November 30, 1807, to which we are indebted for our knowledge of the extent of his studies. In the midst of his rollicking set at Cambridge he was secretly girding up his loins, and collecting his powers to make a grand struggle for fame. Perhaps no poet was ever drawn out so directly by the thirst for public honour; no poet ever appealed so directly to the public eye and heart. He launched himself bodily before the world, almost ravenous for sympathy and homage.
It is generally said that but for the savage attack of the Edinburgh Review in the spring of 1808 Byron might never have returned to poetry. But the fact is that the review did not appear till a year after the publication of Hours of Idleness, and in the interval Byron, for all his farewell to poetry, was "scribbling," as he called it, more furiously than ever. "I have written," he wrote to Miss Pigott, six months before the Edinburgh attack, "214 pages of a novel; one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks with notes; 560 lines of Bosworth Field, and 250 lines of another poem in rhyme, besides half a dozen smaller pieces. The poem to be published is a satire." This satire was the poem which he afterwards converted into a reply to the Edinburgh Review. He anticipated censure, and fore-armed himself always as eager to defy reproof as he was to win applause. Apparently he put off publishing his satire till all his critics should have had their say, and he should know clearly where to hit. When the attack came it wounded him bitterly; but a friend who called on him at the time thought from the fierce light in his eye that he had received a challenge. He was in no hurry to publish; he worked at leisure, with a confident consciousness of his powers, and English Bards and Scotch Revieivers did not make its appearance till the spring of 1809. When it did appear the authorship was soon discovered, and it was the talk of the town. To us who look back upon it dispassionately, and compare its somewhat heavy and mechanical couplets with the exquisite lightness and fitting-point of its antitype the Dunciad, the satire appears to possess no great force; but the personalities told at the time, when there was a vague unrest in the literary world at the out spoken severity and sometimes truculent malice of the Scotch review, and the injured poet had his revenge in a general acknowledgment that the objects of his wrath deserved castigation, and that the lash was well laid on.
Soon after the publication of his satire, Byron, in June 1809, left for his travels on the Continent; and one would have expected that the young lord, with the wreath of triumph still fresh on his head after his first literary battle, would have gone on his journey with satisfaction and hopeful curiosity. He sailed in deep dejection, with all the bitterness of a man who feels himself friendless and solitary, and he returned after two years wandering in Spain, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor, sadder than before. Why was this? Those who identify him with his own Childe Harold, are ready with the answer that he had lived a life of dissolute pleasure, and was already, at the age of twenty-one, experiencing the pains of satiety and exhaustion. But this is not borne out by such scanty light as he and his friends have thrown on his life at this period. He himself always protested, both in public and private, against being identified with Childe Harold. Childe Harold's manor was an old monastic residence; he left his country in bitter sadness; in the original MS. his name was Childe Burun; he left behind hi.m a mother and a sister; and he passed through the scenes of Byron's travels. But there the resemblance ends. The resemblance is really confined, as the author alleged, to local details. There is no reason to disbelieve what the author affirmed, that Childe Harold was a purely fictitious character, "introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece." To make him what he intended "a modern Timon, perhaps a poetical Zeluco," the poet drew, no doubt, upon his own gloomier moods; he felt occasionally as he makes Harold feel habitually, but the process was much more dramatic than the world, in spite of his pro tests, took for granted. Byron, with all his bitter moods of forlorn despondency, was too susceptible a spirit to "stalk in joyless reverie" through the south of Europe, as his letters home testify. And we know that his picture of the Bacchanalian feasts in the monastery, with "Paphian girls," and "flatterers and parasites," is not at all like what actually occurred at Newstead Abbey. There were no "laughing dames" there, except the domestics, and the flatterers and parasites were his bosom friends whom he loved with a romantic ardour. They held "high jinks" there as any young men might have clone, masqueraded about in monkish habits to be in whimsical conformity with the place, practised pistol-shooting in the old hall, had a wolf and a bear chained at the entrance, had the garden dug up in search of concealed treasure, found a skull there, had it made into a cup, and passed this cup round after dinner, with the conceit that their mouths did it less harm than the worms, and that when its wit had ceased to sparkle, it had better be filled with Burgundy to make other wits sparkle than lie rotting in the earth. Byron himself was too poor, as Moore has remarked, to keep a harem, had such been his wish. He is known to have had a romantic passion for a girl who used to travel with him in England in boy's clothes; but whoever thinks he was satiated with this poor creature's devotion to him, should read the concluding stanzas of the second canto of Childe Harold, where the poet speaks in his own person, and laments her death in language utterly out of keeping with the dark unfeeling mood of his "modern Timon." One can then understand why he should have said that " he would not for worlds be a man like his hero." There is really very little of the personage Childe Harold in the poem; the poet simply has him by his side as a connecting link, while he describes the scenes through which he passed. In the two last cantos, indeed, Byron, angry that the public had identified him with Childe Harold, and then more defiant of public opinion, hardly cared to keep up the separation between his own character and the pilgrim's; and in the last canto he avowedly makes them coalesce.
To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest; but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world's money, and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was thereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron's youthful gloom than satiety of this world's pleasures. His embarrassed finances, and the impossibility of securing the respect due to his title, formed a constant source of annoyance, put his whole system into a morbid condition, in which every little slight and repulse festered and rankled with exaggerated virulence. From the daily humiliations and impertinences to which his false position exposed him, aggravated by his jealous and suspicious irritability, he may have turned sometimes to Childe Harold's consolations "the harlot and the bowl," but his nature prompted him rather to forget his vexations in purer and worthier objects. Unfortunately for him, such impetuous and passionate affections as his could rarely find the response for which he craved. In those few cases where devotion was repaid with devotion, the warmth of his gratitude was unbounded; he loaded poor Thyrza's memory with caresses, careless of what the world might say, remembering only that the poor girl clung to him with unselfish love; and he returned his sister's tender regard with an ardour and constancy that showed how highly he prized and how eagerly he reciprocated
