No more, no more, O never more on me
  The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew: 

and again,

  O could I feel as I have felt—­or be what I have been,
  Or weep as I could once have wept, o’er many a vanished scene;
  As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho’ they be,
  So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much of his serious poetry has a false ring.  His example infected the minor poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray—­who represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the heroic—­should be provoked into describing Byron as “a big sulky dandy.”

Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of this fierce discontent.  He inherited from his mother a haughty and violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father.  He was through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.  He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute.  But he had traits of bravery and generosity.  Women loved him, and he made strong friends.  There was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other as Shelley and Scott.  By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten.  Though a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his rank as he was of his beauty.  He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was idle and dissipated, but did a great deal of miscellaneous reading.  He took some of his Cambridge set—­Hobhouse, Matthews, and others—­to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.  Byron was strikingly handsome.  His face had a spiritual paleness and a classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head.  A deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, and impaired his activity in many ways, although he prided himself upon his powers as a swimmer.

In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social eclat in London, he married.  In February of the following year he was separated from Lady Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged respectability.  In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved.  From Switzerland, where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys; from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling defiance at English public opinion.  The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold,