his talent to describing trivial
or unwholesome intrigues and posing as the hero of his own verses. The real
tragedy of Byron's life is that he died just as he was beginning to find
himself.

LIFE. Byron was born in London in 1788, the year preceding the French
Revolution. We shall understand him better, and judge him more charitably,
if we remember the tainted stock from which he sprang. His father was a
dissipated spendthrift of unspeakable morals; his mother was a Scotch
heiress, passionate and unbalanced. The father deserted his wife after
squandering her fortune; and the boy was brought up by the mother who
"alternately petted and abused" him. In his eleventh year the death of a
granduncle left him heir to Newstead Abbey and to the baronial title of one
of the oldest houses in England. He was singularly handsome; and a lameness
resulting from a deformed foot lent a suggestion of pathos to his make-up.
All this, with his social position, his pseudo-heroic poetry, and his
dissipated life,--over which he contrived to throw a veil of romantic
secrecy,--made him a magnet of attraction to many thoughtless young men and
foolish women, who made the downhill path both easy and rapid to one whose
inclinations led him in that direction. Naturally he was generous, and
easily led by affection. He is, therefore, largely a victim of his own
weakness and of unfortunate surroundings.

At school at Harrow, and in the university at Cambridge, Byron led an
unbalanced life, and was more given to certain sports from which he was not
debarred by lameness, than to books and study. His school life, like his
infancy, is sadly marked by vanity, violence, and rebellion against every
form of authority; yet it was not without its hours of nobility and
generosity. Scott describes him as "a man of real goodness of heart, and
the kindest and best feelings, miserably thrown away by his foolish
contempt of public opinion." While at Cambridge, Byron published his first
volume of poems, _Hours of Idleness_, in 1807. A severe criticism of the
volume in the _Edinburgh Review_ wounded Byron's vanity, and threw him into
a violent passion, the result of which was the now famous satire called
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, in which not only his enemies, but
also Scott, Wordsworth, and nearly all the literary men of his day, were
satirized in heroic couplets after the manner of Pope's _Dunciad_. It is
only just to say that he afterwards made friends