Mrs. Byron made no concealment of her troubles.  Society had occasion for gossip and the occasion was improved.  Stories of Byron’s cruelty and inhumanity filled the coffeehouses and drawing-rooms; and the hints at crimes so grave they could not even be mentioned gave the gossips their cue.

The press took it up, and the poet was warned by his friends not to appear at the theater or upon the street for fear of the indignation of the mob.  The spoilt child of London was paying the penalty of popularity.  The pendulum had swung too far and was now coming back.

Byron, hunted by creditors, hooted by enemies, broken in health, crushed in spirit, left the country—­left England, never to return alive.

When Byron trod the deck of the good ship bound for Ostend, and saw a strip of tossing, blue water separating him from England, his spirits rose.  He was twenty-eight years old, and the thought that he would yet do something and be somebody was strong in his heart.  All the old pride came back.

The idea that he would not sell the product of his brain for hire was abandoned, and soon after arriving in Holland he began to write letters home, making sharp bargains with publishers.

Further than this, his attorneys, on his order, made demand for a share of his wife’s estate.  And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness.  He was making money, and had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a conservative and written a book on “Getting on in the World, or Success as I Have Found It.”

Byron’s pilgrimage down through Germany, along the Rhine to Switzerland, was one of rest and recreation.  At Berne, Basle, Lausanne and Geneva he found food for literary thought, and many instances in his writings show the reflected scenes he saw.  No visitor at Lausanne fails to visit the Castle of Chillon, and all the guides will recite you these sweeping lines, so surcharged with feeling, beginning: 

    “Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
    A thousand feet in depth below,
    Its many waters meet and flow.”

At Geneva began the most interesting friendship between Byron and that other young man, so like and yet so unlike him.

Only a few years and Byron was to search the shores of the Mediterranean for Shelley’s dead body, and finding it, be one of the friends who reduced it to ashes.

Tiring of Geneva and the tourists who pointed him out as a curiosity, we find Byron and his little party making their way across the Simplon, to cross which is an epoch in the life of any man, and then down by the Lago Maggiore to Milan.

“The Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron—­the art of painting never did—­this was his most marked limitation.  From Milan they wandered down through Italy to Verona and Venice.