The present volume contains the six metrical tales which were composed within the years 1812 and 1815, the _Hebrew Melodies_, and the minor poems of 1809-1816. With the exception of the first fifteen poems (1809-1811)--_Chansons de Voyage_, as they might be called--the volume as a whole was produced on English soil. Beginning with the _Giaour_; which followed in the wake of _Childe Harold_ and shared its triumph, and ending with the ill-omened _Domestic Pieces_, or _Poems of the Separation_, the poems which Byron wrote in his own country synchronize with his popularity as a poet by the acclaim and suffrages of his own countrymen. His greatest work, by which his lasting fame has been established, and by which his relative merits as a great poet will be judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name, which is stamped with his sign-manual, and which has come to be regarded as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity and achievement. No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, not Mr. Kipling, was ever in his own lifetime so widely, so amazingly popular. Thousands of copies of the "Tales"--of the _Bride of Abydos_, of the _Corsair_, of _Lara_--were sold in a day, and edition followed edition month in and month out. Everywhere men talked about the "noble author"--in the capitals of Europe, in literary circles in the United States, in the East Indies. He was "the glass of fashion ... the observ'd of all observers," the swayer of sentiment, the master and creator of popular emotion. No other English poet before or since has divided men's attention with generals and sea-captains and statesmen, has attracted and fascinated and overcome the world so entirely and potently as Lord Byron. It was _Childe Harold_, the unfinished, immature _Childe Harold_, and the Turkish and other "Tales," which raised this sudden and deafening storm of applause when the century was young, and now, at its close (I refer, of course, to the Tales, not to Byron's poetry as a whole, which, in spite of the critics, has held and still holds its own), are ignored if not forgotten, passed over if not despised--which but few know thoroughly, and "very few" are found to admire or to love. _Ubi lapsus, quid feci?_ might the questioning spirit of the author exclaim with regard to his "Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates," who once held the field, and now seem to have gone under in the struggle for poetical existence! To what, then, may we attribute the passing away of interest and enthusiasm? To the caprice of fashion, to an insistence on a more faultless _technique_, to a nicer taste in ethical sentiment, to a preference for a subtler treatment of loftier themes? More certainly, and more particularly, I think, to the blurring of outline and the blotting out of detail due to lapse of time and the shifting of the intellectual standpoint.