Byron was profoundly unhappy, and it was to find happiness that he plunged, without reflection, into his luckless marriage with Miss Millbanke, to whom he had proposed and been rejected in 1813. She now accepted him, and in January 1815 they were married. For a year the ill-assorted couple lived together in tolerable comfort; then, suddenly, Lady Byron took advantage of a visit she was paying to her family in Leicestershire, to announce to her husband in London that she should not return to him. She demanded a legal separation,

but doggedly refused to state her reasons, and in spite of reams of commentary and conjecture we are as much in the dark to-day. as regards the real causes of the separation, as the gossips were eighty years ago. It is certain that, at first, the poet was patient and conciliatory, but, under his wife's obduracy, his temper broke down, and with extraordinary want of tact he made the public his confidants. His violent popularity had for some time been waning, and this want of prudence destroyed it the whole British nation went over in sympathy to the insulted wife. On what grounds the public formed their opinion it is still difficult to discover, but, as Byron said, "it was general and it was decisive." The poet was accused of every crime, and before the storm of obloquy his pride and his sensitiveness recoiled; he turned and fled from England, settling himself "by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes himself to the waters." In April 1816 he left London for Ostend, and he never set foot in his native land again. He brought with him a coach and a retinue; in Brussels the former was exchanged for a calèche, in which he travelled to Geneva. Here he formed an intimacy with Shelley, with whom he took many excursions on the lake, being nearly wrecked on one occasion. The Shelleys left Geneva for England in September, and Byron set out on a journey through Switzerland, of which Manfred was the result. This first year of exile was highly productive of poetry; to 1816 belong The Prisoner of Chillon, The Dream, Childe Harold, Canto III., and many of Byron's finest lyrics. In October he started for Italy, and settled in Venice for several months. The year 1817 was spent either in that city or in restless wanderings over the length and breadth of Italy; in the autumn he rented a small villa at Este. His life now became absolutely reckless and wildly picturesque; a whole romantic legend gathered around it, which Byron himself was at no pains to reprove. He became, as one of his own servants said, "a good gondolier, spoiled by being a poet and a lord." Intellectually and imaginatively, it is plain that this romantic, lawless life suited Byron's temperament admirably. It was at this time that he wrote with the greatest vigour. Early in 1818 he finished Beppo, later he composed Mazeppa, and

Palazzo Guiccioli, Ravenna

in the winter of that year he began Don Juan. At this time he had the charge of

his little daughter Allegra, whom in the summer of 1820 he put to school with the nuns at Cavalli Bagni; in April 1822 she died, to Byron's bitter sorrow, at the age of five years. Early in 1819 the poet began his liaison with Theresa, Countess Guiccioli, a beautiful young woman of the Romagna, who fell violently in love with him. Byron came over to Ravenna to visit her in June, and stayed with her there and at Bologna till nearly the end of the year. After a brief cessation of their loves he joined her again at Ravenna early in 1820; this was a period of comparative quietude, and Byron wrote Marino Faliero, The Prophecy of Dante, and the fourth and fifth cantos of Don Juan. "This connection with La Guiccioli," as Shelley clearly observed, was "an inestimable benefit" to Byron; the younger poet conceived the idea of bringing the lovers over to Pisa, a safer town for them than Ravenna.

Shelley secured the Palazzo Lanfranchi, and Byron took up his abode there in November 1821. He brought with him three dramas composed in Ravenna,

The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus,

and Cain. At Pisa Byron resumed his eager poetic activity, and in 1822 finished Werner, The Deformed Transformed, and Heaven and I arth, more or less daring examples of his new passion for romantic drama. Cain, in particular, awakened a storm of hostility among the orthodox in England, and the name of Byron became anathema; there was even a suggestion that the publisher should be proceeded against. It was in the midst of this fanatic storm that Byron still more audaciously outraged British respectability with what is perhaps the finest of all his writings, The Vision of Judgment (1822), and this time the printer was prosecuted and fined. Byron's breach with all that was respectable in England was now

complete; he gave up any idea of returning. In July the drowning of Shelley was a great shock to Byron, and, the Tuscan police about this time becoming very troublesome, he left Pisa and settled with La Guiccioli near Genoa, at the Villa Saluzzo; this was his last Italian home. Here he took up Don Juan once more, and here he wrote The Island and The Age of Bronze. Byron now became greatly interested in the war of Greek independence; he was elected a member of the Greek committee of government, and began to think that he might be useful in the Morea. In July 1823 he started from Genoa with money, arms, and medicines for the revolutionaries. After landing at Leghorn, where he received an epistle in verse from Goethe, Byron reached Kephalonia in August and stayed there until December. There was a suggestion that the Greeks should make him their king, and he said, "If they make me the offer, I will perhaps not reject it." In the last days of 1823 he arrived with all his retinue at Missolonghi, received "as if he were the Messiah."

Palazzo Lanfranchi, Pisa

From a Photograph

But he was soon attacked by an illness, which took the form of rheumatic fever.

On the 19th of April 1824 he died at Missolonghi"England had lost her brightest genius, Greece her noblest friend." His body was embalmed and sent to England, where burial in Westminster Abbey was applied for and refused to it; on the 16th of July Byron was buried at Hucknall Torkard. In 1830, when the scandal caused by his adventures had begun to die away, Moore published his Life and Letters of Byron, which revealed the poet as a brilliant and racy writer of easy prose. Without question, Dyron is among the most admirable of English letter-writers, and his correspondence offers a valuable commentary on his works in verse. In the final edition of his works

Missolonghi

brought out by Mr. R. E. Prothero between 1898 and 1903, the mass of Byron's letters is almost doubled. The beauty of Byron was proverbial; he had dark curled hair, a pale complexion, great elegance, and, notwithstanding his slight deformity, activity of figure, with eyes the most lustrous ever seen. His restlessness, his selfconsciousness, his English pride, his Italian passion, the audacity and grandeur of his dreams, his "fatal" fascination, made him, and make him still, the most interesting personality in the history of English literature.

FROM "PROMETHEUS.”

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,

And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

The ruling principle of Hate,

Which for its pleasure doth create

The things it may annihilate,

Refused thee even the boon to die :

The wretched gift Eternity

Was thine-and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,

That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy godlike crime was to be kind,

To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen Man with his own mind;

But baffled as thou wert from high,

Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit :

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee

His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence :
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry

Its own concentred recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory!