George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824): Best-selling poet. His father, John Byron (1757–1791), was an army officer who squandered the inheritance of Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon. At the age of ten, Byron inherited the title of Baron Byron of Rochdale and Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire from his great-uncle. Byron was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and composed poetry from childhood. His attacks on his contemporaries (including Southey) in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) made him well-known, despite the work’s anonymity. After a Grand Tour in the Mediterranean 1809–1811, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) began a run of highly popular, if controversial, publications. His marriage to an heiress, Annabella Milbanke (1792–1860), in 1815 proved disastrous almost from the beginning and Byron’s debts and the host of scandals in which he was embroiled (including accusations of incest with his half-sister) led him to leave England for good in 1816. Byron settled in Italy and continued to publish controversial works, especially Don Juan (1819), whose suppressed (but widely-circulated) ‘Preface’ fiercely criticised Southey. Southey responded by accusing Byron in A Vision of Judgement (1821) of leading a Satanic school of writers which corrupted readers’ morality. Further criticism from Byron led Southey to publish a public defence in a letter to the Courier in January 1822. Byron, in Italy, thought of returning to Britain to challenge Southey to a duel; but his challenge was never delivered and instead he mercilessly – and hilariously – satirised the Poet Laureate in The Vision of Judgment (1822). Southey did not publicly respond to this attack. Byron left for Greece in 1823 to support the country’s war of independence against the Ottoman Empire and died there the following year. The acrimony of the years 1819–1822 was not the whole story of the Byron-Southey relationship, though. Byron had earlier been influenced by Southey’s Oriental romances and continued to admire Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814).