INTRODUCTION.

BEFORE reading the verse of a poet we often desire to know what manner of man he was: after a first reading this desire is frequently strengthened. Some poets have protested that the public ought not to desire to know their histories, that what they have published belongs to the world, but that the details of their lives do not. Their readers and admirers, however, have seldom respected this protest, especially in modern times, but crave still to know more and more about all great poets. Many readers indeed find literary history the most fascinating kind of reading. Even if in other cases this claim for privacy be allowed, it need not hold in the case of Byron, for Byron, so far from being among the poets that wish to keep their lives private and hidden, tried to interest his readers in his most intimate, domestic griefs. He never separated his poetry from his own private history. The critics have often pointed out that in his various poems he is generally himself the subject, though under various disguises.

The object of this Introduction is, first, to sketch the story of Byron's life, and to show the manner of man he was; secondly to give an account of Childe Harold; and

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finally to set forth the nature and characteristics, the merits and defects, of Byron's poetry in general. But as it is of course impossible here to make a complete study of so large a mass of poetry, many of his poems are not even named.

LIFE.

George Gordon Byron was born in London on January 22nd, 1788. He is one of the long list of poets who by their birth have made England's capital the place in the world most prolific of poets. Here is a list of their names :-Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, Browning, D. G. Rossetti, W. Morris. Add to these the name of Byron, and no other town can show such a birth-roll of poets.

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He came of a very old family. His own words are:'My name . . . had been a knightly or noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman." An earlier origin still may be traced, as there was a "Burun❞ amongst those Northmen who, by settling in the lower valley of the Seine, gave Normandy its name. Byron tells us that he had ancestors who were Crusaders. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII., Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire was conferred upon a Byron. In the Civil Wars the Byrons were strong royalists. Seven brothers of the name fought on the king's side at the indecisive battle of Edgehill, and four of them fell on the more fatal field of Marston Moor. By Charles I. the first Lord Byron was rewarded with a peerage.

Early in the eighteenth century the fourth Lord Byron

married a lady of the house of Berkeley, and it would seem as if an adventurous, almost a wild strain, were thus imported into the Byron family. The fifth Lord Byron, the poet's great uncle, had the unpleasant nickname of "the wicked lord." He was undoubtedly most eccentric; once he was tried for murder, and escaped through a privilege of his order. In a room lighted only by a single candle and without witnesses he had fought a duel with a neighbour, and killed his man. At Newstead he had lived a lonely life, shunned by every one, and amusing himself like a child. When he died

he was succeeded by the poet, aged ten.

The wicked lord's brother, the Hon. John Byron, was a gallant sailor. As a midshipman he had sailed in Anson's squadron that in 1740 was sent on a voyage into the Pacific. His ship, the "Wager," was wrecked on the coast of Chili; escaping, he went through various hardships, described by him in a Narrative not published until many years later. The poet took hints for a shipwreck in Don Juan from his "grand-dad's narrative." The Hon. John Byron rose to the rank of admiral; but his best known service was a voyage into the Pacific, where he was a predecessor of Cook, though it is doubtful whether he 66 was cut out" for an explorer. He was not gifted with the patience of Cook, and the results achieved by his voyage were inconsiderable. Though his manners were pleasant, sailors did not like to ship with him on account of his bad luck. Amongst them he was known as "Foul-weather Jack."

Admiral Byron had two sons, of whom the elder was a handsome, fascinating but unprincipled man, known about town as "Mad Jack Byron," who married twice.

His second wife, the poet's mother, was a Miss Gordon. She was of good family, and had the blood of the Stuarts in her veins; but she was not well educated, and she was afflicted with a shocking bad temper. Her husband wasted her money, which at best hardly amounted to a fortune, and then deserted her. The poet was born in lodgings in London, but the years of his childhood were spent in poverty in Aberdeen. Unfortunately he was born with a slight malformation that has often been misdescribed. The tendon Achilles of each foot was so contracted that he could not set the heel to the ground, but was obliged to walk on the ball of the foot and the toes. The most skilful advice of the day was obtained, but it was not skilfully carried out, and Byron was never able to run like other boys, nor to walk like other men.

At the age of three the poet lost his father: at six, through the death of a cousin, he became heir to the peerage, and he succeeded to it at the age of ten.

It may be truly said that the young Byron was "spoilt" by his mother. At times she would overwhelm him with tenderness: this is the conventional sense of "spoiling." Then she would burst out into fierce and violent abuse of him, even taunting the poor child with lameness. "I was born so, mother," he replied: and he has introduced the taunt and the reply into one of his plays. This method of treating the child the unwise mother continued towards the growing boy. Violent scenes took place between them, the measure of their violence being the story that, after one such scene, mother and son each visited the neighbouring druggist to warn him not to furnish the other with the means for suicide.

By origin Byron was half a Scotchman. Amongst the mountains of his mother's country, "land of the mountain and the flood," he first imbibed his love of wild natural scenery. In later years he was sometimes vexed if people thought him Scotch, but his own humorous account remained true:

"I scotch'd, not kill'd, the Scotchman in my blood."

The poet's earliest training may be said to have been given him by a Scotch nurse, a rigid Calvinist, who gave him that affection for the Old Testament which appears in part of his poetry, such, for instance, as the Hebrew Melodies. Byron was quite a little boy, only five, when he went to a grammar school in Aberdeen. Afterwards he was for a while at a school in Dulwich, where his mother injudiciously interfered with his schooling. Byron's most famous school was the great public school of Harrow. For a while he was profoundly miserable there, but during the last year and a half, having become a leader in the school, he was exceed ingly happy. "I was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could, or can be, more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason ;—a part of the time passed there as the happiest of my life." For Dr. Drury, the headmaster, he felt a warm affection and admiration: when in Childe Harold1 he attacked the premature study of Horace, he added a note to soften the attack into one on methods of teaching rather than on the study of the classics altogether, and in this note he especially praised Drury. There is still shown in the churchyard on Harrow Hill a tomb

1 IV. lxxv.-lxxvii.