ABSTRACT

Walter Scott was grieved by the scandal of Lord Byron's separation from his wife, and disturbed as well as impressed by his poetry of the summer of 1816. 'The last part of Childe Harold,' he wrote to Joanna Baillie on 26 November, 'intimates a terrible state of mind and with all the power and genius which characterized his former productions the present seems to indicate a more serious and desperate degree of misanthropy. The family misfortunes which have for a time Lord Byron to his native land have neither chilled his poetical fire, nor deprived England of its benefit. The Third Canto of Childe Harold exhibits, in all its strength and in all its peculiarity, the wild, powerful and original vein of poetry which, in the preceding cantos, first fixed the public attention upon the author. Childe Harold, in his former Pilgrimage, beheld in Spain the course of the 'tyrant and of the tyrant's slaves'.