governments." During his exile he finished _Childe Harold, The Prisoner of
Chillon_, his dramas _Cain_ and _Manfred_, and numerous other works, in
some of which, as in _Don Juan_, he delighted in revenging himself upon his
countrymen by holding up to ridicule all that they held most sacred.

In 1824 Byron went to Greece to give himself and a large part of his
fortune to help that country in its struggle for liberty against the Turks.
How far he was led by his desire for posing as a hero, and how far by a
certain vigorous Viking spirit that was certainly in him, will never be
known. The Greeks welcomed him and made him a leader, and for a few months
he found himself in the midst of a wretched squabble of lies, selfishness,
insincerity, cowardice, and intrigue, instead of the heroic struggle for
liberty which he had anticipated. He died of fever, in Missolonghi, in
1824. One of his last poems, written there on his thirty-sixth birthday, a
few months before he died, expresses his own view of his disappointing
life:

My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone:
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.

WORKS OF BYRON. In reading Byron it is well to remember that he was a
disappointed and embittered man, not only in his personal life, but also in
his expectation of a general transformation of human society. As he pours
out his own feelings, chiefly, in his poetry, he is the most expressive
writer of his age in voicing the discontent of a multitude of Europeans who
were disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution to produce an
entirely new form of government and society.

One who wishes to understand the whole scope of Byron's genius and poetry
will do well to begin with his first work, _Hours of Idleness_, written
when he was a young man at the university. There is very little poetry in
the volume, only a striking facility in rime, brightened by the devil-may-
care spirit of the Cavalier poets; but as a revelation of the man himself
it is remarkable. In a vain and sophomoric preface he declares that poetry
is to him an idle experiment, and that this is his first and last attempt
to amuse himself in that line. Curiously enough, as he starts for Greece on
his last, fatal journey, he again ridicules literature, and says that the
poet is a "mere babbler." It is this despising of the art which alone makes
him famous that occasions our deepest disappointment. E