and his truer sensitive self stung by the injustice to fury against the
hypocrisy and conventionalities of English life, which, in fact, he had
always despised. He spent the following seven years as a wanderer over
Italy and central Europe. He often lived scandalously; sometimes he was
with the far more fine-spirited Shelley; and he sometimes furnished money
to the Italians who were conducting the agitation against their tyrannical
foreign governments. All the while he was producing a great quantity of
poetry. In his half dozen or more poetic dramas he entered a new field. In
the most important of them, 'Manfred,' a treatment of the theme which
Marlowe and Goethe had used in 'Faust,' his real power is largely thwarted
by the customary Byronic mystery and swagger. 'Cain' and 'Heaven and
Earth,' though wretchedly written, have also a vaguely vast imaginative
impressiveness. Their defiant handling of Old Testament material and
therefore of Christian theology was shocking to most respectable Englishmen
and led Southey to characterize Byron as the founder of the 'Satanic
School' of English poetry. More significant is the longest and chief of his
satires, 'Don Juan,' [Footnote: Byron entirely anglicized the second word
and pronounced it in two syllables--Ju-an.] on which he wrote
intermittently for years as the mood took him. It is ostensibly the
narrative of the adventures of a young Spaniard, but as a story it rambles
on formlessly without approaching an end, and its real purpose is to serve
as an utterly cynical indictment of mankind, the institutions of society,
and accepted moral principles. Byron often points the cynicism by lapsing
into brilliant doggerel, but his double nature appears in the occasional
intermingling of tender and beautiful passages.

Byron's fiery spirit was rapidly burning itself out. In his uncontrolled
zest for new sensations he finally tired of poetry, and in 1823 he accepted
the invitation of the European committee in charge to become a leader of
the Greek revolt against Turkish oppression. He sailed to the Greek camp at