writings,--that
ill-disguised autobiography which goes by the name of "Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage," in which he soars to loftier flights than any English poet
from Milton to his own time. Like Shakespeare, like Dryden, like Pope,
like Burns, he was a born poet; while most of the other poets, however
eminent and excellent, were simply made,--made by study and labor on a
basis of talent, rather than exalted by native genius as he was,
speaking out what he could not help, and revelling in the richness of
unconscious gifts, whether for good or evil.

Byron was a man with qualities so generous, yet so wild, that Lamartine
was in doubt whether to call him angel or devil. But, whether angel or
devil, his life is the saddest and most interesting among all the men of
letters in the nineteenth century.

Of course, most of our material comes from his Life and Letters, as
edited by his friend and brother-poet, Thomas Moore. This biographer, I
think, has been unwisely candid in the delineation of Byron's character,
making revelations that would better have remained in doubt, and on
which friendship at least should have prompted him to a
discreet silence.

Lord Byron was descended from the Byrons of Normandy who accompanied
William the Conqueror in his invasion of England, of which illustrious
lineage the poet was prouder than of his poetry. In the reign of Henry
VIII., on the dissolution of the monasteries, a Byron came into
possession of the old mediaeval abbey of Newstead. In the reign of James
I., Sir John Byron was made a knight of the Order of the Bath. In 1784
the father of the poet, a dissipated captain of the Guards, being in
embarrassed circumstances, married a rich Scotch heiress of the name of
Gordon. Handsome and reckless, "Mad Jack Byron" speedily spent his
wife's fortune; and when he died, his widow, being reduced to a pittance
of L150 a year, retired to Scotland to live, with her infant son who had
been born in London. She was plain Mrs. Byron, widow of a "younger son,"
with but little expectation of future rank. She was a woman of caprices
and eccentricities, and not at all fitted to superintend the education
of her wayward boy.

Hence the childhood and youth of Byron were sad and unfortunate. His
temper was violent and passionate. A malformation of his foot made him
peculiarly sensitive, and the unwise treatment of his mother, fond and
harsh by turns, destroyed maternal authority. At five years of age, he
was