p.264.
From all the contemporary history and literature of the times, therefore, we have reason to believe that Lord Byron spoke the exact truth when he said to Medwin,-- 'My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'-- Medwin's Conversations, p.42.
Utter prostration of the whole physical man from intemperate excess, the deadness to temptation which comes from utter exhaustion, was his condition, according to himself and Moore, when he first left England, at twenty-one years of age.
In considering his subsequent history, we are to take into account that it was upon the brain and nerve-power, thus exhausted by early excess, that the draughts of sudden and rapid literary composition began to be made.

There was something unnatural and unhealthy in the rapidity, clearness, and vigour with which his various works followed each other.
Subsequently to the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'The Giaour,' 'Lara,' 'Parisina,' and 'The Siege of Corinth,' all followed close upon each other, in a space of less than three years, and those the three most critical years of his life.

'The Bride of Abydos' came out in the autumn of 1813, and was written in a week; and 'The Corsair' was composed in thirteen days.

A few months more than a year before his marriage, and the brief space of his married life, was the period in which all this literary labour was performed, while yet he was running the wild career of intrigue and fashionable folly.

He speaks of 'Lara' as being tossed off in the intervals between masquerades and balls, etc.