Like Scott, Byron was a prolific poet; and he owes to Scott the general
suggestion and much of the success of his tales in verse. His powers of
description were original and great: he adopted the new romantic tone,
while in his more studied works he was an imitator and a champion of a
former age, and a contemner of his own.
EARLY LIFE OF BYRON.--The Honorable George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord
Byron, was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. While he was yet an
infant, his father--Captain Byron--a dissipated man, deserted his mother;
and she went with her child to live upon a slender pittance at Aberdeen.
She was a woman of peculiar disposition, and was unfortunate in the
training of her son. She alternately petted and quarrelled with him, and
taught him to emulate her irregularities of temper. On account of an
accident at his birth, he had a malformation in one of his feet, which,
producing a slight limp in his gait through life, rendered his sensitive
nature quite unhappy, the signs of which are to be discerned in his drama,
_The Deformed Transformed_.
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