They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric; and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless men--men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate, doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant air of "damn the consequences." We find that note alike in the first Lord's "improper charge" on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord's improvised duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron's dashing elopement with a noble neighbour's wife. We shall catch it again, and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character. Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth. Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley's instigation, he only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in his work which might fairly be described as being "like Wordsworth only less so." None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside "The world is too much with us," and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity." But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was "dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,"--and he damned the consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded that Byron was a greater poet than himself. That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them, and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of Byron's temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose. CHAPTER II CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW