his wife was of severe morals, cold, and unsympathetic.  We need not advance farther into the horrors recently suggested to the world.  The blame has rested on Byron; and, at the time, the popular feeling was so strong, that it may be said to have driven him from England.  It awoke in him a dark misanthropy which returned English scorn with an unnatural hatred.  He sojourned at various places on the continent.  At Geneva he wrote a third canto of Childe Harold, and the touching story of Bonnivard, entitled The Prisoner of Chillon, and other short poems.

In 1817 he was at Venice, where he formed a connection with the Countess Guiccioli, to the disgrace of both.  In Venice he wrote a fourth canto of Childe Harold, the story of Mazeppa, the first two cantos of Don Juan, and two dramas, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari.

For two years he lived at Ravenna, where he wrote some of his other dramas, and several cantos of Don Juan.  In 1821 he removed to Pisa; thence, after a short stay, to Genoa, still writing dramas and working at Don Juan.

PHILHELLENISM:  HIS DEATH.—­The end of his misanthropy and his debaucheries was near; but his story was to have a ray of sunset glory—­his death was to be connected with a noble effort and an exhibition of philanthropic spirit which seem in some degree to palliate his faults.  Unlike some writers who find in his conduct only a selfish whim, we think that it casts a beautiful radiance upon the early evening of a stormy life.  The Greeks were struggling for independence from Turkish tyranny:  Byron threw himself heart and soul into the movement, received a commission from the Greek government, recruited a band of Suliotes, and set forth gallantly to do or die in the cause of Grecian freedom:  he died, but not in battle.  He caught a fever of a virulent type, from his exposure, and after very few days expired, on the 19th of April, 1824, amid the mourning of the nation.  Of this event, Macaulay—­no mean or uncertain critic—­could say, in his epigrammatical style:  “Two men have died within our recollection, who, at a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory.  One of them died at Longwood; the other at Missolonghi.”

ESTIMATE OF HIS POETRY.—­In giving a brief estimate of his character and of his works, we may begin by saying that he represents, in clear lineaments, the nobleman, the traveller, the poet, and the debauchee, of the beginning of the nineteenth century.  In all his works he unconsciously depicts himself.  He is in turn Childe Harold, Lara, the Corsair, and Don Juan.  He affected to despise the world’s opinion so completely that he has made himself appear worse than he really was—­more profane, more intemperate, more licentious.  It is equally true that this tendency, added to the fact that he was a handsome peer, had much to do with the immediate popularity of his poems.  There was also a paradoxical vanity, which does not seem easily reconcilable with his misanthropy, that thus led him to reproduce himself in a new dress in his dramas and tales.  He paraded himself as if, after all, he did value the world’s opinion.