brilliancy of his literary career his own nation in particular does not
like to have his defects and vices dwelt upon. It blushes and condones.
It would fain blot out his life and much of his poetry if, without them,
it could preserve the best and grandest of his 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