CHARACTERISTICS, AND PLACE IN LITERATURE.
Lord Jeffrey at the close of a once-famous review quaintly laments: "The
tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber, and the
rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of
Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the
field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry, and the
blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride." Of the
poets of the early part of this century, Lord John Russell thought Byron
the greatest, then Scott, then Moore. "Such an opinion," wrote a
_National_ reviewer, in 1860, "is not worth a refutation; we only smile at
it." Nothing in the history of literature is more curious than the
shifting of the standard of excellence, which so perplexes criticism. But
the most remarkable feature of the matter is the frequent return to power
of the once discarded potentates. Byron is resuming his place: his spirit
has come again to our atmosphere; and every budding critic, as in 1820, is
impelled to pronounce a verdict on his genius and character. The present
times are, in many respects, an aftermath of the first quarter of the
century, which was an era of revolt, of doubt, of storm. There succeeded
an era of exhaustion, of quiescence, of reflection. The first years of the
third quarter saw a revival of turbulence and agitation; and, more than
our fathers, we are inclined to sympathize with our grandfathers. Macaulay
has popularized the story of the change of literary dynasty which in our
island marked the close of the last, and the first two decades of the
present, hundred years.
The corresponding artistic revolt on the continent was closely connected
with changes in the political world. The originators of the romantic
literature in Italy, for the most part, died in Spielberg or in exile. The
same revolution which levelled the Bastille, and converted Versailles and
the Trianon--the classic school in stone and terrace--into a moral
Herculaneum and Pompeii, drove the models of the so-called Augustan ages
into a museum of antiquarians. In our own country, the movement initiated
by Chatterton, Cowper, and Burns, was carried out by two classes of great
writers. They agreed in opposing freedom to formality; in substituting for
the old, new aims and methods; in preferring a grain of mother wit to a
peck of clerisy. They broke with the old school, as Protestantism broke
with the old Church; but, like the sects, they separated again.
Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, while refusing to acknowledge the
literary precedents of the past, submitted themselves to a self-imposed
law. The partialities of their maturity were towards things settled and
regulated; their favourite virtues, endurance and humility; their
conformity to established institutions was the basis of a new
Conservatism. The others were the Radicals of the movement: they
practically acknowledged no law but their own inspiration. Dissatisfied
with the existing order, their sympathies were with strong will and
passion and defiant independence. These found their master-types in
Shelley and in Byron.
A reaction is always an extreme. Lollards, Puritans, Covenanters, were in
some respects nauseous antidotes to ecclesiastical corruption. The ruins
of the Scotch cathedrals and of the French nobility are warnings at once
against the excess that provokes and the excess that avenges. The revolt
against the _ancien régime_ in letters made possible the Ode that is the
high-tide mark of modern English inspiration, but it was parodied in page
on page of maundering rusticity. Byron saw the danger, but was borne
headlong by the rapids. Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories
and his performance. Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by Rousseau;
but the former is, at furthest, a Girondin. The latter, acting like Danton
on the motto "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," sighs after _Henri
Quatre et Gabrièlle_. There is more of the spirit of the French Revolution
in _Don Juan_ than in all the works of the author's contemporaries; but
his criticism is that of Boileau, and when deliberate is generally absurd.
He never recognized the meaning of the artistic movement of his age, and
overvalued those of his works which the Unities helped to destroy. He
hailed Gifford as his Magnus Apollo, and put Rogers next to Scott in his
comical pyramid. "Chaucer," he writes, "I think obscene and contemptible."
He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called
the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same
spirit he writes: "In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all
Claudian." He saw--what fanatics had begun to deny--that Pope was a great
writer, and the "angel of reasonableness," the strong common sense of both
was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his
controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his
earnestness by his anger. "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age
can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all
times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence....
Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the _Dunciad_, or anything
that is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in
grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in
"worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the
paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his
model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judgment, that "personal
taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the
nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no doubt that Byron loved
praise as much as he affected to despise it. His note, on reading the
_Quarterly_ on his dramas, "I am the most unpopular man in England," is
like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he had little affinity,
moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his
determination to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded
of his phrase, "I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were
perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for
popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary
impulse of which he was the child.
Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect a nation or
an era, and who keep their own secrets. His verse and prose is alike
biographical, and the inequalities of his style are those of his career.
He lived in a glass case, and could not hide himself by his habit of
burning blue lights. He was too great to do violence to his nature, which
was not great enough to be really consistent. It was thus natural for him
to pose as the spokesman of two ages--as a critic and as an author; and of
two orders of society--as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in
both, he could never forget the one character in the other. To the last,
he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. "Vulgarity," he
writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black
guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at
times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things,
signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English
radicals; and it has been acutely remarked, that part of his final
interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic
memories, "where a man might be the champion of liberty without soiling
himself in the arena." He owed much of his early influence to the fact of
his moving in the circles of rank and fashion; but though himself steeped
in the prejudices of caste, he struck at them at times with fatal force.
Aristocracy is the individual asserting a vital distinction between itself
and "the muck o' the world." Byron's heroes all rebel against the
associative tendency of the nineteenth century; they are self-worshippers
at war with society; but most of them come to bad ends. He maligned
himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing
one whom with special significance we call a brother poet. "Allen," he
writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters....
What an antithetical mind!--tenderness, roughness--delicacy, coarseness--
sentiment, sensuality--soaring and grovelling--dirt and deity--all mixed
up in that one compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these
antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. Byron
had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every
thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the soldier at
Mesolonghi; but partly owing to meanness, partly to a sound instinct, his
memory has been more severely dealt with. The fact of his being a nobleman
helped to make him famous, but it also helped to make him hated. No doubt
it half spoiled him in making him a show; and the circumstance has
suggested the remark of a humourist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a
perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. But it
also exposed to the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything
but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions;
and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's "blatant
beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs
and Willies, sincerely reverential; much of _Don Juan_ would have seemed
to him "an atheist's laugh," and--a more certain superiority--he was
absolutely frank.
Byron, like Pope, was given to playing monkey-like tricks, mostly
harmless, but offensive to their victims. His peace of mind was dependent
on what people would say of him, to a degree unusual even in the irritable
race; and when they spoke ill he was, again like Pope, essentially
vindictive. The _Bards and Reviewers_ beats about, where the lines to
Atticus transfix with Philoctetes' arrows; but they are due to a like
impulse. Byron affected to contemn the world; but, say what he would, he
cared too much for it. He had a genuine love of solitude as an alterative;
but he could not subsist without society, and, Shelley tells us, wherever
he went, became the nucleus of it. He sprang up again when flung to the
earth, but he never attained to the disdain he desired.
We find him at once munificent and careful about money; calmly asleep amid
a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going to ride without a nervous
caution; defying augury, yet seriously disturbed by a gipsy's prattle. He
could be the most genial of comrades, the most considerate of masters, and
he secured the devotion of his servants, as of his friends; but he was too
overbearing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to
his real rivals. His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering
purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through
all his life and work,--a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of
laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride,
yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that
his errors can only half obscure.
Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was,
during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms
of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. The chief
among them were translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish,
Russian, Spanish. On the publication of Moore's _Life_, Lord Macaulay had
no hesitation in referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of
the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between
1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a
romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing
youth." It was a reaction, such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of
our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a
sign of immaturity as to admire everything.
The weariness, if not disgust, induced by a throng of more than usually
absurd imitators, enabled Carlyle, the poet's successor in literary
influence (followed with even greater unfairness by Thackeray), more
effectively to lead the counter-revolt. "In my mind," writes the former,
in 1839, "Byron has been sinking at an accelerated rate for the last ten
years, and has now reached a very low level.... His fame has been very
great, but I do not see how it is to endure; neither does that make him
great. No genuine productive thought was ever revealed by him to mankind.
He taught me nothing that I had not again to forgot." The refrain of
Carlyle's advice during the most active years of his criticism was, "Close
thy Byron, open thy Goethe." We do so, and find that the refrain of
Goethe's advice in reference to Byron is--"nocturnâ versate manu, versate
diurnâ." He urged Eckermann to study English that he might read him;
remarking, "A character of such eminence has never existed before, and
probably will never come again. The beauty of _Cain_ is such as we shall
not see a second time in the world.... Byron issues from the sea-waves
ever fresh. In _Helena_, I could not make use of any man as the
representative of the modern poetic era except him, who is undoubtedly the
greatest genius[1] of our century." Again: "Tasso's epic has maintained
its fame, but Byron is the burning bush, which reduces the cedar of
Lebanon to ashes.... The English may think of him as they please; this is
certain, they can show no (living) poet who is comparable to him.... But
he is too worldly. Contrast _Macbeth_, and _Beppo_, where you are in a
nefarious empirical world." On Eckermann's doubting "whether there is a
gain for pure culture in Byron's work," Goethe conclusively replies,
"There I must contradict you. The audacity and grandeur of Byron must
certainly tend towards culture. We should take care not to be always
looking for it in the decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great
promotes cultivation, as soon as we are aware of it."
[Footnote 1: Mr. Arnold wrongly objects to this translation of the
German "talent."]
This verdict of the Olympian as against the verdict of the Titan is
interesting in itself, and as being the verdict of the whole continental
world of letters. "What," exclaims Castelar, "does Spain not owe to Byron?
From his mouth come our hopes and fears. He has baptized us with his
blood. There is no one with whose being some song of his is not woven. His
life is like a funeral torch over our graves." Mazzini takes up the same
tune for Italy. Stendhal speaks of Byron's "Apollonic power;" and Sainte
Beuve writes to the same intent, with some judicious caveats. M. Taine
concludes his survey of the romantic movement with the remark: "In this
splendid effort, the greatest are exhausted. One alone--Byron--attains the
summit. He is so great and so English, that from him alone we shall learn
more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together."
Dr. Elze, ranks the author of _Harold_ and _Juan_ among the four greatest
English poets, and claims for him the intellectual parentage of Lamartine
and Musset in France, of Espronceda in Spain, of Puschkin in Russia, with
some modifications, of Heine in Germany, of Berchet and others in Italy.
So many voices of so various countries cannot be simply set aside: unless
we wrap ourselves in an insolent insularism, we are bound at least to ask
what is the meaning of their concurrent testimony. Foreign judgments can
manifestly have little weight on matters of form, and not one of the
above-mentioned critics is sufficiently alive to the egregious
shortcomings which Byron himself recognized. That he loses almost nothing
by translation is a compliment to the man, a disparagement to tho artist.
Very few pages of his verse even aspire to perfection; hardly a stanza
will bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into
clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with
a big brush were never meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between
his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax.
If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his
work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and
slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing
_currente calamo_, and disdaining the "art to blot." "I can never recast
anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling
back to my jungle." He said to Medwin, "Blank verse is the most difficult,
because every line must be good." Consequently, his own blank verse is
always defective--sometimes execrable. No one else--except, perhaps,
Wordsworth--who could write so well, could also write so ill. This fact in
Byron's case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity.
Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to
check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with
the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by
the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian
delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the
consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant
Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas
and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires. It
is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which
is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity.
If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for Byron any
absolute originality. His sources have been found in Rousseau, Voltaire,
Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri,
Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps
of the classics, and the Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age
is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist.
Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He
transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his
dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the notes jotted down
from other writers as he sailed on the Lake of Geneva. But he made them
his own by smelting the rough ore into bell metal. He brewed a cauldron
like that of Macbeth's witches, and from it arose the images of crowned
kings. If he did not bring a new idea into the world, he quadrupled the
force of existing ideas and scattered them far and wide. Southern critics
have maintained that he had a southern nature and was in his true element
on the Lido or under an Andalusian night. Others dwell on the English
pride that went along with his Italian habits and Greek sympathies. The
truth is, he had the power of making himself poetically everywhere at
home; and this, along with the fact of all his writings being perfectly
intelligible, is the secret of his European influence. He was a citizen of
the world; because he not only painted the environs, but reflected the
passions and aspirations of every scene amid which he dwelt.
A disparaging critic has said, "Byron is nothing without his
descriptions." The remark only emphasizes the fact that his genius was not
dramatic. All non-dramatic art is concerned with bringing before us
pictures of the world, the value of which lies half in their truth, half
in the amount of human interest with which they are invested. To
scientific accuracy few poets can lay claim, and Byron less than most; but
the general truth of his descriptions is acknowledged by all who have
travelled in the same countries. The Greek verses of his first
pilgrimage,--e.g. the night scene on the Gulf of Arta, many of the
Albanian sketches, with much of the _Siege of Corinth_ and the _Giaour_
--have been invariably commended for their vivid realism. Attention has
been especially directed to the lines in the _Corsair_ beginning--
But, lo! from high Hymettus to the plain,
as being the veritable voice of one
Spell-bound, within the clustering Cyclades.
The opening lines of the same canto, transplanted from the _Curse of
Minerva_, are even more suggestive:--
Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea's hill the setting sun,
Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light, &c.
In the same way, the later cantos of _Harold_ are steeped in Switzerland
and in Italy. Byron's genius, it is true, required a stimulus; it could
not have revelled among the daisies of Chaucer, or pastured by the banks
of the Doon or the Ouse, or thriven among the Lincolnshire fens. He had a
sincere, if somewhat exclusive, delight in the storms and crags that
seemed to respond to his nature and to his age. There is no affectation in
the expression of the wish, "O that the desert were my dwelling-place!"
though we know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still
craved for the gossip of the clubs. It only shows that--
Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.
Of Byron's two contemporary rivals, Wordsworth had no feverish blood;
nothing drove him to the world without; consequently his "eyes avert their
ken from half of human fate," and his influence, though perennial, will
always be limited. He conquered England from his hills and lakes; but his
spirit has never crossed the Straits which he thought too narrow. The
other, with a fever in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud,
and, in some degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to
mark the world at large. The poets' poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, he
bore the banner of the forlorn hope; but Byron, with his feet of clay, led
the ranks. Shelley, as pure a philanthropist as St. Francis or Howard,
could forget mankind, and, like his Adonaïs, become one with nature.
Byron, who professed to hate his fellows, was of them even more than for
them, and so appealed to them through a broader sympathy, and held them
with a firmer hand. By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was
enabled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many parts,
and to which his external universe of cloudless moons, and vales of
evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the various background. He
set the "anguish, doubt, desire," the whole chaos of his age, to a music
whose thunder-roll seems to have inspired the opera of _Lohengrin_--a
music not designed to teach or to satisfy "the budge doctors of the Stoic
fur," but which will continue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters
of men.
Madame de Staël said to Byron, at Ouchy, "It does not do to war with the
world: the world is too strong for the individual." Goethe only gives a
more philosophic form to this counsel when he remarks of the poet, "He put
himself into a false position by his assaults on Church and State. His
discontent ends in negation.... If I call _bad_ bad, what do I gain? But
if I call _good_ bad, I do mischief." The answer is obvious: as long as
men call _bad_ good, there is a call for iconoclasts: half the reforms of
the world have begun in negation. Such comments also point to the common
error of trying to make men other than they are by lecturing them. This
scion of a long line of lawless bloods--a Scandinavian Berserker, if there
ever was one--the literary heir of the Eddas--was specially created to
wage that war--to smite the conventionality which is the tyrant of England
with the hammer of Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles
the hollow hypocrisy--sham taste, sham morals, sham religion--of the
society by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but
succeeded in seducing him. But for the ethereal essence,--
The fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife,
Byron would have been merely a more melodious Moore and a more
accomplished Brummell. But the caged lion was only half tamed, and his
continual growls were his redemption. His restlessness was the sign of a
yet unbroken will. He fell and rose, and fell again; but never gave up the
struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul. His greatness as
well as his weakness lay, in the fact that from boyhood battle was the
breath of his being. To tell him not to fight, was like telling Wordsworth
not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of
challenge; and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an
unaccomplished campaign. His work is neither perfect architecture nor fine
mosaic; but, like that of his intellectual ancestors, the elder
Elizabethans whom he perversely maligned, it is all animated by the spirit
of action and of enterprise.
In good portraits his head has a lurid look, as if it had been at a higher
temperature than that of other men. That high temperature was the source
of his inspiration, and the secret of a spell which, during his life,
commanded homage and drew forth love. Mere artists are often mannikins.
Byron's brilliant though unequal genius was subordinate to the power of
his personality; he
Had the elements
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world--"This was a man."
We may learn much from him still, when we have ceased to disparage, as our
fathers ceased to idolize, a name in which there is so much warning and so
much example.
INDEX.
_Abydos, Bride of_
Adeline (Lady), analysis of female character
Albrizzi (Countess), salon of
Ali Pasha, his reception of Byron
Allegra, Byron's daughter
Athenians, character of
Athens
Aurora Raby, La Guiccioli idealised
Becher's, Rev. J.T., influence on Byron
_Beppo_
_Blackwood's Magazine_
Blessington, Lady
_Blues, The_
Boatswain (Byron's dog)
Bologna
Boston's _Fourfold State_
Bowers, Byron's tutor
Bowles, controversy about Pope
Bozzaris, Marco, death of
Brandes, Prof., criticism of Byron's bust
_British Review, To the Editor of the_
_Bronze, The Age of_
Brougham's, Lord, criticism of _Hours of Idleness_
Brown, Hamilton
Bruno, Dr.
Brydges, Sir Egerton, criticism of _Cain_
Burns
Burun, an ancestor of Byron
Butler, Dr., master of Harrow
Byron, Augusta Ada (the poet's daughter)
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord
genealogy;
birth;
residence at Ballater;
school-life;
early loves;
"first dash into poetry";
accession to peerage;
Baillie, Dr., medical adviser;
at Harrow;
coming of age;
writes review on Wordsworth;
Annesley, residence at;
at Cambridge;
takes seat in House of Lords;
travels;
studies Romaic;
Armenian;
attacks of fever;
speeches in House of Lords;
writes address on re-opening of Drury Lane Theatre;
publishes the _Giaour_;
friendship with Sir Walter Scott;
marriage;
separation from wife;
departure from England;
friendship with Shelley;
in Switzerland;
in Italy;
life in Venice
completes _Childe Harold_
life at Ravenna
at Pisa
relations with Leigh Hunt
life in Albaro
joins conspiracy in Italy
joins movement for liberation of Greece
leaves Italy
life in Greece
last illness and death
last words
funeral honours
Byron, Lord
allusions in his poetry to his training
appreciation of
aristocratic sentiments
Austria, hatred of, characteristics
characteristics of literature in Byron's age
cleverness
comparison with Shelley and Wordsworth
contemporary admiration
debts
defects of character
defects of his poetry
descriptive power
dislike of professional _littérateurs_
dissipations
dogmatism
early friends
financial affairs
follower of Pope
garrulity
idleness
knowledge of languages
knowledge of Scripture
in London society
lameness
love of mountains
melancholy
pecuniary profits
personal appearance
physical endurance
poetic character
politics
reading
relations to female sex
scholarship
Scotch superstition
social views
solitude
sources of Byron's work
swimming, feats of
tame bear
temper
theological views
verse-romances
women
estimate of
works translated
Byron, John, Admiral
Byron, John, of Clayton
Byron, John (father)
Byron, Lady (wife)
Byron, Mrs. (mother)
Byron, Richard (2nd Lord)
Byron, Robert de
Byron, Sir John (1st Lord)
Byron, Sir Nicholas
Byron, William (3rd Lord)
Byron, William (4th Lord)
Byron, William (5th Lord)
Cadiz, estimate of
_Cain_
Cambridge
Campbell, Thomas
Carbonari, a secret society
Carlisle, Lord
Carlyle
Castelar
_Cenci_
Charlotte, Princess
Chasles, criticism by
Chatterton
Chaucer
Chaworth, Mary Ann
Chaworth, Mr.
Chaworth, Viscount
Cheltenham
_Childe Harold_
criticism of
_Chillon, Prisoner of_
_Christabel_
_Churchill's Grave_
Civil Wars
Clairmont, Miss, intimacy with
Clare, Lord, friendship with
Clermont, Mrs., Lady Byron's maid
Cogni, Margarita, intimacy with
Coleridge
Colocatroni, the brigand
Constantinople
_Corinth, Siege of_
_Corsair_
_Could I remount the River of my Years_
Cowley
Cowper
Crabbe
_Curse of Minerva_
Dallas, R.C.
Dante
D'Arcy, Amelia (Countess Conyers)
_Darkness_
Davies, Scrope
Davy, Sir H.
_Deformed Transformed_
_Don Juan_
criticism of
Doomsday Book
Dramas (Byron's)
_Dream, The_
Drury, Dr. Joseph
Drury, Henry
Drury Lane Theatre
Drury, Mark
Dryden
Duff, Mary, intimacy with
Dulwich
Eddlestone, the chorister
_Edinburgh Review_
Ekenhead, Lieutenant
Eldon, Lord
Elgin, Lord
Elze
England's vice of hypocrisy
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_
English character
English literature
_Faery Queene_ (Spenser's)
Falkland, Lord
_Faust_, influence of, on Byron
Ferrara
Fletcher (valet)
Florence
_Foscari, The Two_
_Francesca of Rimini_
Frere
Galt
Gamba
Gell
Geneva
Genoa
George, Prince of Denmark
George III.
_Giaour_
Gibbon
Gibraltar
Gifford
_Glenarvon_ (Lady Caroline Lamb's novel)
Glennie, Dr.
Goethe
Gray, May, her influence over Byron
Gray (poet)
Greece
Grindelwald
Guiccioli
Hailstone, Prof.
Hanson, Mr., solicitor
Harness, a school-fellow
Harrogate, trip to
Harrow
Hawthorne
_Heaven and Earth_
Heber, Bishop
_Hebrew Melodies_
_Hints from Horace_
Hiron, a Cambridge tradesman
Hobhouse
Hodgson, Rev. F.
Holderness, Earl of
Holland, Lord
Hoppner
_Hours of Idleness_
Howard, Hon. F.
Howitt, William
Hucknall Torkard, church
_Hudibras_
Hunt, John
Hunt, Leigh
Ilissus
Ilium
_Island, The_
Italy
Ithaca
Jackson, Mr., a pugilist
Janina
Jeffrey
Jones (tutor)
Journal (Byron's)
Juliet, story of
Jungfrau
_Juvenilia_
Keats
Kemble, Frances Ann, memoirs of
Kennedy, Dr.
Kharyati
Kinnaird, Douglas
Kirkby Mallory
_Lalla Rookh_
Lamb, Lady Caroline
La Mira
_Landlord, Tales of a_
Landor
Lanfranchi
_Lara_
Lausanne
Lavender, a quack
Lee, Harriet
Leeds, Duke of
Leghorn
Leigh, Colonel
Leigh, Mrs. (poet's sister Augusta)
Loman, Lake
Lepanto
Lewis
_Liberal_, the
Lido
Lion (pet dog)
Lisbon
Lisle, Rouget de
Loch Leven
Locke
Lockhart
London
Londonderry, Lord
Long, Edward Noel
Longman
Loughborough
Lucca
Lucifer
Lushington, Dr.
Macaulay
Mackenzie (the Man of Feeling)
Mafra
Magellan, Straits of
Mallet
Malta
Mandeville, Sir John
_Manfred_
criticism of
Mansel, Dr. Lort
Marathon
Marilyn, Mrs.
_Marina Faliero_
criticism of
Marius
Marlowe
Martineau, Miss
Matlock
Matthews, C.S.
Mavrocordatos, Prince Alexander
Mayor, Dr.
_Mazeppa_
Mazzini
Medora (daughter of Mrs. Leigh)
Medwin, Captain
Meister, Wilhelm
Melbourne
Memoirs (Byron's)
Mesolonghi
Milan
Milbanke, Sir Ralph
Milligen (a physician)
Milton
Moore
Morea
Morgan, Lady
_Morgantc Maggiore_
Murray, Joe (butler)
Murray, John
Musters
Napier, Colonel
Naples
Napoleon
Newark
Newbury, battle of
Nowstead
Noel, Lady
Norton, Mrs.
_Nottingham_
Odysseus
Ossington
Oxford
Paganini
_Parisina_
Parker, Margaret, intimacy with
Parr, Dr.
Parry (engineer)
Parthenon
Paterson (a tutor)
Patras
Peel, Sir Robert
Peloponnesus
Pentelicus
Persia
Petrarch
Philopoemen
Pigot
Pisa
Plato's Glaucus
_Pleasures of Hope_
Po (river)
Polidori
Pope
Porson, 39
Power, Miss
_Prometheus_
Pulci
_Quarterly Review_
_Rambler_
Raphael
Ravenna
Regent, the
Regillus
Reid, Dr.
_Rejected Addresses_
Revolution, the French
Rhine
Rhoetian hill
Richter
Robinson, Crabb
Rochdale
Rochester
Rogers, Samuel, (poet)
Rogers (tutor)
Roman Catholic Emancipation, speech on behalf of
Roman Catholic religion
Rome
Ross (a tutor)
Rossina
Rousseau
Rubens
Rushton, Robert
Ruskin
Russell, Lord John
Russia
Ruthyn, Lord Grey de
Sainte Beuve
Santa Croce
_Saragassa, Maid of_
Sardanapalus
_Saturday Review_
Schlegel, F.
Scotland, allusions to
Scott, Sir Walter
Seaham
Segati, Mariana, intimacy with
Seville
Shakespeare
Shelley
Shelley, Mrs.
Shepherd, Mrs., letter of
Sheridan
Siddons, Mrs.
Sinclair, George, friend of Byron
Sligo, Marquis of
Smith, Mrs. Spencer ("Florence")
Smith, Sir Henry
Smyrna
Socrates
Soraete
Southey
Southwell
Spain
Spectator
Spencer, Earl
Spenser
Spielberg
Spinoza
Stael, Madame de
Stanhope, Colonel
Stanhope, Lady Hester
Staubbach
Stendhal
Stephen, Leslie
Stromboli
Suliotes
Swift
Swinstead
Switzerland
Taafe
Taine
Tasso
Tavell (a tutor)
_Telegrapho_(newspaper)
Tennant
Tennyson
Tepaleni
Thackeray
Thebes
Theresa (Maid of Athens)
Thorwaldsen
Tickhill
Titian
Trelawny
Turkey
Tusculum
University training
_Vampire, The_
Vanessa
Vathi
Venice
Verona
"Victory," the
_Vision of Judgment_
Voltaire
"Wager," the
_Waltz, The,_
Washington
Waterloo
Watkins, Dr. John
Wellington
Wengern
_Werner_
West (artist)
Westminster Abbey
Wildman
Williams, Captain
Wingfield, John
Woodhouselee, Lord
Wordsworth
_World_
Wycliffe
York
Yussuf Pasha
Zante
Zitza
THE END.