Perhaps the virulent treatment of Byron ranks with the meanest and most impotent actions of the militant oligarchists because of his shocking (?) sympathy with England’s enemy.  The fierce though exquisite weaver of rhymes, who had been the idol of the nation and the drawing-room, was sought after by the highest and most cultured in the land.  Byron had fallen a victim to public displeasure partly because he gave way to excesses that shocked the orthodoxy of a capricious public.  He had reached a pinnacle of fame such as no man of his years had ever attained, and suddenly without warning he fell, a victim to unparalleled vituperation.  His faults, if the meagre accounts that have been handed down are true, were great, but many of them were merely human.  His marriage was not compatible, and his love entanglements embarrassing.  His temper and habits were very similar to those of other geniuses, and great allowances should be made for personalities whose mental arrangements may be such as to nullify normal control.

It is all very well to say that these men should be compelled to adhere to a conventional law because ordinary mortals are expected to do so, but a man like Byron was not ordinary.  In his particular line he was a great force with a brain that took spasmodic twists.  It is absurd to expect that a being whose genius produced “Childe Harold” and “Manfred” could be fashioned into living a quite commonplace domestic life.  Miss Milbanke, who married him, and the public who first blessed and then cursed and made him an outcast, were not faultless.  Had they been possessed of the superiority they piously assumed, they would have seen how impossible it was for this eccentric man of stormy passions to be controlled and overridden by conventionality.

It is possible the serene critic may take exception to this form of reasoning and produce examples of genius, such as Wordsworth, who lived a strictly pious life, never offending any moral law by a hairbreadth; but Wordsworth was not made like Byron; he had not the personality of the poor wayward cripple who at one time had brought the world to his feet, neither had Wordsworth to fight against such wild hereditary complications as Byron.  Wordsworth never caught the public imagination, while Byron had the power of inflaming it.  But, alas! neither his magnetic force nor his haughty spirit could stem the whirlwind of hatred, rage, and calumny that took possession of the virtuous and capricious public.  The story of cruelty to his wife grew in its enormity, his reported liaisons multiplied beyond all human reason.  The bleached, white hearts of the oligarchal party had been lashed into fury by his withering ridicule and charge of hypocrisy, but the climax came like a tornado when the poet’s sense of fair play caused him to satirise the Prince Regent and eulogise the Emperor Napoleon with unique pathos and passion.