of deep and strong affection…It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has, to lose its character of dialogue and to become soliloquy." The type was caricatured as the melancholy Mr Cypress in Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818, following the appearance of the Pilgrimage's Canto IV. The poet's misanthropic and despairing announcement there sums up the 'heroic' point of view: "I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle, and all ill - one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death." Almost every word is transcribed from two of the canto's stanzas, 124 and 126. Once Byron's poem had launched the heroic prototype, it went on to be an influence on Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1825 – 32), where the poem's protagonist is compared several times to Childe Harold. Onegin shares the hero's melancholy that cannot be pleased (1.38) and his dreaminess (4.44); but perhaps his mixture of behaviours are only so many masks, and in this respect he is likened to Melmoth the Wanderer as well as to Childe Harold (8.8). Tatiana too ponders whether Onegin's guises make him "a Muscovite in Harold's dress, a modish second-hand edition" (7.24). But however much that pose may have been appreciated in the first half of the 19th century, by World War II the reaction to the hero's attitudes had veered to scepticism. C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters (1941), bracketed Childe Harold and Young Werther as Romantic types "submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses" for whom "five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal [their] romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were". Equally, the bluff hero of C. S. Forester's The Commodore (1945) dismissed Byron's poem as "bombast and fustian" while flipping through its pages for inspiration. Music The first two cantos of the poem were launched under the title Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, and other poems. There were twenty of those "other poems", for the most part arising out of Byron's