Blunt = Lady Anne. Byron Noel Ralph Gordon,
(died 1862) now Lord Wentworth
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY AND FAMILY.
Byron's life was passed under the fierce light that beats upon an
intellectual throne. He succeeded in making himself--what he wished to
be--the most notorious personality in the world of letters of our century.
Almost every one who came in contact with him has left on record various
impressions of intimacy or interview. Those whom he excluded or
patronized, maligned; those to whom he was genial, loved him. Mr. Southey,
in all sincerity, regarded him as the principle of Evil incarnate; an
American writer of tracts in the form of stories is of the same opinion:
to the Countess Guiccioli he is an archangel. Mr. Carlyle considers him to
have been a mere "sulky dandy." Goethe ranks him as the first English
poet after Shakespeare, and is followed by the leading critics of France,
Italy, and Spain. All concur in the admission that Byron was as proud of
his race as of his verse, and that in unexampled measure the good and evil
of his nature were inherited and inborn.
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