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Lord Byron
by
At Geneva began the most interesting friendship between Byron and that other young man, so like and yet so unlike him.
Only a few years and Byron was to search the shores of the Mediterranean for Shelley’s dead body, and finding it, be one of the friends who reduced it to ashes.
Tiring of Geneva and the tourists who pointed him out as a curiosity, we find Byron and his little party making their way across the Simplon, to cross which is an epoch in the life of any man, and then down by the Lago Maggiore to Milan.
“The Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron–the art of painting never did–this was his most marked limitation. From Milan they wandered down through Italy to Verona and Venice.
The third Canto of “Childe Harold,” “Manfred,” and dozens of shorter poems had been sent to Murray. England read and paid for all that Byron wrote, and accepted it all as autobiography. Possibly Byron’s defiant manner lent an excuse for this, but by applying similar rules we could convict Sophocles, Schiller and Shelley of basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron’s sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man’s misdoings, he himself it was who suffered most.
The Countess Guiccioli, it seems, was the only woman who comprehended his nature sufficiently to lead him in the direction of peace and poise. With her, for the first time, he began to systematize his life on a basis of sanity. They lived together for five years, and from the time he met her until his death no other love came to separate them.
Throughout his life Byron was a man in revolt; and it was only a variation of the old passion for freedom that led him to Greece and to his grave. The personal bravery of the man was proven more than once in his life, and on the approach of death he was undismayed. When he passed away, April Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-four, Stanhope wrote, “England has lost her brightest genius–Greece her best friend.”
His body was returned to England, denied burial in Westminster, and now rests in the old church at Hucknall, near Newstead.