He was now settled at his inherited estate of Newstead Abbey (one of the
religious foundations given to members of the nobility by Henry VIII when
he confiscated them from the Church), and had made his appearance in his
hereditary place in the House of Lords; but following his instinct for
excitement and for doing the expensively conspicuous thing he next spent
two years on a European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey. In Greece
he traveled, as was necessary, with a large native guard, and he allowed
reports to become current that he passed through a succession of romantic
and reckless adventures. The first literary result of his journey was the
publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a
dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author
himself; but Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the
series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which the first two cantos
consist. He soon abandoned also the attempt to secure an archaic effect by
the occasional use of Spenserian words, but he wrote throughout in
Spenser's stanza, which he used with much power. The public received the
poem with the greatest enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his
well-known comment: 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In fact,
'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works, though the third and
fourth cantos, published some years later, and dealing with Belgium, the
battle of Waterloo, and central Europe, are superior to the first two. Its
excellence consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a
descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely vivid in
themselves, are permeated with intense emotion and often serve only as
introductions to passionate rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely
lyrical.

Though Byron always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of