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While washing his hands and singing a gay Neapolitan air, he stopped and remarked casually: "My father cut his throat," then went back to singing. Byron was word-perfect in his monster role before he was out of his teens. Henceforth, the clubfoot and the sensitive heart hid themselves in the disguise of a cold, cloven-hoofed devil. On his brow, at a moment's notice, would appear "that singular scowl" which caused one acquaintance to exclaim that he "had never seen a man with such a Cain-like mark on the forehead." A Pair of Stays. A Miss Elizabeth Pigot had the honor of discovering that Byron was addicted to poetry. When she read him some poems of Burns, he astonished her by saying that "he, too, was a poet sometimes." After he published his first signed volume of poems, Hours of Idleness, he began to lead the life "of a gay young man of rank," and was so fearful of "doing anything of a nature to lower his character as a gentleman" that he pooh-poohed both his Hours of Idleness and his hours of boxing lessons with "Mr.
Jackson, the well-known pugilist." But when Hours was pooh-poohed by the Edinburgh Review, his lordship flew into an ungentlemanly frenzy, swore "to punish them for it." He did so, in the satirical poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers —the first intimation to Britons that there had risen among them a satirist with a skinning knife sharper than any since Alexander Pope's.
After he took his seat in the House of Lords and, at 24, published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (poetic impressions of a Continental journey), Byron became overnight Britain's most talked-of poet.
But the adulation, the lionizing, came precisely at a moment when he had determined "to present himself . . . in moral masquerade" and to invent fantastic stories about the viciousness of his nature. "His voice," said a Mrs. Opie with gushing horror, "was such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it." "His head," noted a Miss Berry, "begins to be turned by all the adoration . . . especially [that of] the women." Byron himself summed it up succinctly, triumphantly. "I have made them afraid of me," he said.
He used every trick in the book to keep them afraid, keep them horrified. His craziest fan, Lady Caroline Lamb (TIME, Oct. 11), fell dramatically in love with him. When she cooed, "Should you like to see me waltz with any man but yourself?", he replied that "he should have no objection whatever, upon which with no more ado the fair Lady whips a knife into her own side." Fortunately, observes a cynical onlooker: "Venus . . . interposed in the shape of a pair of stays, so that the blow was by no means fatal."
Actress Fanny Kelly was another lady who got a sharp comeuppance when she crossed swords with the monster. "Being offended" with him, she said: "You know, my Lord, I can act men's parts. I have a great mind to put on breeches and demand satisfaction [i.e., fight a duel with you]." To which his lordship replied coarsely: "Then, Miss Kelly, I should be very happy to pull off mine and give you satisfaction."