In leaving Venice for Ravenna, Byron passed from the society of gondoliers and successive sultanas to a comparatively domestic life, with a mistress who at least endeavoured to stimulate some of his higher aspirations, and smiled upon his wearing the sword along with the lyre.  In the last episode of his constantly chequered and too voluptuous career, we have the waking of Sardanapalus realized in the transmutation of the fantastical Harold into a practical strategist, financier, and soldier.  No one ever lived who, in the same space, more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence.  Having exhausted all other sources of vitality and intoxication—­travel, gallantry, and verse—­it remained for the despairing poet to become a hero.  But he was also moved by a public passion, the genuineness of which there is no reasonable ground to doubt.  Like Alfieri and Rousseau, he had taken for his motto, “I am of the opposition;” and, as Dante under a republic called for a monarchy, Byron, under monarchies at home and abroad, called for a commonwealth.  Amid the inconsistencies of his political sentiment, he had been consistent in so much love of liberty as led him to denounce oppression, even when he had no great faith in the oppressed—­whether English, or Italians, or Greeks.

Byron regarded the established dynasties of the continent with a sincere hatred.  He talks of the “more than infernal tyranny” of the House of Austria.  To his fancy, as to Shelley’s, New England is the star of the future.  Attracted by a strength or rather force of character akin to his own, he worshipped Napoleon, even when driven to confess that “the hero had sunk into a king.”  He lamented his overthrow; but, above all, that he was beaten by “three stupid, legitimate old dynasty boobies of regular sovereigns.”  “I write in ipecacuanha that the Bourbons are restored.”  “What right have we to prescribe laws to France?  Here we are retrograding to the dull, stupid old system, balance of Europe—­poising straws on kings’ noses, instead of wringing them off.”  “The king-times are fast finishing.  There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.  I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”  “Give me a republic.  Look in the history of the earth—­Rome, Greece, Venice, Holland, France, America, our too short Commonwealth—­and compare it with what they did under masters.”

His serious political verses are all in the strain of the lines on Wellington—­

  Never had mortal man such opportunity—­
    Except Napoleon—­or abused it more;
  You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity
    Of tyrants, and been blessed from shore to shore.

An enthusiasm for Italy, which survived many disappointments, dictated some of the most impressive passages of his Harold, and inspired the Lament of Tasso and the Ode on Venice.  The Prophecy of Dante contains much that has since proved prophetic—­