did they disagree, but Scott
thought Byron's Liberalism not very deep: "It appeared to me," he said,
"that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit
and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit
of thinking. At heart I would have termed Byron a patrician on
principle." Scott shared Goethe's opinion of Byron's genius:--"He wrote
from impulse, never for effect, and therefore I have always reckoned
Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half
a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none
of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters." It has
been a fashion of late years to say that both Byron and Scott have gone
by; I fancy it is a case of "not lost, but gone before." Among the men
satirized in the 'Bards' was Wordsworth. Years after, Byron met him
at a dinner, and on his return told his wife that the "one feeling he
had for him from the beginning to the end of the visit was _reverence_."
Yet he never ceased to gird at him in his satires. The truth is, that
consistency was never to be expected in Byron. Besides, he inherited
none of the qualities needed for an orderly and noble life. He came of a
wild and turbulent race.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, the sixth of the name, was born in London,
January 22d, 1788, and died at Missolonghi, Greece, April 19th, 1824.
His father, John Byron, a captain in the Guards, was a heartless
profligate with no redeeming traits of character. He eloped with Amelia
D'Arcy, wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, and after her divorce from
her husband married her and treated her like a brute. One daughter of
this union was Augusta, Byron's half-sister, who married Colonel Leigh,
and who was the good angel of the poet, and the friend of Lady Byron
until there was a rupture of their relations in 1830 on a matter of
business. A year after the death of his first wife, John Byron entrapped
and married Catherine Gordon of Gicht,--a Scotch heiress, very proud of
her descent from James I. of Scotland,--whose estate he speedily
squandered. In less than two years after the birth of George, John Byron
ran away from his wife and his creditors, and died in France.

Mrs. Byron was a wholly undisciplined and weak woman, proud of her
descent, wayward and hysterical. She ruined the child, whom she
alternately petted and abused. She interfered with his education and
fixed him in all his bad tendencie