And yet, in all this degradation, he was not idle.  How could so prolific a writer be idle!  Byron did not ordinarily rise till two o’clock in the afternoon, and spent the interval between his breakfast and dinner in riding on the Lido,—­one of those long narrow islands which lie between the Adriatic and the Lagoon, in the midst of which Venice is built, on the islets arising from its shallow waters.  Yet he found time to begin his “Don Juan,” besides writing the “Lament of Tasso,” the tragedy of “Manfred,” and an Armenian grammar, all which appeared in 1817; in 1818, “Beppo,” and in 1819, “Mazeppa.”  He also made a flying trip to Florence and Rome, and some of the finest stanzas of “Childe Harold” are descriptions of the classic ruins and the masterpieces of Grecian and mediaeval art,—­the beauties and the associations of Italy’s great cities.

       “I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs;
        A palace and a prison on each hand: 
        I saw from out the wave her structures rise
        As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand! 
        A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
        Around me, and a dying glory smiles
        O’er the far times, when many a subject land
        Looked to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
      Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!”

Byron’s correspondence was small, being chiefly confined to his publisher, to Moore, and to a few intimate friends.  These letters are interesting because of their frankness and wit, although they are not models of fine writing.  Indeed, I do not know where to find any specimens of masterly prose in all his compositions.  He was simply a poet, facile in every form of measure from Spenser to Campbell.  No remarkable prose writings appeared in England at all, at that time, until Sir Walter Scott’s novels were written, and until Macaulay, Carlyle, and Lamb wrote their inimitable essays.  Nothing is more heavy and unartistic than Moore’s “Life of Byron;” there is hardly a brilliant paragraph in it,—­and yet Moore is one of the most musical and melodious of all the English poets.  Milton, indeed, was equally great in prose and verse, but very few men have been distinguished as prose writers and poets at the same time.  Sir Walter Scott and Southey are the most remarkable exceptions.  I think that Macaulay could have been distinguished as a poet, if he had so pleased; but he would have been a literary poet like Wordsworth or Tennyson or Coleridge,—­not a man who sings out of his soul because he cannot help it, like Byron or Burns, or like Whittier among our American poets.

It was not until 1819, when Byron had been three years in Venice, that he fell in love with the Countess Guiccioli, the wife of one of the richest nobles of Italy,—­young, beautiful, and interesting.  This love seems to have been disinterested and lasting; and while it was a violation of all the rules of morality, and would not have been allowed in any other country than Italy, it did not further degrade him.  It was pretty much such a love as Voltaire had for Madame de Chatelet; and with it he was at last content.  There is no evidence that Byron ever afterward loved any other woman; and what is very singular about the affair is that it was condoned by the husband, until it became a scandal even in Italy.