the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by
publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical
romances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' (pronounced by
Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of
Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' These were composed not only with remarkable
facility but in the utmost haste, sometimes a whole poem in only a few days
and sometimes in odds and ends of time snatched from social diversions. The
results are only too clearly apparent; the meter is often slovenly, the
narrative structure highly defective, and the characterization superficial
or flatly inconsistent. In other respects the poems are thoroughly
characteristic of their author. In each of them stands out one dominating
figure, the hero, a desperate and terrible adventurer, characterized by
Byron himself as possessing 'one virtue and a thousand crimes,' merciless
and vindictive to his enemies, tremblingly obeyed by his followers,
manifesting human tenderness only toward his mistress (a delicate romantic
creature to whom he is utterly devoted in the approved romantic-sentimental
fashion), and above all inscrutably enveloped in a cloud of pretentious
romantic melancholy and mystery. Like Childe Harold, this impossible and
grandiose figure of many incarnations was well understood by every one to
be meant for a picture of Byron himself, who thus posed for and received in
full measure the horrified admiration of the public. But in spite of all
this melodramatic clap-trap the romances, like 'Childe Harold,' are filled
with the tremendous Byronic passion, which, as in 'Childe Harold,' lends
great power alike to their narrative and their description.

Byron now made a strangely ill-judged marriage with a Miss Milbanke, a
woman of the fashionable world but of strict and perhaps even prudish moral
principles. After a year she left him, and 'society,' with characteristic
inconsistency, turned on him in a frenzy of superficial indignation. He
shortly (1816) fled from England, never to return, both his colossal vanity