"Haven't you anything else?" asked Dallas.
"Oh, nothing but a few stanzas of Spenserian stuff," was the answer.
Dallas asked to see it, and there were placed in his hands rough drafts of the first and second cantos of "Childe Harold." This time Dallas was better suited, and to corroborate his judgment the matter was submitted to Murray, the publisher.
Murray thought the matter had more or less merit, and arrangements were at once made for its publication. And so it came out, hammered into shape while in the printer's hands.
"Childe Harold" was an instantaneous, brilliant success—a success beyond the publisher's or author's expectations. The book ran through seven editions in four weeks, and Lord Byron "became famous in a night."
London society became Byron-mad. The poet was feted, courted, petted.
He indulged in much innocent and costly dissipation, and some not so innocent.
Finally all this began to pall upon him. When twenty-six we find him making a bold stand for reform: he would get married and live a staid, sober, respectable life. His finances were reduced—all the money he had made out of his books had been given away, prompted by a foolish whim that no man should take pay for the product of his mind.
Now he would marry and "settle down"; and to marry a woman with an income would be no special disadvantage. To sell one's thoughts was abhorrent to the young man, but to marry for money was quite another thing. Morality depends upon your point of view.
The paradox of things found expression when Byron the impressionable, Byron the irresistible, sat himself down and after chewing the end of his penholder, wrote a letter to Miss Milbanke, with whom he was only slightly acquainted, proposing marriage. The lady very properly declined. To be courted with a fresh-nibbed pen, and paper cut sonnet-size, instead of by a live man, deserves rebuke. Men who propose by mail to a woman in the next town are either insincere, self-deceived, or else are of the sort whose pulse never goes above sixty-five, and therefore should be avoided.