It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived;
they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the
spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and
standards. This was largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but
the influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when the
apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown the pronounced
liberals back upon their own resources in bitter dissatisfaction with the
existing state of society. Byron was born in 1788. His father, the violent
and worthless descendant of a line of violent and worthless nobles, was
just then using up the money which the poet's mother had brought him, and
soon abandoned her. She in turn was wildly passionate and uncontrolled, and
in bringing up her son indulged alternately in fits of genuine tenderness
and capricious outbursts of mad rage and unkindness. Byron suffered also
from another serious handicap; he was born with deformed feet, so that
throughout life he walked clumsily--a galling irritation to his sensitive
pride. In childhood his poetic instincts were stimulated by summers spent
among the scenery of his mother's native Scottish Highlands. At the age of
ten, on the death of his great-uncle, he succeeded to the peerage as Lord
Byron, but for many years he continued to be heavily in debt, partly
because of lavish extravagance, which was one expression of his inherited
reckless wilfulness.
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