Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788–1824), inherited his title at ten and woke to find himself famous at twenty-four with the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). Scandal over his debts, his marriage and his half-sister drove him from England in 1816, and he lived the rest of his life in Switzerland and Italy, writing Manfred, Beppo, the dramas Sardanapalus, Cain and Werner, and the comic epic Don Juan, which he left unfinished. In 1823 he went to Greece to join the war of independence and died of fever at Missolonghi. He was lame from birth, swam the Hellespont, and became the type of the Romantic poet.