It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was not only a scamp but a hero--or, alternatively, because he was not only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like _Don Juan_, reveal him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit, but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess and abstinence have utterly destroyed--oh, unsentimental word!--my stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing, whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet, he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a better heart than mine. What shall I do--shall I advertise?” About the same time he was writing concerning women in general: I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye _fourth_ wing of her _second_ chicken to mind anything that was not material.