The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse's Diary, "all this time engaged in writing a long poem in the S...

Baffled in love, Byron returned to Harrow, after a term's absence, in January 1804, and remained there for another eighteen months. This eighteen months is the period during whi...

July 1811 saw Byron back in England after two years' absence, but in no hurry, for various reasons, to return to Newstead. The "venerable pile" had been desecrated by the invasi...

"From Brussels," as Moore magniloquently puts it, "the noble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine." At Geneva he joined Shelley and his party who had taken the shorter r...

Captain and Mrs. Byron, finding themselves impoverished, left Holles Street, and retired to Aberdeen, to live on an income of £150 a year. Augusta having been taken off their ha...

A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron's life alike as an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to...

The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed, that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period anterior to his marriage--the...

The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron's life, and was presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so,...

For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathere...

A book might be written--indeed more than one book has been written--about that picturesque last phase of Byron's life which dazzled the imagination of mankind. Coming to it at...

The origin of Byron's revolutionary opinions is wrapped in mystery. He certainly was not born a revolutionist; there is no record of his becoming one for definite reasons at any...

Hobhouse, as we have seen, had an early inkling of the trouble which was to come; and it is not to be supposed that the brief entries in his Diary chronicle the whole of his kno...

One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a city. Already, in his second te...

Countess Guiccioli speaks of Byron's regard for her as "the serious attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his whole heart, and induced him to live an i...

First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be sa...

Even at the time when the draper's and baker's wives were quarrelling over their claims to his attentions--even at the time when the baker's wife was routing the rest of the har...

The poems written during the dark period of Byron's life which we have now to consider are "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and "Lara." Mr. Ernest Hartley Col...

Mrs. Spencer Smith was the daughter of an Austrian Ambassador and the wife of an English Minister Plenipotentiary. "Married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point of c...

The glory has long since departed from the grand tour. We all take it nowadays, with less and less sense of adventure, and more and more expectation of home comforts. Sir Henry...

It was while Byron was at Pisa that his natural daughter, the little Allegra, died, after a rapid illness, of typhus fever at her Convent School. He disliked her mother--we have...

Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circumstances of Byron's separation from his wife, there is, at any rate, nothing to perplex us in the train of events which brought ab...

The Journal is only a fragment, kept only for five months. It is a record rather of emotions than of events--the chronicle of the emotions of a man who feels the need of talking...

Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as Byron "woke up one morning and found himself famous," so the British public woke up one morning and found...

The end was not to come, as Byron may have hoped, on the field of battle. It was his health, as he had apprehended (though without, for that reason, taking any special care of i...

Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be regarded as distinct, though...

As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could sometimes unbend in a non-committal...

She received one letter in which Byron, after speaking of "a sense of duty to your husband and mother" declared that "no other in word or deed shall ever hold the place in my af...

How far Byron was candid with his friends it is, of course, impossible to say. We know neither what he told them nor what he left untold. All that is on record is their opinion,...

The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years elapsed before they distinguish...

The Byron scandal slowly fell asleep, and was allowed to slumber for about half a century. Even the publication of Moore's Life did not awaken it. People took sides, indeed, as...

Byron's separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of Lady Bessborough. "Received a note...

From Ravenna to Pisa, from Pisa to Genoa, from Genoa to Cephalonia, from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and an untimely death in a great cause still very far from victory--these are...