They read it, and made the men read it too. It was recognised, as such things come to be recognised, that any one who had not read it would be liable to feel foolish wherever the "best" people were gathered together. The first edition, issued on March 10, 1812, was sold out in three days. There was a second edition in April, a third in June, a fourth in September, a fifth in December, a sixth in August 1813, a seventh in February 1814. By 1819, an eleventh edition had been reached; and the subsequent editions would require a professional statistician to count them. Byron, in short, had not only, as he said, "woke up one morning and found himself famous"; his fame had proved to have enduring qualities. The suddenness of the fame, as we have seen, was not solely the result either of accident or of merit. Author, publisher, and literary agent--for Dallas may fairly be ranked with the pioneers of the last-named profession--had planned and plotted for it. It may even be questioned whether such supreme success was quite deserved; and it would be easy to cite examples of much greater work--some of Wordsworth's, for example--which was far less successful. But that the enthusiasm was natural--and indeed almost inevitable--cannot be disputed. The title helped, as Byron himself recognised with cheerful cynicism. Lords, of course, had tried their hands at poetry before, but never with much success, whether they were good lords or wicked. Their compositions had amounted to little more than ingenious exercises in rhyme. Either they had failed to put their personalities into their poems or they had had no personalities worth speaking of to put into them. One could say that, with varying degrees of truth, of Rochester, Roscommon, Sheffield, and Carlisle. To find a lord whose poems could be taken seriously one had to go back to the Elizabethan ages; and modern readers--especially the women among them--were not very fond of going back so far. To get real poetry, with a real personality behind it, from a lord was "phenomenal," like getting figs from thistles--a thing to stand still and take note of. Note, therefore, was taken--the more carefully, perhaps, because Byron was, as it were, an unknown lord, born and brought up in exile, coming into society with something of the air of one who had to break down barriers in order to claim his birthright. His poem was, in a manner, his weapon of assault; and, whatever else might be said about it, it was, in no case mere exercise in metrical composition. It was the manifesto of a new personality.