Thomas Cole’s series of paintings The Course of Empire was based on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poem that made Byron famous. Cole quoted this verse, from Canto IV, in his newspaper advertisements for the series::
There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory — when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…
In the Middle Ages, a childe was a young lord, the son of a nobleman, who had not yet won his spurs and the title of knight.
The term also famously appears in the title of Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Childe Harold is the first Byronic hero — “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection,” in Lord Macaulay’s words.