Lord Byron

I was born in London in 1788 and, at ten, inherited a title and a ruined abbey. A malformed foot taught me endurance; water taught me freedom—I crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos in 1810. The Grand Tour of 1809–1811 carried me through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Ottoman dominions; Ali Pasha received me at Tepelene, and I sat for my portrait in Albanian dress. From those roads and seas came the first cantos of Childe Harold.

In 1812 I awoke and found myself famous. I rose in the Lords to speak against hanging the Nottinghamshire frame-breakers. My private life became public copy: Lady Caroline Lamb called me “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I married Annabella Milbanke in 1815; our daughter Ada was born; the marriage collapsed. In 1816 I quitted England. That wet Geneva summer at the Villa Diodati, I proposed ghost stories; from my fragment John Polidori drew his Vampyre, and Mary Godwin conceived Frankenstein.

Italy suited my exile—Venice, then Ravenna and Pisa with Teresa Guiccioli, and conspirators of the Carbonari. I learned a sly eight-line measure—ottava rima—and began Don Juan in 1819, where rhyme serves as scourge and mirror. If readers insist on mistaking a brooding gentleman for his maker, blame the costume, not the tailor.

Greece called in earnest. In 1823 I landed at Missolonghi, spent my purse, drilled artillery, and tried to reconcile quarrelling captains while preparing an attack on Lepanto. After months of rain came fever and the doctors’ bleedings; I died there in April 1824—no hero’s charge, only a kept promise.