Excerpt from The Letters of Lord Byron: Selected and Edited With Introd, by Mathilde Blind Be that as it may, no books now meet with more popular favour than the lives and letters of eminent men and women. Of these there is therefore an inexhaustible supply, and the satisfaction which arises from this sort of reading, although it frequently ministers to mere vulgar curiosity and love of scandal, may, on the other hand, foster a more comprehen sive sympathy by initiating the reader into the struggles and privations more or less the portion of all who do something towards increasing the intellectual or moral wealth of the world. As the letters of great men are not, as a rule, intentionally written for publication, they are among the most valuable sources whence an authentic knowledge of their life and its surroundings may be derived. This is eminently so in the case of Lord Byron, whose correspondence is a faithful reflex of his singularly varied, brilliant, and dramatic career. Born on the 22nd of January 1788, George Gordon Byron, the inheritor of an old historic name, had the good fortune, as a letter-writer, of coming to maturity at a period precisely the most favourable to a fine epistolary style. Letters had never played so important a part in literature as in the century or two preceding his own times; so much was this the case, that the most memorable novels of the eighteenth century, Clarissa Harlowe, La Nouvelle Heloz'se, and lvert/zer, had been cast in that favourite mould while some of the most exquisite literary workmanship is to be found in the Letters of Madame de Sevigne, of Pope, of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, etc., etc. But it was inevitable that, from having been cultivated too much as a fine art, there should be a corresponding loss of spontaneity and freshness of expression. Now, in comparing Byron's epistolary style with that of his literary predecessors on the one hand, and of his successors on the other, he seems to us to hit a happy medium between the choice diction and jewel-like periods of the Queen Anne period, and the easy, dressing-gown and slipper style which has come into fashion with the penny post. Byron's letters are always unmistakably letters, never prose poems or finished essays with a superscription, and of them he might no doubt have said, more truly than he did of Don jucm. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.