Byron, like Pope, was given to playing monkey-like tricks, mostly harmless, but offensive to their victims. His peace of mind was dependent on what people would say of him, to a degree unusual even in the irritable race; and when they spoke ill he was, again like Pope, essentially vindictive. The _Bards and Reviewers_ beats about, where the lines to Atticus transfix with Philoctetes' arrows; but they are due to a like impulse. Byron affected to contemn the world; but, say what he would, he cared too much for it. He had a genuine love of solitude as an alterative; but he could not subsist without society, and, Shelley tells us, wherever he went, became the nucleus of it. He sprang up again when flung to the earth, but he never attained to the disdain he desired.
We find him at once munificent and careful about money; calmly asleep amid a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going to ride without a nervous caution; defying augury, yet seriously disturbed by a gipsy's prattle. He could be the most genial of comrades, the most considerate of masters, and he secured the devotion of his servants, as of his friends; but he was too overbearing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to his real rivals. His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through all his life and work,--a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half obscure.
Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was, during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. The chief among them were translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish, Russian, Spanish. On the publication of Moore's _Life_, Lord Macaulay had no hesitation in referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing youth." It was a reaction, such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a sign of immaturity as to admire everything.