So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
The Gypsies (poem) just as they are parting, Aleko catches them together. In a scene of extremely fast-moving dialogue, he kills them both. The Old Man tells him to leave the Gypsies because his understanding of law, freedom and order is different from his (ll.510–520): The poem closes with an epilogue narrated in the first person, who warns that the gypsy encampments offer no freedom from the "fateful passions" and problems of life. The poem addresses and interrogates the concept of the noble savage, an idea which had gained popular currency in the Romantic Age which held that those people who live further