English peer and poet George Gordon Byron was one of the bad boys of the Romantic movement and, by some accounts, the first ‘celebrity.’ Like countless celebrities who would come after, he was embroiled in a number of romantic scandals and never accused of being overly pious (to put it Britishly). Nevertheless, he was moved by a number of stories from the Hebrew scriptures–a response that inspired him to pen an entire collection of poetry and one of the best-known similes in English poetry.

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