“Thus Lays of Minstrels—­may they be the last!—­ On half-strung harps whine mournful to the blast.  While mountain spirits prate to river sprites, That dames may listen to the sound at nights; . . . . . .  Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, The golden-crested haughty Marmion, Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight, Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight, The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base.  And think’st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance.”

Then after a sneer at Scott for making money by his poems, Byron
concludes with this passage:—­
    “These are the themes that claim our plaudits now;
    These are the bards to whom the muse must bow;
    While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot,
    Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott.”

When people read this satire, they realized that a new poet had appeared.  But it was not until Byron published his first long poem, called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that he became famous.  Then his success was sudden and amazing.  “I woke up one morning and found myself famous,” he says.  “His fame,” says another poet and friend who wrote his life,* “seemed to spring up like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night.”  He was praised and lauded by high and low.  Every one was eager to known him, and for a time he became the spoiled darling of society.

Moore.

Childe Harold is a long poem of four cantos, but now only two cantos were published.  The third was added in 1816, the fourth in 1818.  It is written in the Spenserian stanza, with here and there songs and ballads in other meters, and in the first few verses there is even an affectation of Spenserian wording.  But the poet soon grew tired of that, and returned to his own English.  Childe is used in the ancient sense of knight, and the poem tells of the wanderings of a gloomy, vicious, world-worn man.

There is very little story in Childe Harold.  The poem is more a series of descriptions and a record of the thoughts that are called forth by the places through which the traveler passes.  It is indeed a poetic diary.  The pilgrim visits many famous spots, among them the field of Waterloo, where but a few months before the fate of Europe had been decided.  To us the battle of Waterloo is a long way off.  To Byron it was still a deed of yesterday.  As he approaches the field he feels that he is on sacred ground.

    “Stop!—­for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust! 
    An Earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below! 
    Is the spot marked with no colossal bust? 
    Nor column trophied for triumphal show? 
    None; but the moral’s truth tells simpler so,
    As the ground was before, thus let is be;—­
    How that red rain hath made the harvest grow! 
    And is this all the world has gain’d by thee,
    Thou first and last of field! kingmaking victory?”