. Lord Byron -he afterward said regretfully-could not be happy in the common way. "As for poets," he also said, "I have seen all the best of my time and country, and

I never thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character, except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of." A child once described him as "the gentleman with the beautiful voice." Lady Blessington wrote that "his mouth was splendid, and his scornful expression was real, not affected, but a sweet smile often broke through his melancholy." And Lady Caroline Lamb, at first sight. of Byron, exclaimed, "That pale face is my fate!" We need not wonder that Byron fascinated many women, of high and low degree; and that from 1813 to 1816, he was the social lion of the Regency.

His marriage with Miss Anne Isabella Milbanke, in 1815, was very unhappy. Five weeks after the birth of their daughter, Augusta Ada, Lady Byron left her

husband. Their troubles were discussed publicly, Byron's real and grave faults were magnified by slander, and a reaction setting in against him, this hero of the hour was attacked so atrociously as a monster, a Nero, a Satan, that in 1816 he left England, never to come back.

In Switzerland he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, and Prometheus. He then journeyed to Italy, where he lived for the next seven years. In 1817, at Venice, he finished Manfred, and wrote the Lament of Tasso, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and Beppo; in the next two years, the Ode on Venice, Mazeppa, and the first four cantos of Don Juan; in 1820 and 1821, at Ravenna, the Prophecy of Dante, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, Cain, Heaven and Earth, and A Vision of Judgment. During the rest of his stay, he wrote Werner, The Deformed Transformed, and The Island, and finished Don Juan. Meantime he had fallen in with Shelley. The two revolutionary poets lived at Pisa in the closest friendship; and when in 1822 Shelley was drowned, Byron grieved beside that strange funeral pyre on the beach. His own life, throughout this period, was irregular and reckless. Fasting and revelling by turns, he ruined himself by his many excesses.

But out of this sensual existence he rose, to redeem it by a splendid end. From a fantastic, posing voluptuary, he suddenly became a man of action, a practical financier, soldier, and liberator. He had always hated despotism; his name was already linked with that of

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Greece; and when the Greek war of independence, after two successful years, seemed ready to fail through dissension and poverty, it was natural that English friends of the Hellenic cause, planning an expedition of aid, should offer Byron the command. On July 15-16, 1823, taking along Shelley's friend, Captain Trelawny, and a few others, Byron set sail from Genoa in the brig Hercules," with arms and ammunition, horses, medicines, and 50,000 crowns in money. Fondness for display as his enemies urged- may have impelled Byron at first; but every day disclosed and strengthened his high purpose. From the marshes of Missolonghi, among fevers and turmoils, the poet-soldier disciplined his quarrelling Suliotes, repaired fortifications, directed ships, negotiated for loans, and issued clear and statesmanlike orders. "Your counsels," said the Greek prince, "will be listened to like oracles." Fortune, however, would not suffer Byron to find a soldier's grave, to "look around, and choose his ground, and take his rest"; for a fever seized him in that bog, and on April 19, 1824, he died, calling on the names of Augusta Leigh, his sister, and of Ada, his dead child.

Byron is dead!" sounded in the streets, said Trelawny, like a bell tolling. Mavrocordatos commanded the battery to fire thirty-seven guns, one for each year of the short life. Lord Byron's body lies with his ancestors in the village church of Hucknall, for Westminster Abbey refused a grave to the author of Cain. But his spirit had "led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage