These are a few verses from one of the best known parts of Childe Harold.  There are many other verses equally well known.  They have become the possession of almost every schoolboy.  Some of them you will read in school books, and when you are grown up and able to distinguish between what is vulgar and what is good and beautiful in it, I hope you will read the whole poem.

For two years Byron was as popular as man might be.  Then came a change.  From the time that he was a child he had always been in love, first with one and then with another.  His heart was tinder, ever ready to take fire.  Now he married.  At first all went well.  One little baby girl was born.  Then troubles came, troubles which have never been explained, and for which we need not seek an explanation now, and one day Lady Byron left her husband never to return.

The world which had petted and spoiled the poet now turned from the man.  He was abused and decried; instead of being courted he was shunned.  So in anger and disgust, Byron left the country where he found no sympathy.  He never returned to it, the rest of his life being spent as a wanderer upon the Continent.

It was to a great extent a misspent life, and yet, while Byron wasted himself in unworthy ways, he wrote constantly and rapidly, pouring out volumes of poetry at a speed equaled only by Scott.  He wrote tragedies, metrical romances, lyrics, and everything that he wrote was read—­not only at home, but on the Continent.  And one thing that we must remember Byron for is that he made English literature Continental.  “Before he came,” says an Italian patriot and writer,* “all that was known of English literature was the French translation of Shakespeare.  It is since Byron that we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English writers.  From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us for this land of liberty.  He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.”

Mazzini.

Much that Byron wrote was almost worthless.  He has none of the haunting sense of the beauty of words in perfect order that marks the greatest poets.  He has no passion for the correct use of words, and often his song seems tuneless and sometimes vulgar.  For in Byron’s undisciplined, turgid soul there is a strain of coarseness and vulgarity which not seldom shows itself in his poetry, spoiling some of his most beautiful lines.  His poetry is egotistical too, that is, it is full of himself.  And again and again it has been said that Byron was always his own hero.  “He never had more than a singe subject—­himself.  No man has ever pushed egotism further than he."* In all his dark and gloomy heroes we see Lord Byron, and it is not only himself which he gives to the world’s gaze, but his wrongs and his sorrows.  Yet in spite of all its faults, there is enough that is purely beautiful in his work to give Byron rank as a poet.