Ever since his first appearance in print, Byron has made an impression on his readers as a personality as well as a source of linguistic expression. ‘There is … a tone of self-willed independence and originality about the whole composition’, the critic Francis Jeffrey wrote of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, ‘a certain plain manliness and strength of manner, which is infinitely refreshing after the sickly affectations of so many modern writers.’

As often as not, therefore, his readers and acquaintances have assessed Byron in morally as well as aesthetically evaluative terms. A British resident in Constantinople wrote of meeting Byron in 1810, long before his years of fame, that ‘there was that irresistible attraction in his manner, of which those who have had the good luck to be admitted into his intimacy, can alone have felt the power.’ An Armenian priest in Venice, with whom Byron briefly worked on a grammar of that language in 1816, recalled him as ‘a young man quick, sociable, with burning eyes’. A few months before the poet died, another priest – this time a Scottish evangelical one – testified to the indivisibility of life and art in his case. ‘In the course of the day’, James Kennedy wrote,