Bulwer, in his “Life of Lord Byron,” says:—“Childe Harold succeeded more than I think the merits of the first two cantos deserved; and not only was the success extraordinary, but of a description most likely to please. It was not the poem that was admired only; it was the poet about whom an interest was excited. The fictitious hero of the tale, between whom and the writer of it, we must confess, there was some kind of resemblance, was considered at once as an accurate portrait of the mysterious young noble, who had just returned from the lands of romance and song which he had been describing. If Lord Byron had been known in the world before his travels, the world would have viewed both himself and his travels differently; but though a peer of England, he was unknown to English society.” A veil of mystery and singularity and romance being about him and the strange hero of his tale, and so he enjoyed the privilege of drawing upon his own imagination for the character in which the public should view him, and he created a fictitious and hellish light through which to be viewed; fictitious, ay, in most all save intentional malignity; I say intentional, for his morality was so far dead, that he would not have scrupled to become any one of his heroes in act, could such a complex of incident and circumstance become possible in a real bodily existence.
The more distinctly and substantially the author, if he be a man of originality and genius, be brought before the public gaze, the better will he be appreciated; the more will he be even overrated, by the public. It is creating a body for the dwelling of the poetic soul: the picture is more graphic. For the constant association of the creator with his ideal beauty, encircles him with a never-fading halo; and in those moments when our mind is too inert to rise to the contemplation of his ecstatic thought, it can gaze habitually and languidly upon the other partner of the firm, and tacitly credit him with a glory whose effulgence is acknowledged, still, at the time, but dimly seen. This intimacy with him, which could not exist otherwise, introduces him more familiarly into the society of our affective facilities, and the acquaintanceship improves and ripens. But when the garments by which we know him, are woven of originality, and beauty, and romance, and noble name and birth, and the soft velvet of our own sympathy for sorrow and misfortune; and we have to enter the enchanted fields of far-off lands, to snuff the perfume of southern vines and flowering figs, amid bright vistas at olden grandeur and modern voluptuousness, to enjoy communion; the heart expands, and the brain glows beneath the warmth of overpowering imagination: the individual, composed of humanity and its poetry, as body and soul, is enshrined in veneration a household god, among the contemplative affections. Such was Byron, there was he known, and so was he enshrined. Thus do I take leave of my assertion that, although to the intrinsic merits of Lord Byron’s poetry, much, very much was due, still, not to them was due the gigantic temple of his popularity and fame.