A History of English Literature

poetically it could not vie with the Lyrical Ballads.’ Scott followed up its huge success
with other verse-romances including Marmionand The Lady of the Lake, until Byron
captured this market. He then wrote, anonymously (see p. 249), a series of historical
novels which gave a new example to English literature and to modern civilization.

Younger Romantics

Lord Byron

George Gordon,Lord Byron(1788–1824) had a wild ancestry, a Calvinist child-
hood, handsome looks and a club foot. Inheriting his title unexpectedly, he lived
noisily at Harrow and Cambridge, creating an image by athletic and libertine
exploits. The ‘craving for extraordinary incident’ noted by Wordsworth could be
‘hourly gratified’ in the Regency by spoilt noblemen, among them the Prince Regent.
The Romantic Poet, spontaneously producing poems as a tree does leaves or a
thundercloud lightning, was more intriguing to journalists and to society than mere
poems. A composite image of poet-as-flawed-genius took elements from the opium
addiction of Coleridge; from Byron and Shelley scattering wives, lovers, children and
debts across Europe; and from the younger Romantics’ early deaths. Rousseau and
Napoleon preceded Byron, but he was the first British poet to become the hero-
villain of a publicity cult.
On leaving Cambridge, Byron pursued adventure in Iberia, Malta and the Turkish
empire. These travels contributed to the first two cantos of his mock-medieval
romance,Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1812:

Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth, once upon a time Britain’s

Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight; not at all

But spent his days in riot most uncouth,

And vex’d with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.

Ah,me! in sooth he was a shameless wight creature

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.

Childe Harold was he hight. called

Childe is a medieval title of chivalry, and Byron (for it is transparently himself )
claims a lineage stained with ancestral crime. The revels he boasts of took place at
Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, his inherited seat. He takes his Spenserian stan-
zas from Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748),in which Indolence seems a
ve nial sin.Childe Harold is unrepentant:

Apart he stalk’d in joyless reverie,

And from his native land resolv’d to go,

And visit scorching lands beyond the sea;

With pleasure almost drugg’d he almost long’d for woe,

And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’, Byron wrote, but the fame was
no accident. He never stopped writing, nor being guilty, unrepentant and famous.
The poetic autobiographer mentions his love for his daughter and his half-sister, but

THE ROMANTIC POETS 237