In 1809 Byron, when only twenty-one years of age, started on a tour of Europe and the Orient.  The poetic results of this trip were the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with their famous descriptions of romantic scenery.  The work made him instantly popular, and his fame overshadowed Scott’s completely.  As he says himself, “I awoke one morning to find myself famous,” and presently he styles himself “the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.”  The worst element in Byron at this time was his insincerity, his continual posing as the hero of his poetry.  His best works were translated, and his fame spread almost as rapidly on the Continent as in England.  Even Goethe was deceived, and declared that a man so wonderful in character had never before appeared in literature, and would never appear again.  Now that the tinsel has worn off, and we can judge the man and his work dispassionately, we see how easily even the critics of the age were governed by romantic impulses.

The adulation of Byron lasted only a few years in England.  In 1815 he married Miss Milbanke, an English heiress, who abruptly left him a year later.  With womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation.  This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion against him.  He left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned.  Eight years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was associated with Shelley until the latter’s tragic death in 1822.  His house was ever the meeting place for Revolutionists and malcontents calling themselves patriots, whom he trusted too greatly, and with whom he shared his money most generously.  Curiously enough, while he trusted men too easily, he had no faith in human society or government, and wrote in 1817:  “I have simplified my politics to an utter detestation of all existing governments.”  During his exile he finished Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, his dramas Cain and Manfred, and numerous other works, in some of which, as in Don Juan, he delighted in revenging himself upon his countrymen by holding up to ridicule all that they held most sacred.

In 1824 Byron went to Greece to give himself and a large part of his fortune to help that country in its struggle for liberty against the Turks.  How far he was led by his desire for posing as a hero, and how far by a certain vigorous Viking spirit that was certainly in him, will never be known.  The Greeks welcomed him and made him a leader, and for a few months he found himself in the midst of a wretched squabble of lies, selfishness, insincerity, cowardice, and intrigue, instead of the heroic struggle for liberty which he had anticipated.  He died of fever, in Missolonghi, in 1824.  One of his last poems, written there on his thirty-sixth birthday, a few months before he died, expresses his own view of his disappointing life: