The edition was soon exhausted—­the shot had at least raised a mighty dust.

The author got his nerve back, fathered the book, made corrections; and this edition, too, sold with a rush.  Byron returned to Newstead, invited a score of his Cambridge cronies, who came down, entering the mansion between the bear and the wolf, and were received with salvos of pistol-shots.  Here they played games over the spacious grounds, wrestled, boxed, swam, and at night feasted and drank deep damnation out of a skull to all Scotch reviewers.

Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily decamped and left the rogues to do their own cooking.

This brought them to their senses, sanity came back, and the company disbanded.  Then the servants, who had watched the orgies from afar, returned and found a week’s pile of dishes unwashed and a horse stabled in the library.

* * * * *

Then Byron had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm.  His titles and pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching a dunciad in their direction.  His good nature was especially ruffled by Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor.  The chief cause of the old Lord’s prejudice against the young one lay in the fact that the young ’un had ridiculed the old ’un’s literary pretensions.

They were rivals in letters, with a very beautiful, natural and mutual disdain for each other.

Lord Byron was not welcomed into the House of Lords:  he simply pushed in the door because he had a right to.  He thirsted for approbation, for distinction, for notoriety.  His sensitive soul hung upon newspaper clippings with feverish expectations; and about all the attention he received was in the line of being damned by faint praise, or smothered with silence.  Patriotism, as far as England was concerned, was not a part of Byron’s composition.

When all Great Britain was execrating Napoleon, picturing him as a devil with horns and hoofs, Byron looked upon him as the world’s hero.

In this frame of mind he went forth and borrowed a goodly sum, and started cut to view the world.  He was accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, and his valet, Fletcher.

It was a two years’ trip, this jolly trio made—­down along the coast of France, Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, lingering in queer old cities, mousing over historic spots, alternately living like princes or vagabonds.  They frolicked, drank, made love to married women, courted maidens, fought, feasted and did all the foolish things that sophomores usually do when they have money and opportunity.

These months of travel supplied Byron enough in way of suggestion to keep him writing many moons.  His active imagination seized upon everything picturesque, peculiar, romantic, sentimental or tragic, and stored it up in those wondrous brain-cells, to be used when the time was ripe.