Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 

1. A travelogue 

2. The modern sceptic's version of pilgrimage: a quest for meaning in a Europe no longer centred on Christianity or fired with the French revolutionaries' secular belief in human perfectability.

3. The Protagonist, Harold: Byron's alter ego, a libertine satiated with sin. A libertine, an embittered sceptic, and anti-hero, the obverse of the Christian knight idealised in the Middle Age. Also a man of feeling.

4. The tone:  Sardonic mockery  and serious concern. The pilgrim's paradoxical search for an ideal in spite of his pessimistic awareness of the tarnished nature of the fallen world, his elegiac lament for the heroism of the past, this very contradictory mixture of the fervour and despair was the essence of Byronism.

5. Spenserian stanza: ABABBCBCC

Canto I 

1-4: Introduction

25-26: On The Convention of Cintra

Canto II

72: On Ali Pacha's Army

73: On Greece

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