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Ah monarchs! could ye taste the mirth ye mar,

Not in the toils of glory would ye fret ;

The hoarse dull drum would sleep, and man be happy yet!"

Or the stanza with which he takes farewell of Spain:

"Nor yet, alas! the dreadful work is done;
Fresh legions pour adown the Pyrenees :
It deepens still, the work is scarce begun,
Nor mortal eye the distant end foresees.

Fall'n nations gaze on Spain: if freed, she frees
More than her fell Pizarros once enchained."

In the second canto Byron conducted his pilgrim to Greece, to scenes of departed greatness, and his meditations there also struck a sympathetic chord in the hearts of a people who saw historic grandeurs trembling all round them, and knew not when the turn of their own empire would come. The half-hearted mirth with which the pilgrim, with his assumption of joyless cynicism and discontent produced by satiety, relieved the monotony of his gloomy meditations, his sudden changes of mood from ardent aspiration to bitter mockery, from impassioned delight in nature's beauties to scorn of men's deformities, were all in unison with the hysterical, distracted state of the public temper. We must live over again the anxieties of those troubled years when the strain of resistance to Napoleon's ambition, sustained year after year, was becoming intolerable, and the sternest resolution was dashed at times by fears that the dreams of the man of destiny would be fulfilled-we must do this to understand the instantaneous effect of "Childe Harold." The poet spoke the words that were on every-body's lips, spoke them with all the fire and intensity of genius. Intense susceptibility to the impressions of the moment was always a striking feature of Byron's character, and he "drew from his audience in a vapor," to use once more Mr. Gladstone's famous simile, "what he gave back to them in a flood." He professed

PUBLIC INTERPRETATION OF THE POEM

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indifference in the opening of his poem; spoke with a languid air of his reluctance to awake the weary Nine for so lowly a lay as his; but the fire of most of the subsequent stanzas gave the lie to this affectation.

ence.

This close harmony with the moods of the time is greatly left out of sight in attempts to explain the rapidity with which Byron gained the ear of his audiToo much stress is laid in these explanations on the romantic character of the hero, driven into his pilgrimage by a strange unrest, satiated with pleasure, rendered joyless by the excess of it, prematurely penetrated by the conviction that all is vanity; a wanderer, not because he hopes for relief from change, but because change is an imperative necessity to him. It was not the character of "Childe Harold " that first drew attention to the poem; it was the interest in the poem that drew attention to the character of the poet, with whom the public, in spite of his protests, persisted in identifying him. We must not credit the readers of the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" with knowing all that we can now learn about Byron, from works of which this first effort, with all its revelation of power, was comparatively but a feeble and one-sided instalment. Their interest was principally in the poem itself, which enthralled them before they knew much or any thing about the author; and if we try to look at it with their eyes, following its movement with the interest they naturally had in its incidents, we find abundant reason for their admiration in the impetuous vehemence with which the poet hurries from theme to theme, fixing one impression after another with a few powerful strokes, moving with the ease of a giant in the fetters of a difficult stanza, controlling the rhymes with a master's hand into the service of his fervent feeling, instead of allowing them to direct and check and hamper its flow as is the way with rhymesters of less resource. The interest of the public once kindled in the poem, turned

naturally to the poet, and they would have it that in his strange hero, a new character in poetry, he had drawn the picture of himself. Every striking publication sets the public speculating about the author, and there were several superficial circumstances that favored this belief. Byron had himself passed through the scenes through which he conducted his pilgrim. True, he said in the preface that the pilgrim was only "a fictitious character introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece"; but the very disclaimer encouraged the public in the popular conviction. When they began enquiring about the author, they found that he was a young lord in his twenty-fifth year, who had for some time been his own master, and had led rather a dissolute life; why, if he did not mean to picture himself, should he choose so discreditable a fictitious character as a prematurely jaded voluptuary, stalking in joyless revery through scenes in which all Europe at the time felt a living interest?

The mistake was natural, perhaps, and yet none the less it was a mistake. Childe Harold's moods were only the darker moods of an intemperately sensitive and variable spirit, in which heights of joyous mirth were quite as frequent as depths of sombre melancholy. When Byron began the poem, his intention was, as he says in his preface, following the words of Dr. Beattie, "to give full scope to his inclination, and be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humor struck him." He had intended, in fact, what he afterward accomplished in "Don Juan." And in his first draughts of the poems he had called the hero Childe Burun, the ancient name of his family. But as he went on and thought of making his pilgrim a fictitious character of certain stamp, a character, as he tells us, modelled on Dr. Moore's "Zeluco," he altered the cast of the poem to correspond, and replaced more than one mirthful passage by others of a melancholy

THE POET'S UPBRINGING

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description. Thus only one side of his own character was represented in the poem, and the shades even of that were very much deepened.

To make this clear let us run rapidly over his life before the publication of "Childe Harold." We shall see that he had other reasons for despondency and discontent than the fulness of satiety. His life had been very different from that of most young members of the peerage. He had succeeded to the title of Lord Byron at the age of ten by the death of an eccentric and violent grand-uncle, who had never recognized his existence or done any thing to help his mother in giving him an education suitable to his future rank. The Byrons were one of the oldest families in England, but for several generations before the birth of the poet the family estates had been reduced and the family name disgraced by turbulent, extravagant, and scandalous conduct. There were honorable traditions in the family, but they belonged to a date before its elevation to the peerage. Captain Byron, the poet's father, was a profligate younger son, who added gaming to his other vices. His first wife was the divorced wife of a peer, with whom he had eloped, and who died soon after their marriage. The Hon. Mrs. Leigh, Byron's half-sister, was the only offspring of this union. His second wife was Catherine Gordon, the heiress of Gight. He married her for her money, and in less than two years (1786-88) it was swallowed up in the payment of his debts. Gight was sold, and she was left with only enough to yield her the small pittance on which she educated her son. This son, the poet, was born in London on January 22, 1788. Mrs. Byron, though passionately attached to her spendthrift husband, was a woman of extremely violent temper; and life with her husband proving impossible, she withdrew with her young son to Aberdeen in 1790, two years after his birth. The father contrived to extort from her narrow means

a sum sufficient to take him to France, and died there in the following year. Mrs. Byron remained in Aberdeen, domiciled in one flat after another in Queen Street, Virginia Street, and Broad Street, till the death of the fourth Lord Byron in 1798, in the poet's eleventh year, opened the way to his succession, and the family removed South. With such a mother, a woman of naturally ungovernable temper, exasperated by her being dragged down from affluence to poverty, sometimes fondling her child with extravagant affection, sometimes storming at him as "a lame brat," and hurling things at him,-the fire-irons are said to have been her favorite weapons,-a proud, sensitive, passionate child was not likely to learn self-control. Among other things, she probably exaggerated that sensitiveness about his lameness to which biographers and critics attach so much importance. He seems to have had one or both feet clubbed, and one of the first uses that his mother made of her larger command of money, when he became Lord Byron, was to consult physicians and quacks about the cure of this defect, and on their advice to apply painful remedies in vain. Her violent temper and capricious affection harmed him quite as much after his accession as before, for she kept incessantly interfering with himself and his teachers, and quarrelled so outrageously with his guardian, Lord Carlisle, and with every-body who came near her, that she was practically excluded from the society of people of her own rank. Thus it happened that when Byron came of age he had no friends except such as he had made for himself at Harrow and Cambridge. Brought up with very exalted ideas of his own rank, all the more vivid that he had not been born in it, he had no knowledge of the domestic life of families in that rank; he had no social acquaintance with them, and when he was of age to take his seat in the House of Lords, there was not a single member of that House

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