LORD BYRON.

A NEW, REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION,

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

Poetry. Vol. III.

EDITED BY

ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE, M.A., HON. F.R.S.L.

LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.

NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

1900.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME.

The present volume contains the six metrical tales which were composed
within the years 1812 and 1815, the _Hebrew Melodies_, and the minor
poems of 1809-1816. With the exception of the first fifteen poems
(1809-1811)--_Chansons de Voyage_, as they might be called--the volume
as a whole was produced on English soil. Beginning with the _Giaour_;
which followed in the wake of _Childe Harold_ and shared its triumph,
and ending with the ill-omened _Domestic Pieces_, or _Poems of the
Separation_, the poems which Byron wrote in his own country synchronize
with his popularity as a poet by the acclaim and suffrages of his own
countrymen. His greatest work, by which his lasting fame has been
established, and by which his relative merits as a great poet will be
judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name,
which is stamped with his sign-manual, and which has come to be regarded
as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity and
achievement.

No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, not
Mr. Kipling, was ever in his own lifetime so widely, so amazingly
popular. Thousands of copies of the "Tales"--of the _Bride of Abydos_,
of the _Corsair_, of _Lara_--were sold in a day, and edition followed
edition month in and month out. Everywhere men talked about the "noble
author"--in the capitals of Europe, in literary circles in the United
States, in the East Indies. He was "the glass of fashion ... the
observ'd of all observers," the swayer of sentiment, the master and
creator of popular emotion. No other English poet before or since has
divided men's attention with generals and sea-captains and statesmen,
has attracted and fascinated and overcome the world so entirely and
potently as Lord Byron.

It was _Childe Harold_, the unfinished, immature _Childe Harold_, and
the Turkish and other "Tales," which raised this sud