and as we read on to the end of the splendid fourth canto—­with its poetic feeling for nature, and its stirring rhythm that grips and holds the reader like martial music—­we lay down the book with profound regret that this gifted man should have devoted so much of 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 with Scott and with others whom he had abused without provocation; and it is interesting to note, in view of his own romantic poetry, that he denounced all masters of romance and accepted the artificial standards of Pope and Dryden.  His two favorite books were the Old Testament and a volume of Pope’s poetry.  Of the latter he says, “His is the greatest name in poetry ... all the rest are barbarians.”