"Lord Byron," the Scottish critics now remarked, "has improved much since we last had his work under review. This new volume is full of originality and talent; the author herein makes amends for the literary sins of his youth, and does more, for he promises to give us better work still." Lord Byron received £600 for the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, and so great was its success that, for the third part, he was paid £1575, and for the fourth £2100. It was said then, and with some truth, that he sold his poems at the rate of a guinea a line. With success came popularity. All the world wanted to see this poet who had appeared suddenly among them like a brilliant meteor, lighting up the darkness of the night, and to buy his works. They beheld his face and saw that he was beautiful; they uttered his name and remembered that, by his father, he came of an illustrious race, and, by his mother, being descended from Jane Stuart, daughter of James II. of Scotland, he had royal blood in his veins. He had said in his poem that he had seen everything worth seeing and was bored with it all, that he had committed all kinds of sins and even crimes; he had said--a most extraordinary confession for a poet of only twenty-five years of age--that he could not fall in love with even the most beautiful of women London had to show. _Those pale and languid flowers of the Norths_, as he called them, vowed, in their turn, to make him break his oath. It was not a difficult matter for those who knew Lord Byron; many succeeded without much effort; Lady Caroline Lamb succeeded best of all. She was the daughter of the Earl of Bamborough, and had married, in 1805, William Lamb, second son of Lord Melbourne. Byron fell madly in love with her, and offered to run away with her; but she declined. What was the cause of the bitter rupture between them that ended in Lady Lamb writing the novel called _Glenarvon_ against her former lover, and in his treating her with great disdain throughout the remainder of his life? We should probably have found an answer to these questions in the Memoirs of Lord Byron that Thomas Moore burnt. Who knows? perhaps he burnt them on account of that episode. After this quarrel, Byron earned a reputation for being a dandy; he became the fashionable frequenter of watering-places and of aristocratic assemblies. But this kind of life ended as it was sure to do, in weariness and in disgust; and on 27 February 1814 the poet wrote:-- "Here I am, alone, instead of dining at Lord H.'s, where I was asked,--but not inclined to go anywhere. Hobhouse says I am growing a _loup garou_,--a solitary hobgoblin. True:--'I am myself alone.'"