In Chapter 8, I ask why Byron should have insisted that his was ‘a liberal age’ at a time when in Britain and all over Europe liberalism seemed to be, if not defeated, then at least everywhere in retreat. It points out that the word ‘liberal’ had various meanings in the period, meanings that might, as one contemporary commentator put it, be ‘the very reverse of each other.’ Byron’s liberalism, I argue, is characteristically self-contradictory, for which reason Hazlitt dismisses it as ‘preposterous.’ But Byron was a liberal, perhaps, because liberal was the only available description of his views flexible enough to accommodate their variousness. The chapter argues that the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century was powerful precisely because it was fragmented, and that Byron deploys that language more searchingly than any of the Victorian novelists who are his true heirs.