Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, lived from 1788 to 1824 and became one of the best known British poets of the Romantic period. He is remembered above all for the long narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and for shorter lyrics such as those gathered in Hebrew Melodies, which found a wide audience. After studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled across Europe and spent seven years in Italy, living in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, where he often saw his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. In his last years he joined the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, and Greeks honour him as a folk hero. He died at Missolonghi at the age of thirty six, of a fever caught during the sieges of that town.