CHAPTER I. LADY BYRON AS I KNEW HER.

This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler.

LADY BYRON VINDICATED

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

A history of the Byron Controversy from its beginning in 1816 to the

present time.

NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS.

The subject of this volume is of such painful notoriety that any apology

from the Publishers may seem unnecessary upon issuing the Author's reply

to the counter statements which her narrative in Macmillan's Magazine has

called forth. Nevertheless they consider it right to state that their

strong regard for the Author, respect for her motives, and assurance of

her truthfulness, would, even in the absence of all other considerations,

be sufficient to induce them to place their imprint on the title-page.

The publication has been undertaken by them at the Author's request, 'as

her friends,' and as the publishers of her former works, and from a

feeling that whatever difference of opinion may be entertained respecting

the Author's judiciousness in publishing 'The True Story,' she is

entitled to defend it, having been treated with grave injustice, and

often with much maliciousness, by her critics and opponents, and been

charged with motives from which no person living is more free. An

intense love of justice and hatred of oppression, with an utter disregard

of her own interests, characterise Mrs. Stowe's conduct and writings, as

all who know her well will testify; and the Publishers can unhesitatingly

affirm their belief that neither fear for loss of her literary fame, nor

hope of gain, has for one moment influenced her in the course she has

taken.

LONDON: January 1870.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II. THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON

CHAPTER III. RESUME OF THE CONSPIRACY

CHAPTER IV. RESULTS AFTER LORD BYRON'S DEATH

CHAPTER V. THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON'S GRAVE

PART II.

CHAPTER I. LADY BYRON AS I KNEW HER

CHAPTER II. LADY BYRON'S STORY AS TOLD ME

CHAPTER III. CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY OF EVENTS

CHAPTER IV. THE CHARACTER OF THE TWO WITNESSES COMPARED

CHAPTER V. THE DIRECT ARGUMENT TO PROVE THE CRIME

CHAPTER VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

CHAPTER VII. HOW COULD SHE LOVE HIM?

CHAPTER VIII. CONCLUSION

PART III. MISCELLANEOUS DOCUMENTS.

THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE (AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 'THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY')

LORD LINDSAY'S LETTER TO 'THE LONDON TIMES'

DR. FORBES WINSLOW'S LETTER TO 'THE LONDON TIMES'

EXTRACT FROM LORD BYRON'S EXPUNGED LETTER TO MURRAY

EXTRACTS FROM 'BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE'

LETTERS OF LADY BYRON TO H. C. ROBINSON

DOMESTIC POEMS BY LORD BYRON

PART I.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.

The interval since my publication of 'The True Story of Lady Byron's

Life' has been one of stormy discussion and of much invective.

I have not thought it necessary to disturb my spirit and confuse my sense

of right by even an attempt at reading the many abusive articles that

both here and in England have followed that disclosure. Friends have

undertaken the task for me, giving me from time to time the substance of

anything really worthy of attention which came to view in the tumult.

It appeared to me essential that this first excitement should in a

measure spend itself before there would be a possibility of speaking to

any purpose. Now, when all would seem to have spoken who can speak, and,

it is to be hoped, have said the utmost they can say, there seems a

propriety in listening calmly, if that be possible, to what I have to say

in reply.

And, first, why have I made this disclosure at all?

_To this I answer briefly, Because I considered it my duty to make it_.

I made it in defence of a beloved, revered friend, whose memory stood

forth in the eyes of the civilised world charged with most repulsive

crimes, of which I _certainly_ knew her innocent.

I claim, and shall prove, that Lady Byron's reputation has been the

victim of a concerted attack, begun by her husband during her lifetime,

and coming to its climax over her grave. I claim, and shall prove, that

it was not I who stirred up this controversy in this year 1869. I shall

show _who did do it_, and who is responsible for bringing on me that hard

duty of making these disclosures, which it appears to me ought to have

been made by others.

I claim that these facts were given to me unguarded by any promise or

seal of secrecy, expressed or implied; that they were lodged with me as

one sister rests her story with another for sympathy, for counsel, for

defence. _Never_ did I suppose the day would come that I should be

subjected to so cruel an anguish as this use of them has been to me.

Never did I suppose that,--when those kind hands, that had shed nothing

but blessings, were lying in the helplessness of death, when that gentle

heart, so sorely tried and to the last so full of love, was lying cold in

the tomb,--a countryman in England could be found to cast the foulest

slanders on her grave, and not one in all England to raise an effective

voice in her defence.

I admit the feebleness of my plea, in point of execution. It was written

in a state of exhausted health, when no labour of the kind was safe for

me,--when my hand had not strength to hold the pen, and I was forced to

dictate to another.

I have been told that I have no reason to congratulate myself on it as a

literary effort. O my brothers and sisters! is there then nothing in the

world to think of but literary efforts? I ask any man with a heart in

his bosom, if he had been obliged to tell a story so cruel, because his

mother's grave gave no rest from slander,--I ask any woman who had been

forced to such a disclosure to free a dead sister's name from grossest

insults, whether she would have thought of making this work of bitterness

a literary success?

Are the cries of the oppressed, the gasps of the dying, the last prayers

of mothers,--are _any_ words wrung like drops of blood from the human

heart to be judged as literary efforts?

My fellow-countrymen of America, men of the press, I have done you one

act of justice,--of all your bitter articles, I have read not one. I

shall never be troubled in the future time by the remembrance of any

unkind word you have said of me, for at this moment I recollect not one.

I had such faith in you, such pride in my countrymen, as men with whom,

above all others, the cause of woman was safe and sacred, that I was at

first astonished and incredulous at what I heard of the course of the

American press, and was silent, not merely from the impossibility of

being heard, but from grief and shame. But reflection convinces me that

you were, in many cases, acting from a misunderstanding of facts and

through misguided honourable feeling; and I still feel courage,

therefore, to ask from you a fair hearing. Now, as I have done you this

justice, will you also do me the justice to hear me seriously and

candidly?

What interest have you or I, my brother and my sister, in this short life

of ours, to utter anything but the truth? Is not truth between man and

man and between man and woman the foundation on which all things rest?

Have you not, every individual of you, who must hereafter give an account

yourself alone to God, an interest to know the exact truth in this

matter, and a duty to perform as respects that truth? Hear me, then,

while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my course in

relation to it.

A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the 'Blackwood'

of July 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of criminals, and

recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public as interesting from

the very fact that it was the avowed production of Lord Byron's mistress.

No efficient protest was made against this outrage in England, and

Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the 'Blackwood' article, and the

Harpers, the largest publishing house in America, perhaps in the world,

re-published the book.

Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and

other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the young

reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them advertised in

dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and thus the generation

of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron but by these fables of

her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The friends who knew her

personally were a small select circle in England, whom death is every day

reducing. They were few in number compared with the great world, and

were _silent_. I saw these foul slanders crystallising into history

uncontradicted by friends who knew her personally, who, firm in their own

knowledge of her virtues and limited in view as aristocratic circles

generally are, had no idea of the width of the world they were living in,

and the exigency of the crisis. When time passed on and no voice was

raised, I spoke. I gave at first a simple story, for I knew

instinctively that whoever put the first steel point of truth into this

dark cloud of slander must wait for the storm to spend itself. I must

say the storm exceeded my expectations, and has raged loud and long. But

now that there is a comparative stillness I shall proceed, first, to

prove what I have just been asserting, and, second, to add to my true

story such facts and incidents as I did not think proper at first to

state.

CHAPTER II. THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON.

In proving what I asserted in the first chapter, I make four points:

1st. A concerted attack upon Lady Byron's reputation, begun by Lord

Byron in self-defence.

2nd. That he transmitted his story to friends to be continued after his

death.

3rd. That they did so continue it.

4th. That the accusations reached their climax over Lady Byron's grave

in 'Blackwood' of 1869, and the Guiccioli book, and that this re-opening

of the controversy was my reason for speaking.

And first I shall adduce my proofs that Lady Byron's reputation was,

during the whole course of her husband's life, the subject of a

concentrated, artfully planned attack, commencing at the time of the

separation and continuing during his life. By various documents

carefully prepared, and used publicly or secretly as suited the case, he

made converts of many honest men, some of whom were writers and men of

letters, who put their talents at his service during his lifetime in

exciting sympathy for him, and who, by his own request, felt bound to

continue their defence of him after he was dead.

In order to consider the force and significance of the documents I shall

cite, we are to bring to our view just the issues Lord Byron had to meet,

both at the time of the separation and for a long time after.

In Byron's 'Memoirs,' Vol. IV. Letter 350, under date December 10, 1819,

nearly four years after the separation, he writes to Murray in a state of

great excitement on account of an article in 'Blackwood,' in which his

conduct towards his wife had been sternly and justly commented on, and

which he supposed to have been written by Wilson, of the 'Noctes

Ambrosianae.' He says in this letter: 'I like and admire W---n, and he

should not have indulged himself in such outrageous license. . . . . When

he talks of Lady Byron's business he talks of what he knows nothing

about; and you may tell him _no man can desire a public investigation of

that affair more than I do_.' {7}

He shortly after wrote and sent to Murray a pamphlet for publication,

which was printed, but not generally circulated till some time

afterwards. Though more than three years had elapsed since the

separation, the current against him at this time was so strong in England

that his friends thought it best, at first, to use this article of Lord

Byron's discreetly with influential persons rather than to give it to the

public.

The writer in 'Blackwood' and the indignation of the English public, of

which that writer was the voice, were now particularly stirred up by the

appearance of the first two cantos of 'Don Juan,' in which the indecent

caricature of Lady Byron was placed in vicinity with other indecencies,

the publication of which was justly considered an insult to a Christian

community.

It must here be mentioned, for the honour of Old England, that at first

she did her duty quite respectably in regard to 'Don Juan.' One can

still read, in Murray's standard edition of the poems, how every

respectable press thundered reprobations, which it would be well enough

to print and circulate as tracts for our days.

Byron, it seems, had thought of returning to England, but he says, in the

letter we have quoted, that he has changed his mind, and shall not go

back, adding 'I have finished the Third Canto of "Don Juan," but the

things I have heard and read discourage all future publication. You may

try the copy question, but you'll lose it; the cry is up, and the cant is

up. I should have no objection to return the price of the copyright, and

have written to Mr. Kinnaird on this subject.'

One sentence quoted by Lord Byron from the 'Blackwood' article will show

the modern readers what the respectable world of that day were thinking

and saying of him:--

'It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted

_every species_ of sensual gratification--having drained the cup of

sin even to its bitterest dregs--were resolved to show us that he is

no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned

fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and

worse elements of which human life is composed.'

The defence which Lord Byron makes, in his reply to that paper, is of a

man cornered and fighting for his life. He speaks thus of the state of

feeling at the time of his separation from his wife:--

'I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private

rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my

fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was

tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered and muttered and murmured

was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me.

I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries--in

Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the

lakes--I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed

the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and

settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who

betakes him to the waters.

'If I may judge by the statements of the few friends who gathered

round me, the outcry of the period to which I allude was beyond all

precedent, all parallel, even in those cases where political motives

have sharpened slander and doubled enmity. I was advised not to go to

the theatres lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament

lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure

my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under the

apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the

door of the carriage.'

Now Lord Byron's charge against his wife was that SHE was directly

responsible for getting up and keeping up this persecution, which drove

him from England,--that she did it in a deceitful, treacherous manner,

which left him no chance of defending himself.

He charged against her that, taking advantage of a time when his affairs

were in confusion, and an execution in the house, she left him suddenly,

with treacherous professions of kindness, which were repeated by letters

on the road, and that soon after her arrival at her home her parents sent

him word that she would never return to him, and she confirmed the

message; that when he asked the reason why, she refused to state any; and

that when this step gave rise to a host of slanders against him she

silently encouraged and confirmed the slanders. His claim was that he

was denied from that time forth even the justice of any tangible

accusation against himself which he might meet and refute.

He observes, in the same article from which we have quoted:--

'When one tells me that I cannot "in any way _justify_ my own

behaviour in that affair," I acquiesce, because no man can "_justify_"

himself until he knows of what he is accused; and I have never

had--and, God knows, my whole desire has ever been to obtain it--any

specific charge, in a tangible shape, submitted to me by the

adversary, nor by others, unless the atrocities of public rumour and

the mysterious silence of the lady's legal advisers may be deemed

such.'

Lord Byron, his publishers, friends, and biographers, thus agree in

representing his wife as the secret author and abettor of that

persecution, which it is claimed broke up his life, and was the source of

all his subsequent crimes and excesses.

Lord Byron wrote a poem in September 1816, in Switzerland, just after the

separation, in which he stated, in so many words, these accusations

against his wife. Shortly after the poet's death Murray published this

poem, together with the 'Fare thee well,' and the lines to his sister,

under the title of 'Domestic Pieces,' in his standard edition of Byron's

poetry. It is to be remarked, then, that this was for some time a

private document, shown to confidential friends, and made use of

judiciously, as readers or listeners to his story were able to bear it.

Lady Byron then had a strong party in England. Sir Samuel Romilly and

Dr. Lushington were her counsel. Lady Byron's parents were living, and

the appearance in the public prints of such a piece as this would have

brought down an aggravated storm of public indignation.

For the general public such documents as the 'Fare thee well' were

circulating in England, and he frankly confessed his wife's virtues and

his own sins to Madame de Stael and others in Switzerland, declaring

himself in the wrong, sensible of his errors, and longing to cast himself

at the feet of that serene perfection,

'Which wanted one sweet weakness--to forgive.'

But a little later he drew for his private partisans this bitter poetical

indictment against her, which, as we have said, was used discreetly

during his life, and published after his death.

Before we proceed to lay that poem before the reader we will refresh his

memory with some particulars of the tragedy of AEschylus, which Lord

Byron selected as the exact parallel and proper illustration of his

wife's treatment of himself. In his letters and journals he often

alludes to her as Clytemnestra, and the allusion has run the round of a

thousand American papers lately, and been read by a thousand good honest

people, who had no very clear idea who Clytemnestra was, and what she did

which was like the proceedings of Lady Byron. According to the tragedy,

Clytemnestra secretly hates her husband Agamemnon, whom she professes to

love, and wishes to put him out of the way that she may marry her lover,

AEgistheus. When her husband returns from the Trojan war she receives

him with pretended kindness, and officiously offers to serve him at the

bath. Inducing him to put on a garment, of which she had adroitly sewed

up the sleeves and neck so as to hamper the use of his arms, she gives

the signal to a concealed band of assassins, who rush upon him and stab

him. Clytemnestra is represented by AEschylus as grimly triumphing in

her success, which leaves her free to marry an adulterous paramour.

'I did it, too, in such a cunning wise,

That he could neither 'scape nor ward off doom.

I staked around his steps an endless net,

As for the fishes.'

In the piece entitled 'Lines on hearing Lady Byron is ill,' Lord Byron

charges on his wife a similar treachery and cruelty. The whole poem is

in Murray's English edition, Vol. IV. p. 207. Of it we quote the

following. The reader will bear in mind that it is addressed to Lady

Byron on a sick-bed:--

'I am too well avenged, but 't was my right;

Whate'er my sins might be, _thou_ wert not sent

To be the Nemesis that should requite,

Nor did Heaven choose so near an instrument.

Mercy is for the merciful! If thou

Hast been of such, 't will be accorded now.

Thy nights are banished from the realms of sleep,

For thou art pillowed on a curse too deep;

Yes! they may flatter thee, but thou shalt feel

A hollow agony that will not heal.

Thou hast sown in my sorrow, and must reap

The bitter harvest in a woe as real.

_I have had many foes, but none like thee_;

For 'gainst the rest myself I could defend,

And be avenged, or turn them into friend;

But thou, in safe implacability,

Hast naught to dread,--in thy own weakness shielded,

And in my love, which hath but too much yielded,

And spared, for thy sake, some I should not spare.

And thus upon the world, trust in thy truth,

And the wild fame of my ungoverned youth,--

On things that were not and on things that are,--

Even upon such a basis thou halt built

A monument whose cement hath been guilt!

The moral Clytemnestra of thy lord,

And hewed down with an unsuspected sword

Fame, peace, and hope, and all that better life

Which, but for this cold treason of thy heart,

Might yet have risen from the grave of strife

And found a nobler duty than to part.

But of thy virtues thou didst make a vice,

Trafficking in them with a purpose cold,

And buying others' woes at any price,

For present anger and for future gold;

And thus, once entered into crooked ways,

The early truth, that was thy proper praise,

Did not still walk beside thee, but at times,

And with a breast unknowing its own crimes,

Deceits, averments incompatible,

Equivocations, and the thoughts that dwell

_In Janus spirits, the significant eye

That learns to lie with silence_, {14} the pretext

Of prudence with advantages annexed,

The acquiescence in all things that tend,

No matter how, to the desired end,--

All found a place in thy philosophy.

The means were worthy and the end is won.

I would not do to thee as thou hast done.'

Now, if this language means anything, it means, in plain terms, that,

whereas, in her early days, Lady Byron was peculiarly characterised by

truthfulness, she has in her recent dealings with him acted the part of a

liar,--that she is not only a liar, but that she lies for cruel means and

malignant purposes,--that she is a moral assassin, and her treatment of

her husband has been like that of the most detestable murderess and

adulteress of ancient history, that she has learned to lie skilfully and

artfully, that she equivocates, says incompatible things, and crosses her

own tracks,--that she is double-faced, and has the art to lie even by

silence, and that she has become wholly unscrupulous, and acquiesces in

_any_thing, no matter what, that tends to the desired end, and that end

the destruction of her husband. This is a brief summary of the story

that Byron made it his life's business to spread through society, to

propagate and make converts to during his life, and which has been in

substance reasserted by 'Blackwood' in a recent article this year.

Now, the reader will please to notice that this poem is dated in

September 1816, and that on the 29th of March of that same year, he had

thought proper to tell quite another story. At that time the deed of

separation was not signed, and negotiations between Lady Byron, acting by

legal counsel, and himself were still pending. At that time, therefore,

he was standing in a community who knew all he had said in former days of

his wife's character, who were in an aroused and excited state by the

fact that so lovely and good and patient a woman had actually been forced

for some unexplained cause to leave him. His policy at that time was to

make large general confessions of sin, and to praise and compliment her,

with a view of enlisting sympathy. Everybody feels for a handsome

sinner, weeping on his knees, asking pardon for his offences against his

wife in the public newspapers.

The celebrated 'Fare thee well,' as we are told, was written on the 17th

of March, and accidentally found its way into the newspapers at this time

'through the imprudence of a friend whom he allowed to take a copy.'

These 'imprudent friends' have all along been such a marvellous

convenience to Lord Byron.

But the question met him on all sides, What is the matter? This wife you

have declared the brightest, sweetest, most amiable of beings, and

against whose behaviour as a wife you actually never had nor can have a

complaint to make,--why is she _now_ all of a sudden so inflexibly set

against you?

This question required an answer, and he answered by writing another

poem, which also _accidentally_ found its way into the public prints. It

is in his 'Domestic Pieces,' which the reader may refer to at the end of

this volume, and is called 'A Sketch.'

There was a most excellent, respectable, well-behaved Englishwoman, a

Mrs. Clermont, {16} who had been Lady Byron's governess in her youth, and

was still, in mature life, revered as her confidential friend. It

appears that this person had been with Lady Byron during a part of her

married life, especially the bitter hours of her lonely child-bed, when a

young wife so much needs a sympathetic friend. This Mrs. Clermont was

the person selected by Lord Byron at this time to be the scapegoat to

bear away the difficulties of the case into the wilderness.

We are informed in Moore's Life what a noble pride of rank Lord Byron

possessed, and how when the headmaster of a school, against whom he had a

pique, invited him to dinner, he declined, saying, 'To tell you the

truth, Doctor, if you should come to Newstead, I shouldn't think of

inviting _you_ to dine with _me_, and so I don't care to dine with you

here.' Different countries, it appears, have different standards as to

good taste; Moore gives this as an amusing instance of a young lord's

spirit.

Accordingly, his first attack against this 'lady,' as we Americans should

call her, consists in gross statements concerning her having been born

poor and in an inferior rank. He begins by stating that she was

'Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred,

Promoted thence to deck her mistress' head;

Next--for some gracious service unexpressed

And from its wages only to be guessed--

Raised from the toilet to the table, where

Her wondering betters wait behind her chair.

With eye unmoved and forehead unabashed,

She dines from off the plate she lately washed:

Quick with the tale, and ready with the lie,

The genial confidante and general spy,--

Who could, ye gods! her next employment guess,--

An _only infant's earliest governess_!

What had she made the pupil of her art

None knows; _but that high soul secured the heart,

And panted for the truth it could not hear

With longing soul and undeluded ear_!' {17}

The poet here recognises as a singular trait in Lady Byron her peculiar

love of truth,--a trait which must have struck everyone that had any

knowledge of her through life. He goes on now to give what he certainly

knew to be the real character of Lady Byron:--

'Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind,

Which flattery fooled not, baseness could not blind,

_Deceit infect_ not, nor contagion soil,

Indulgence weaken, or example spoil,

Nor mastered science tempt her to look down

On humbler talent with a pitying frown,

Nor genius swell, nor beauty render vain,

Nor envy ruffle to retaliate pain.'

We are now informed that Mrs. Clermont, whom he afterwards says in his

letters was a spy of Lady Byron's mother, set herself to make mischief

between them. He says:--

'If early habits,--those strong links that bind

At times the loftiest to the meanest mind,

Have given her power too deeply to instil

The angry essence of her deadly will;

If like a snake she steal within your walls,

Till the black slime betray her as she crawls;

If like a viper to the heart she wind,

And leaves the venom there she did not find,--

What marvel that this hag of hatred works

Eternal evil latent as she lurks.'

The noble lord then proceeds to abuse this woman of inferior rank in the

language of the upper circles. He thus describes her person and manner:--

'Skilled by a touch to deepen scandal's tints

With all the kind mendacity of hints,

While mingling truth with falsehood, sneers with smiles,

A thread of candour with a web of wiles;

A plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming,

To hide her bloodless heart's soul-harden'd scheming;

A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal,

And without feeling mock at all who feel;

With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,--

A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone.

Mark how the channels of her yellow blood

Ooze to her skin and stagnate there to mud,

Cased like the centipede in saffron mail,

Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale,--

(For drawn from reptiles only may we trace

Congenial colours in that soul or face,)

Look on her features! and behold her mind

As in a mirror of itself defined:

Look on the picture! deem it not o'ercharged

There is no trait which might not be enlarged.'

The poem thus ends:--

'May the strong curse of crushed affections light

Back on thy bosom with reflected blight,

And make thee in thy leprosy of mind

As loathsome to thyself as to mankind!

Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate,

Black--as thy will for others would create;

Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust,

And thy soul welter in its hideous crust.

O, may thy grave be sleepless as the bed,

The widowed couch of fire, that thou hast spread

Then when thou fain wouldst weary Heaven with prayer,

Look on thy earthly victims--and despair!

Down to the dust! and as thou rott'st away,

Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous clay.

_But for the love I bore and still must bear_

To her thy malice from all ties would tear,

Thy name,--thy human name,--to every eye

The climax of all scorn, should hang on high,

Exalted o'er thy less abhorred compeers,

And festering in the infamy of years.'

March 16, 1816.

Now, on the 29th of March 1816, this was Lord Byron's story. He states

that his wife had a truthfulness even from early girlhood that the most

artful and unscrupulous governess could not pollute,--that she always

_panted_ for truth,--that flattery could not fool nor baseness blind

her,--that though she was a genius and master of science, she was yet

gentle and tolerant, and one whom no envy could ruffle to retaliate pain.

In September of the same year she is a monster of unscrupulous deceit and

vindictive cruelty. Now, what had happened in the five months between

the dates of these poems to produce such a change of opinion? Simply

this:--

1st. The negotiation between him and his wife's lawyers had ended in his

signing a deed of separation in preference to standing a suit for

divorce.

2nd. Madame de Stael, moved by his tears of anguish and professions of

repentance, had offered to negotiate with Lady Byron on his behalf, and

had failed.

The failure of this application is the only apology given by Moore and

Murray for this poem, which gentle Thomas Moore admits was not in quite

as generous a strain as the 'Fare thee well.'

But Lord Byron knew perfectly well, when he suffered that application to

be made, that Lady Byron had been entirely convinced that her marriage

relations with him could never be renewed, and that duty both to man and

God required her to separate from him. The allowing the negotiation was,

therefore, an artifice to place his wife before the public in the

attitude of a hard-hearted, inflexible woman; her refusal was what he

knew beforehand must inevitably be the result, and merely gave him

capital in the sympathy of his friends, by which they should be brought

to tolerate and accept the bitter accusations of this poem.

We have recently heard it asserted that this last-named piece of poetry

was the sudden offspring of a fit of ill-temper, and was never intended

to be published at all. There were certainly excellent reasons why his

friends should have advised him not to publish it _at that time_. But

that it was read with sympathy by the circle of his intimate friends, and

believed by them, is evident from the frequency with which allusions to

it occur in his confidential letters to them. {21}

About three months after, under date March 10, 1817, he writes to Moore:

'I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in public

imagination, more particularly since my moral ----- clove down my fame.'

Again to Murray in 1819, three years after, he says: 'I never hear

anything of Ada, the little Electra of Mycenae.'

Electra was the daughter of Clytemnestra, in the Greek poem, who lived to

condemn her wicked mother, and to call on her brother to avenge the

father. There was in this mention of Electra more than meets the ear.

Many passages in Lord Byron's poetry show that he intended to make this

daughter a future partisan against her mother, and explain the awful

words he is stated in Lady Anne Barnard's diary to have used when first

he looked on his little girl,--'What an instrument of torture I have

gained in you!'

In a letter to Lord Blessington, April 6, 1823, he says, speaking of Dr.

Parr:-- {22a}

'He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great

friend of the _other branch of the house of Atreus_, and the Greek

teacher, I believe, of my _moral_ Clytemnestra. I say _moral_ because

it is true, and is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to

do anything without the aid of an AEgistheus.'

If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen, why

were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his allusions to

it? and why was it preserved in Murray's hands? and why published after

his death? That Byron was in the habit of reposing documents in the

hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is evident from a part

of a note written by him to Murray respecting some verses so intrusted:

'Pray let not these _versiculi_ go forth with my name except _to the

initiated_.' {22b}

Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron's death,

showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a

woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy of

treatment. At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most

deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself from

such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted, worthy

Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these lines to

her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world. Nothing can show more

plainly what this poem was written for, and how thoroughly it did its

work! Considering Byron as a wronged man, Murray thought he was

contributing his mite towards doing him justice. His editor prefaced the

whole set of 'Domestic Pieces' with the following statements:--

'They all refer to the unhappy separation, of which the precise causes

are still a mystery, and which he declared to the last were never

disclosed to himself. He admitted that pecuniary embarrassments,

disordered health, and dislike to family restraints had aggravated his

naturally violent temper, and driven him to excesses. He suspected

that his mother-in-law had fomented the discord,--which Lady Byron

denies,--and that more was due to the malignant offices of a female

dependant, who is the subject of the bitterly satirical sketch.

* * * *

'To these general statements can only be added the still vaguer

allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the

result of insanity,--that, the physician pronouncing him responsible

for his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that Dr.

Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation was

neither proper nor possible. _No weight can be attached to the

opinions of an opposing counsel upon accusations made by one party

behind the back of the other, who urgently demanded and was

pertinaciously refused the least opportunity of denial or defence_. He

rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but _consented when

threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons._' {23}

Neither John Murray nor any of Byron's partisans seem to have pondered

the admission in these last words.

Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing with

her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for herself

and child against her husband.

She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under

their direction.

Two of the greatest lawyers in England have pronounced that there has

been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is neither

proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but

separation or divorce.

He asks her to state her charges against him. She, making answer under

advice of her counsel, says, 'That if he _insists_ on the specifications,

he must receive them in open court in a suit for divorce.'

What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man, who

believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for virtue

to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on her side

even the lawyer he sought to retain on his; {24} that she was an

unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain her

ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, 'accused of every

monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour'? When she, under

advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal _separation_ or open

investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?

HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.

Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,--let any lawyer who

knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington, ask whether

_they_ were the men to take a case into court for a woman that had no

_evidence_ but her own statements and impressions? Were _they_ men to go

to trial without proofs? Did they not know that there were artful,

hysterical women in the world, and would _they_, of all people, be the

men to take a woman's story on her own side, and advise her in the last

issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of the strongest

kind? Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this statement of

Byron's--that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance of knowing

whereof he _was accused--never appeared in public_.

It, however, was most actively circulated in _private_. That Byron was

in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various

kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have

already shown. We have recently come upon another instance of this kind.

In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has turned up,

of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron's

death, he published in the preface to his 'Domestic Pieces' the sentence:

'_He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when

threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons_.' It appears that, up to

1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his place,

had taken any notice of this newly found document, which we are now

informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while Mr. Hobhouse

was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to Mr. Matthew

Gregory Lewis, _for circulation among friends in England_, found in Mr.

Lewis's papers after his death, and _now_ in the possession of Mr.

Murray.' Here it is:--

'It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the

legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared "their lips to be sealed

up" on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their

lips are sealed up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest

favour _they_ can confer upon me will be to open them. From the first

hour in which I was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to

the last communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character

of wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and

in vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly in

consequence of Lady Byron's claiming (in a letter still existing) a

promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was _really_

her wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating

and inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which

rendered it next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could

ever be reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still,

to sign the deed, which I shall be happy--most happy--to cancel, and

go before any tribunal which may discuss the business in the most

public manner.

'Mr. Hobhouse made this proposition on my part, viz. to abrogate all

prior intentions--and go into court--the very day before the

separation was signed, and it was declined by the other party, as also

the publication of the correspondence during the previous discussion.

Those propositions I beg here to repeat, and to call upon her and hers

to say their worst, pledging myself to meet their

allegations,--whatever they may be,--and only too happy to be informed

at last of their real nature.

'BYRON.'

'August 9, 1817.

'P.S.--I have been, and am now, utterly ignorant of what description

her allegations, charges, or whatever name they may have assumed, are;

and am as little aware for what purpose they have been kept

back,--unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by

silence.

'BYRON.'

'La Mira, near Venice.'

It appears the circulation of this document must have been _very

private_, since Moore, not _over_-delicate towards Lady Byron, did not

think fit to print it; since John Murray neglected it, and since it has

come out at this late hour for the first time.

If Lord Byron really desired Lady Byron and her legal counsel to

understand the facts herein stated, and was willing at all hazards to

bring on an open examination, why was this _privately_ circulated? Why

not issued as a card in the London papers? Is it likely that Mr. Matthew

Gregory Lewis, and a chosen band of friends acting as a committee,

requested an audience with Lady Byron, Sir Samuel Romilly, and Dr.

Lushington, and formally presented this cartel of defiance?

We incline to think not. We incline to think that this small serpent, in

company with many others of like kind, crawled secretly and privately

around, and when it found a good chance, bit an honest Briton, whose

blood was thenceforth poisoned by an undetected falsehood.

The reader now may turn to the letters that Mr. Moore has thought fit to

give us of this stay at La Mira, beginning with Letter 286, dated July 1,

1817, {28a} where he says: 'I have been working up my impressions into a

_Fourth_ Canto of Childe Harold,' and also 'Mr. Lewis is in Venice. I am

going up to stay a week with him there.'

Next, under date La Mira, Venice, July 10, {28b} he says, 'Monk Lewis is

here; how pleasant!'

Next, under date July 20, 1817, to Mr. Murray: 'I write to give you

notice that I have _completed the fourth and ultimate canto of Childe

Harold_. . . . It is yet to be copied and polished, and the notes are to

come.'

Under date of La Mira, August 7, 1817, he records that the new canto is

one hundred and thirty stanzas in length, and talks about the price for

it. He is now ready to launch it on the world; and, as now appears, on

August 9, 1817, _two days after_, he wrote the document above cited, and

put it into the hands of Mr. Lewis, as we are informed, 'for circulation

among friends in England.'

The reason of this may now be evident. Having prepared a suitable number

of those whom he calls in his notes to Murray 'the initiated,' by private

documents and statements, he is now prepared to publish his accusations

against his wife, and the story of his wrongs, in a great immortal poem,

which shall have a band of initiated interpreters, shall be read through

the civilised world, and stand to accuse her after his death.

In the Fourth Canto of 'Childe Harold,' with all his own overwhelming

power of language, he sets forth his cause as against the silent woman

who all this time had been making no party, and telling no story, and

whom the world would therefore conclude to be silent because she had no

answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding

in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a

vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold

insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands have felt the power of

this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of

what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this wicked man, and how vilely

he abused this power as a weapon to slay the innocent.

It is among the ruins of ancient Rome that his voice breaks forth in

solemn imprecation:--

'O Time, thou beautifier of the dead,

Adorner of the ruin, comforter,

And only healer when the heart hath bled!--

Time, the corrector when our judgments err,

The test of truth, love,--sole philosopher,

For all besides are sophists,--from thy shrift

That never loses, though it doth defer!--

Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift

My hands and heart and eyes, and claim of thee a gift.

* * * *

'If thou hast ever seen me too elate,

Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne

Good, and reserved my pride against the hate

Which shall not whelm me, _let me not have worn

This iron in my soul in vain, shall_ THEY _not mourn_?

And thou who never yet of human wrong

Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis,

Here where the ancients paid their worship long,

Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,

And round Orestes bid them howl and hiss

_For that unnatural retribution,--just

Had it but come from hands less near_,--in this

Thy former realm I call thee from the dust.

Dost thou not hear, my heart? awake thou shalt and must!

It is not that I may not have incurred

For my ancestral faults and mine, the wound

Wherewith I bleed withal, and had it been conferred

With a just weapon it had flowed unbound,

But now my blood shall not sink in the ground.

* * * *

'But in this page a record will I seek;

Not in the air shall these my words disperse,

Though I be ashes,--a far hour shall wreak

The deep prophetic fulness of this verse,

And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.

That curse shall be forgiveness. Have I not,--

Hear me, my Mother Earth! behold it, Heaven,--

Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?

Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?

Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,

Hopes sapped, name blighted, life's life lied away,

And only not to desperation driven,

Because not altogether of such clay

As rots into the soul of those whom I survey?

----------

'From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,

Have I not seen what human things could do,--

From the loud roar of foaming calumny,

To the small whispers of the paltry few,

And subtler venom of the reptile crew,

_The Janus glance of whose significant eye,

Learning to lie with silence, would seem true,

And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh,

Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy_?' {31}

The reader will please notice that the lines in italics are almost, word

for word, a repetition of the lines in italics in the former poem on his

wife, where he speaks of a _significant eye_ that has _learned to lie in

silence_, and were evidently meant to apply to Lady Byron and her small

circle of confidential friends.

Before this, in the Third Canto of 'Childe Harold,' he had claimed the

sympathy of the world, as a loving father, deprived by a severe fate of

the solace and society of his only child:--

'My daughter,--with this name my song began,--

My daughter,--with this name my song shall end,--

I see thee not and hear thee not, but none

Can be so wrapped in thee; thou art the friend

To whom the shadows of far years extend.

* * * *

'To aid thy mind's developments, to watch

The dawn of little joys, to sit and see

Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch

Knowledge of objects,--wonders yet to thee,--

And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss;--

This it should seem was not reserved for me.

Yet this was in my nature,--as it is,

I know not what there is, yet something like to this.

----------

'_Yet though dull hate as duty should be taught_,

I know that thou wilt love me; though my name

Should be shut out from thee as spell still fraught

With desolation and a broken claim,

Though the grave close between us,--'t were the same

I know that thou wilt love me, though to drain

My blood from out thy being were an aim

And an attainment,--all will be in vain.'

To all these charges against her, sent all over the world in verses as

eloquent as the English language is capable of, the wife replied nothing.

'Assailed by slander and the tongue of strife,

Her only answer was,--a blameless life.'

She had a few friends, a very few, with whom she sought solace and

sympathy. One letter from her, written at this time, preserved by

accident, is the only authentic record of how the matter stood with her.

We regret to say that the publication of this document was not brought

forth to clear Lady Byron's name from her husband's slanders, but to

shield _him_ from the worst accusation against him, by showing that this

crime was not included in the few private confidential revelations that

friendship wrung from the young wife at this period.

Lady Anne Barnard, authoress of 'Auld Robin Grey,' a friend whose age and

experience made her a proper confidante, sent for the broken-hearted,

perplexed wife, and offered her a woman's sympathy.

To her Lady Byron wrote many letters, under seal of confidence, and Lady

Anne says: 'I will give you a few paragraphs transcribed from one of Lady

Byron's own letters to me. It is sorrowful to think that in a very

little time this young and amiable creature, wise, patient, and feeling,

will have her character mistaken by every one who reads Byron's works. To

rescue her from this I preserved her letters, and when she afterwards

expressed a fear that anything of her writing should ever fall into hands

to injure him (I suppose she meant by publication), I safely assured her

that it never should. But here this letter shall be placed, a sacred

record in her favour, unknown to herself.

'I am a very incompetent judge of the impression which the last Canto

of "Childe Harold" may produce on the minds of indifferent readers.

'It contains the usual trace of a conscience restlessly awake, though

his object has been too long to aggravate its burden, as if it could

thus be oppressed into eternal stupor. I will hope, as you do, that

it survives for his ultimate good.

'It was the acuteness of his remorse, impenitent in its character,

which so long seemed to demand from my compassion to spare every

semblance of reproach, every look of grief, which might have said to

his conscience, "You have made me wretched."

'I am decidedly of opinion that he is responsible. He has wished to

be thought partially deranged, or on the brink of it, to perplex

observers and _prevent them from tracing effects to their real causes_

through all the intricacies of his conduct. I was, as I told you, at

one time the dupe of his acted insanity, and clung to the former

delusions in regard to the motives that concerned me personally, till

the whole system was laid bare.

'He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them, as Bonaparte did

lives, for conquest, without more regard to their intrinsic value,

considering them only as ciphers, which must derive all their import

from the situation in which he places them, and the ends to which he

adapts them, with such consummate skill.

'Why, then, you will say, does he not employ them to give a better

colour to his own character? Because he is too good an actor to over-

act, or to assume a moral garb, which it would be easy to strip off.

'In regard to his poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his

imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject

with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by

the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time,

_he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable

except to a very few_; and his constant desire of creating a sensation

makes him not averse to be the object of wonder and curiosity, even

though accompanied _by some dark and vague suspicions_.

'Nothing has contributed more to the misunderstanding of his real

character than the lonely grandeur in which he shrouds it, and his

affectation of being above mankind, when he exists almost in their

voice. The romance of his sentiments is another feature of this mask

of state. I know no one more habitually destitute of that enthusiasm

he so beautifully expresses, and to which he can work up his fancy

chiefly by contagion.

'_I had heard he was the best of brothers, the most generous of

friends, and I thought such feelings only required to be warmed and

cherished into more diffusive benevolence. Though these opinions are

eradicated, and could never return but with the decay of my memory_,

you will not wonder if there are still moments when the association of

feelings which arose from them soften and sadden my thoughts.

'But I have not thanked you, dearest Lady Anne, for your kindness in

regard to a principal object,--that of rectifying false impressions. I

trust you understand my wishes, which never were to injure Lord Byron

in any way; for, _though he would not suffer me to remain his wife, he

cannot prevent me from continuing his friend; and it was from

considering myself as such that I silenced the accusations by which my

own conduct might have been more fully justified_.

'It is not necessary to speak ill of his heart in general; it is

sufficient that to me it was hard and impenetrable that my own must

have been broken before his could have been touched. I would rather

represent this as _my_ misfortune than as _his_ guilt; but, surely,

that misfortune is not to be made my crime! Such are my feelings; you

will judge how to act.

'His allusions to me in "Childe Harold" are cruel and cold, but with

such a semblance as to make _me_ appear so, and to attract all

sympathy to himself. It is said in this poem that hatred of him will

be taught as a lesson to his child. I might appeal to all who have

ever heard me speak of him, and still more to my own heart, to witness

that there has been no moment when I have remembered injury otherwise

than affectionately and sorrowfully.

'It is not my duty to give way to hopeless and wholly unrequited

affection; but, so long as I live, my chief struggle will probably be

not to remember him too kindly. I do not seek the sympathy of the

world, but I wish to be known by those whose opinion is valuable and

whose kindness is dear to me. Among such, my dear Lady Anne, you will

ever be remembered by your truly affectionate

'A. BYRON.'

On this letter I observe Lord Lindsay remarks that it shows a noble but

rather severe character, and a recent author has remarked that it seemed

to be written rather in a 'cold spirit of criticism.' It seems to strike

these gentlemen as singular that Lady Byron did not enjoy the poem! But

there are two remarkable sentences in this letter which have escaped the

critics hitherto. Lord Byron, in this, the Third Canto of 'Childe

Harold,' expresses in most affecting words an enthusiasm of love for his

sister. So long as he lived he was her faithful correspondent; he sent

her his journals; and, dying, he left her and her children everything he

had in the world. This certainly seems like an affectionate brother; but

in what words does Lady Byron speak of this affection?

'I _had heard he was the best of brothers_, the most generous of friends.

I thought these feelings only required to be warmed and cherished into

more diffusive benevolence. THESE OPINIONS ARE ERADICATED, AND COULD

NEVER RETURN BUT WITH THE DECAY OF MEMORY.' Let me ask those who give

this letter as a proof that at this time no idea such as I have stated

was in Lady Byron's mind, to account for these words. Let them please

answer these questions: Why had Lady Byron ceased to think him a good

brother? Why does she use so strong a word as that the opinion was

eradicated, torn up by the roots, and could never grow again in her

except by decay of memory?

And yet this is a document Lord Lindsay vouches for as authentic, and

which he brings forward _in defence_ of Lord Byron.

Again she says, 'Though he _would not suffer me to remain his wife_, he

cannot prevent me from continuing his friend.' Do these words not say

that in some past time, in some decided manner, Lord Byron had declared

to her his rejection of her as a wife? I shall yet have occasion to

explain these words.

Again she says, 'I silenced accusations by which my conduct might have

been more fully justified.'

The people in England who are so very busy in searching out evidence

against my true story have searched out and given to the world an

important confirmation of this assertion of Lady Byron's.

It seems that the confidential waiting-maid who went with Lady Byron on

her wedding journey has been sought out and interrogated, and, as appears

by description, is a venerable, respectable old person, quite in

possession of all her senses in general, and of that sixth sense of

propriety in particular, which appears not to be a common virtue in our

days.

As her testimony is important, we insert it just here, with a description

of her person in full. The ardent investigators thus speak:--

'Having gained admission, we were shown into a small but neatly

furnished and scrupulously clean apartment, where sat the object of

our visit. Mrs. Mimms is a venerable-looking old lady, of short

stature, slight and active appearance, with a singularly bright and

intelligent countenance. Although midway between eighty and ninety

years of age, she is in full possession of her faculties, discourses

freely and cheerfully, hears apparently as well as ever she did, and

her sight is so good that, aided by a pair of spectacles, she reads

the Chronicle every day with ease. Some idea of her competency to

contribute valuable evidence to the subject which now so much engages

public attention on three continents may be found from her own

narrative of her personal relations with Lady Byron. Mrs. Mimms was

born in the neighbourhood of Seaham, and knew Lady Byron from

childhood. During the long period of ten years she was Miss

Milbanke's lady's-maid, and in that capacity became the close

confidante of her mistress. There were circumstances which rendered

their relationship peculiarly intimate. Miss Milbanke had no sister

or female friend to whom she was bound by the ties of more than a

common affection; and her mother, whatever other excellent qualities

she may have possessed, was too high-spirited and too hasty in temper

to attract the sympathies of the young. Some months before Miss

Milbanke was married to Lord Byron, Mrs. Mimms had quitted her service

on the occasion of her own marriage with Mr. Mimms; but she continued

to reside in the neighbourhood of Seaham, and remained on the most

friendly terms with her former mistress. As the courtship proceeded,

Miss Milbanke concealed nothing from her faithful attendant; and when

the wedding-day was fixed, she begged Mrs. Mimms to return and fulfil

the duties of lady's-maid, at least during the honeymoon. Mrs. Mimms

at the time was nursing her first child, and it was no small sacrifice

to quit her own home at such a moment, but she could not refuse her

old mistress's request. Accordingly, she returned to Seaham Hall some

days before the wedding, was present at the ceremony, and then

preceded Lord and Lady Byron to Halnaby Hall, near Croft, in the North

Riding of Yorkshire, one of Sir Ralph Milbanke's seats, where the

newly married couple were to spend the honeymoon. Mrs. Mimms remained

with Lord and Lady Byron during the three weeks they spent at Halnaby

Hall, and then accompanied them to Seaham, where they spent the next

six weeks. It was during the latter period that she finally quitted

Lady Byron's service; but she remained in the most friendly

communication with her ladyship till the death of the latter, and for

some time was living in the neighbourhood of Lady Byron's residence in

Leicestershire, where she had frequent opportunities of seeing her

former mistress. It may be added that Lady Byron was not unmindful of

the faithful services of her friend and attendant in the instructions

to her executors contained in her will. Such was the position of Mrs.

Mimms towards Lady Byron; and we think no one will question that it

was of a nature to entitle all that Mrs. Mimms may say on the subject

of the relations of Lord and Lady Byron to the most respectful

consideration and credit.'

Such is the chronicler's account of the faithful creature whom nothing

but intense indignation and disgust at Mrs. Beecher Stowe would lead to

speak on her mistress's affairs; but Mrs. Beecher Stowe feels none the

less sincere respect for her, and is none the less obliged to her for

having spoken. Much of Mrs. Mimms's testimony will be referred to in

another place; we only extract one passage, to show that while Lord Byron

spent his time in setting afloat slanders against his wife, she spent

hers in sealing the mouths of witnesses against him.

Of the period of the honeymoon Mrs. Mimms says:--

'The happiness of Lady Byron, however, was of brief duration; even

during the short three weeks they spent at Halnaby, the irregularities

of Lord Byron occasioned her the greatest distress, and she even

contemplated returning to her father. Mrs. Mimms was her constant

companion and confidante through this painful period, and she does not

believe that her ladyship concealed a thought from her. _With

laudable reticence, the old lady absolutely refuses to disclose the

particulars of Lord Byron's misconduct at this time; she gave Lady

Byron a solemn promise not to do so_.

* * * *

'So serious did Mrs. Mimms consider the conduct of Lord Byron, that

she recommended her mistress to confide all the circumstances to her

father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, a calm, kind, and most excellent parent,

and take his advice as to her future course. At one time Mrs. Mimms

thinks Lady Byron had resolved to follow her counsel and impart her

wrongs to Sir Ralph; but on arriving at Seaham Hall her ladyship

strictly enjoined Mrs. Mimms to preserve absolute silence on the

subject--a course which she followed herself;--so that when, six weeks

later, she and Lord Byron left Seaham for London, not a word had

escaped her to disturb her parents' tranquillity as to their

daughter's domestic happiness. As might be expected, Mrs. Mimms bears

the warmest testimony to the noble and lovable qualities of her

departed mistress. She also declares that Lady Byron was by no means

of a cold temperament, but that the affectionate impulses of her

nature were checked by the unkind treatment she experienced from her

husband.'

We have already shown that Lord Byron had been, ever since his

separation, engaged in a systematic attempt to reverse the judgment of

the world against himself, by making converts of all his friends to a

most odious view of his wife's character, and inspiring them with the

zeal of propagandists to spread these views through society. We have

seen how he prepared partisans to interpret the Fourth Canto of 'Childe

Harold.'

This plan of solemn and heroic accusation was the first public attack on

his wife. Next we see him commencing a scurrilous attempt to turn her to

ridicule in the First Canto of 'Don Juan.'

It is to our point now to show how carefully and cautiously this Don Juan

campaign was planned.

Vol. IV. p.138, we find Letter 325 to Mr. Murray:--

'Venice: January 25, 1819.

'You will do me the favour to _print privately, for private

distribution, fifty copies of "Don Juan."_ The list of the men to

whom I wish it presented I will send hereafter.'

The poem, as will be remembered, begins with the meanest and foulest

attack on his wife that ever ribald wrote, and puts it in close

neighbourhood with scenes which every pure man or woman must feel to be

the beastly utterances of a man who had lost all sense of decency. Such

a potion was too strong to be administered even in a time when great

license was allowed, and men were not over-nice. But Byron chooses fifty

armour-bearers of that class of men who would find indecent ribaldry

about a wife a good joke, and talk about the 'artistic merits' of things

which we hope would make an honest boy blush.

At this time he acknowledges that his vices had brought him to a state of

great exhaustion, attended by such debility of the stomach that nothing

remained on it; and adds, 'I was obliged to reform my way of life, which

was conducting me from the yellow leaf to the ground with all deliberate

speed.' {41} But as his health is a little better he employs it in

making the way to death and hell elegantly easy for other young men, by

breaking down the remaining scruples of a society not over-scrupulous.

Society revolted, however, and fought stoutly against the nauseous dose.

His sister wrote to him that she heard such things said of it that _she_

never would read it; and the outcry against it on the part of all women

of his acquaintance was such that for a time he was quite overborne; and

the Countess Guiccioli finally extorted a promise from him to cease

writing it. Nevertheless, there came a time when England accepted 'Don

Juan,'--when Wilson, in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' praised it as a

classic, and took every opportunity to reprobate Lady Byron's conduct.

When first it appeared the 'Blackwood' came out with that indignant

denunciation of which we have spoken, and to which Byron replied in the

extracts we have already quoted. He did something more than reply. He

marked out Wilson as one of the strongest literary men of the day, and

set his 'initiated' with their documents to work upon him.

One of these documents to which he requested Wilson's attention was the

private autobiography, written expressly to give his own story of all the

facts of the marriage and separation.

In the indignant letter he writes Murray on the 'Blackwood' article, Vol.

IV., Letter 350--under date December 10, 1819--he says:--

'I sent home for Moore, and for Moore only (who has my journal also),

my memoir written up to 1816, and I gave him leave to show it to whom

he pleased, but _not to publish_ on any account. _You_ may read it,

and you may let Wilson read it if he likes--not for his public

opinion, but his private, for I like the man, and care very little

about the magazine. And I could wish Lady Byron herself to read it,

that she may have it in her power to mark any thing mistaken or

misstated. As it will never appear till after my extinction, it would

be but fair she should see it; that is to say, herself willing. Your

"Blackwood" accuses me of treating women harshly; but I have been

their martyr; my whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them.'

It was a part of Byron's policy to place Lady Byron in positions before

the world where she _could_ not speak, and where her silence would be set

down to her as haughty, stony indifference and obstinacy. Such was the

pretended negotiation through Madame de Stael, and such now this

apparently fair and generous offer to let Lady Byron see and mark this

manuscript.

The little Ada is now in her fifth year--a child of singular sensibility

and remarkable mental powers--one of those exceptional children who are

so perilous a charge for a mother.

Her husband proposes this artful snare to her,--that she shall mark what

is false in a statement which is all built on a damning lie, that she

cannot refute over that daughter's head,--and which would perhaps be her

ruin to discuss.

Hence came an addition of two more documents, to be used 'privately among

friends,' {43} and which 'Blackwood' uses after Lady Byron is safely out

of the world to cast ignominy on her grave--the wife's letter, that of a

mother standing at bay for her daughter, knowing that she is dealing with

a desperate, powerful, unscrupulous enemy.

'Kirkby Mallory: March 10, 1820.

'I received your letter of January 1, offering to my perusal a Memoir

of part of your life. I decline to inspect it. I consider the

publication or circulation of such a composition at any time as

prejudicial to Ada's future happiness. For my own sake, I have no

reason to shrink from publication; but, notwithstanding the injuries

which I have suffered, I should lament some of the consequences.

'A. Byron.

'To Lord Byron.'

Lord Byron, writing for the public, as is his custom, makes reply:--

'Ravenna: April 3, 1820.

'I received yesterday your answer, dated March 10. My offer was an

honest one, and surely could only be construed as such even by the

most malignant casuistry. I could answer you, but it is too late, and

it is not worth while. To the mysterious menace of the last sentence,

whatever its import may be--and I cannot pretend to unriddle it--I

could hardly be very sensible even if I understood it, as, before it

can take place, I shall be where "nothing can touch him further." . .

. I advise you, however, to anticipate the period of your intention,

for, be assured, no power of figures can avail beyond the present; and

if it could, I would answer with the Florentine:--

'"Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce

. . . . . e certo

La fiera moglie, piu ch'altro, mi nuoce." {44}

'BYRON.

'To Lady Byron.'

Two things are very evident in this correspondence: Lady Byron intimates

that, if he publishes his story, some _consequences_ must follow which

she shall regret.

Lord Byron receives this as a threat, and says he doesn't understand it.

But directly after he says, 'Before IT can take place, I shall be,' etc.

The intimation is quite clear. He _does_ understand what the

consequences alluded to are. They are evidently that Lady Byron will

speak out and tell her story. He says she cannot do this till _after he

is dead_, and then he shall not care. In allusion to her accuracy as to

dates and figures, he says: 'Be assured no power of figures can avail

beyond the present' (life); and then ironically _advises_ her to

_anticipate the period_,--i.e. to speak out while he is alive.

In Vol. VI. Letter 518, which Lord Byron wrote to Lady Byron, but did not

send, he says: 'I burned your last note for two reasons,--firstly,

because it was written in a style not very agreeable; and, secondly,

because I wished to take your word without documents, which are the

resources of worldly and suspicious people.'

It would appear from this that there was a last letter of Lady Byron to

her husband, which he did not think proper to keep on hand, or show to

the 'initiated' with his usual unreserve; that this letter contained some

kind of _pledge_ for which he preferred to take her word, _without

documents_.

Each reader can imagine for himself what that _pledge_ might have been;

but from the tenor of the three letters we should infer that it was a

promise of silence for his lifetime, on _certain conditions_, and that

the publication of the autobiography would violate those conditions, and

make it her duty to speak out.

This celebrated autobiography forms so conspicuous a figure in the whole

history, that the reader must have a full idea of it, as given by Byron

himself, in Vol. IV. Letter 344, to Murray:--

'I gave to Moore, who is gone to Rome, my life in MS.,--in seventy-

eight folio sheets, brought down to 1816 . . . also a journal kept in

1814. Neither are for publication during my life, but when I am cold

you may do what you please. In the mean time, if you like to read

them you may, and show them to anybody you like. I care not. . . . '

He tells him also:--

'You will find in it a detailed account of my marriage and its

consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such an account.'

Of the extent to which this autobiography was circulated we have the

following testimony of Shelton Mackenzie, in notes to 'The Noctes' of

June 1824.

In 'The Noctes' Odoherty says:--

'The fact is, the work had been copied for the private reading of a

great lady in Florence.'

The note says:--

'The great lady in Florence, for whose private reading Byron's

autobiography was copied, was the Countess of Westmoreland. . . . Lady

Blessington had the autobiography in her possession for weeks, and

confessed to having copied every line of it. Moore remonstrated, and

she committed her copy to the flames, but did not tell him that her

sister, Mrs. Home Purvis, now Viscountess of Canterbury, had also made

a copy! . . . From the quantity of copy I have seen,--and others were

more in the way of falling in with it than myself,--I surmise that at

least half a dozen copies were made, and of these _five_ are now in

existence. Some particular parts, such as the marriage and

separation, were copied separately; but I think there cannot be less

than five full copies yet to be found.'

This was written _after the original autobiography was burned_.

We may see the zeal and enthusiasm of the Byron party,--copying seventy-

eight folio sheets, as of old Christians copied the Gospels. How widely,

fully, and thoroughly, thus, by this secret process, was society

saturated with Byron's own versions of the story that related to himself

and wife! Against her there was only the complaint of an absolute

silence. She put forth no statements, no documents; had no party, sealed

the lips of her counsel, and even of her servants; yet she could not but

have known, from time to time, how thoroughly and strongly this web of

mingled truth and lies was being meshed around her steps.

From the time that Byron first saw the importance of securing Wilson on

his side, and wrote to have his partisans attend to him, we may date an

entire revolution in the 'Blackwood.' It became Byron's warmest

supporter,--is to this day the bitterest accuser of his wife.

Why was this wonderful silence? It appears by Dr. Lushington's

statements, that, when Lady Byron did speak, she had a story to tell that

powerfully affected both him and Romilly,--a story supported by evidence

on which they were willing to have gone to public trial. Supposing, now,

she had imitated Lord Byron's example, and, avoiding public trial, had

put her story into private circulation; as he sent 'Don Juan' to fifty

confidential friends, suppose she had sent a written statement of her

story to fifty judges as intelligent as the two that had heard it; or

suppose she had confronted his autobiography with her own,--what would

have been the result?

The first result might have been Mrs. Leigh's utter ruin. The world may

finally forgive the man of genius anything; but for a woman there is no

mercy and no redemption.

This ruin Lady Byron prevented by her utter silence and great

self-command. Mrs. Leigh never lost position. Lady Byron never so

varied in her manner towards her as to excite the suspicions even of her

confidential old servant.

To protect Mrs. Leigh effectually, it must have been necessary to

continue to exclude even her own mother from the secret, as we are

assured she did at first; for, had she told Lady Milbanke, it is not

possible that so high-spirited a woman could have restrained herself from

such outward expressions as would at least have awakened suspicion. There

was no resource but this absolute silence.

Lady Blessington, in her last conversation with Lord Byron, thus

describes the life Lady Byron was leading. She speaks of her as 'wearing

away her youth in almost monastic seclusion, questioned by some,

appreciated by few, seeking consolation alone in the discharge of her

duties, and avoiding all external demonstrations of a grief that her pale

cheek and solitary existence alone were vouchers for.' {49}

The main object of all this silence may be imagined, if we remember that

if Lord Byron had not died,--had he truly and deeply repented, and become

a thoroughly good man, and returned to England to pursue a course worthy

of his powers, there was on record neither word nor deed from his wife to

stand in his way.

HIS PLACE WAS KEPT IN SOCIETY, ready for him to return to whenever he

came clothed and in his right mind. He might have had the heart and

confidence of his daughter unshadowed by a suspicion. He might have won

the reverence of the great and good in his own lands and all lands. That

hope, which was the strong support, the prayer of the silent wife, it did

not please God to fulfil.

Lord Byron died a worn-out man at thirty-six. But the bitter seeds he

had sown came up, after his death, in a harvest of thorns over his grave;

and there were not wanting hands to use them as instruments of torture on

the heart of his widow.

CHAPTER III. RESUME OF THE CONSPIRACY.

We have traced the conspiracy of Lord Byron against his wife up to its

latest device. That the reader's mind may be clear on the points of the

process, we shall now briefly recapitulate the documents in the order of

time.

I. March 17, 1816.--While negotiations for separation were

pending,--'_Fare thee well, and if for ever_.'

While writing these pages, we have received from England the testimony of

one who has seen the original draught of that 'Fare thee well.' This

original copy had evidently been subjected to the most careful and acute

revision. Scarcely two lines that were not interlined, scarcely an

adjective that was not exchanged for a better; showing that the noble

lord was not so far overcome by grief as to have forgotten his

reputation. (Found its way to the public prints through the imprudence

of _a friend_.)

II. March 29, 1816.--An attack on Lady Byron's old governess for having

been born poor, for being homely, and for having unduly influenced his

wife against him; promising that her grave should be a fiery bed, etc.;

also praising his wife's perfect and remarkable truthfulness and

discernment, that made it impossible for flattery to fool, or baseness

blind her; but ascribing all his woes to her being fooled and blinded by

this same governess. (Found its way to the prints by the imprudence of

_a friend_.)

III. September 1816.--Lines on hearing that Lady Byron is ill. Calls

her a Clytemnestra, who has secretly set assassins on her lord; says she

is a mean, treacherous, deceitful liar, and has entirely departed from

her early truth, and become the most unscrupulous and unprincipled of

women. (Never printed till after Lord Byron's death, but circulated

_privately_ among the '_initiated_.')

IV. Aug. 9, 1817.--Gives to M. G. Lewis a paper for circulation among

friends in England, stating that what he most wants is _public

investigation_, which has always been denied him; and daring Lady Byron

and her counsel to come out publicly. (Found in M. G. Lewis's portfolio

after his death; never heard of before, except among the 'initiated.')

Having given M. G. Lewis's document time to work,--

January 1818.--Gives the Fourth Canto of 'Childe Harold' {51} to the

public.

Jan. 25, 1819.--Sends to Murray to print for private circulation among

the 'initiated' the First Canto of 'Don Juan.'

Is nobly and severely rebuked for this insult to his wife by the

'Blackwood,' August 1819.

October 1819.--Gives Moore the manuscript 'Autobiography,' with leave to

show it to whom he pleases, and print it after his death.

Oct. 29, 1819, Vol. IV. Letter 344.--Writes to Murray, that he may read

all this 'Autobiography,' and show it to anybody he likes.

Dec. 10, 1819.--Writes to Murray on this article in 'Blackwood' against

'Don Juan' and himself, which he supposes written by Wilson; sends a

complimentary message to Wilson, and asks him to read his 'Autobiography'

sent by Moore. (Letter 350.)

March 15, 1820.--Writes and dedicates to I. Disraeli, Esq., a vindication

of himself in reply to the 'Blackwood' on 'Don Juan,' containing an

indignant defence of his own conduct in relation to his wife, and

maintaining that he never yet has had an opportunity of knowing whereof

he has been accused; accusing Sir S. Romilly of taking his retainer, and

then going over to the adverse party, etc. (Printed for _private

circulation_; to be found in the standard English edition of Murray, vol.

ix. p.57.)

To this condensed account of Byron's strategy we must add the crowning

stroke of policy which transmitted this warfare to his friends, to be

continued after his death.

During the last visit Moore made him in Italy, and just before Byron

presented to him his 'Autobiography,' the following scene occurred, as

narrated by Moore (vol. iv. p.221):--

'The chief subject of conversation, when alone, was his marriage, and

the load of obloquy which it had brought upon him. He was most

anxious to know _the worst_ that had been alleged of his conduct; and,

as this was our first opportunity of speaking together on the subject,

I did not hesitate to put his candour most searchingly to the proof,

not only by enumerating the various charges I had heard brought

against him by others, but by specifying such portions of these

charges as I had been inclined to think not incredible myself.

'To all this he listened with patience, and answered with the most

unhesitating frankness; laughing to scorn the tales of unmanly outrage

related of him, but at the same time acknowledging that there had been

in his conduct but too much to blame and regret, and stating one or

two occasions during his domestic life when he had been irritated into

letting the "breath of bitter words" escape him,. . . which he now

evidently remembered with a degree of remorse and pain which might

well have entitled them to be forgotten by others.

'It was, at the same time, manifest, that, whatever admissions he

might be inclined to make respecting his own delinquencies, the

inordinate measure of the punishment dealt out to him had sunk deeply

into his mind, and, with the usual effect of such injustice, drove him

also to be unjust himself; so much so, indeed, as to impute to the

quarter to which he now traced all his ill fate a feeling of fixed

hostility to himself, which would not rest, he thought, even at his

grave, but continue to persecute his memory as it was now embittering

his life. So strong was this impression upon him, that, during one of

our few intervals of seriousness, he conjured me by our friendship,

if, as he both felt and hoped, I should survive him, not to let

unmerited censure settle upon his name.'

In this same account, page 218, Moore testifies that

'Lord Byron disliked his countrymen, but only because he knew that his

morals were held in contempt by them. The English, themselves rigid

observers of family duties, could not pardon him the neglect of his,

nor his trampling on principles; therefore, neither did he like being

presented to them, nor did they, especially when they had wives with

them, like to cultivate his acquaintance. Still there was a strong

desire in all of them to see him; and the women in particular, who did

not dare to look at him but by stealth, said in an under-voice, "What

a pity it is!" If, however, any of his compatriots of exalted rank

and high reputation came forward to treat him with courtesy, he showed

himself obviously flattered by it. It seemed that, to the wound which

remained open in his ulcerated heart, such soothing attentions were as

drops of healing balm, which comforted him.'

When in society, we are further informed by a lady quoted by Mr. Moore,

he was in the habit of speaking of his wife with much respect and

affection, as an illustrious lady, distinguished for her qualities of

heart and understanding; saying that all the fault of their cruel

separation lay with himself. Mr. Moore seems at times to be somewhat

puzzled by these contradictory statements of his idol, and speculates not

a little on what could be Lord Byron's object in using such language in

public; mentally comparing it, we suppose, with the free handling which

he gave to the same subject in his private correspondence.

The innocence with which Moore gives himself up to be manipulated by Lord

Byron, the naivete with which he shows all the process, let us a little

into the secret of the marvellous powers of charming and blinding which

this great actor possessed.

Lord Byron had the beauty, the wit, the genius, the dramatic talent,

which have constituted the strength of some wonderfully fascinating

women.

There have been women able to lead their leashes of blinded adorers; to

make them swear that black was white, or white black, at their word; to

smile away their senses, or weep away their reason. No matter what these

sirens may say, no matter what they may do, though caught in a thousand

transparent lies, and doing a thousand deeds which would have ruined

others, still men madly rave after them in life, and tear their hair over

their graves. Such an enchanter in man's shape was Lord Byron.

He led captive Moore and Murray by being beautiful, a genius, and a lord;

calling them 'Dear Tom' and 'Dear Murray,' while they were only

commoners. He first insulted Sir Walter Scott, and then witched his

heart out of him by ingenuous confessions and poetical compliments; he

took Wilson's heart by flattering messages and a beautifully-written

letter; he corresponded familiarly with Hogg; and, before his death, had

made fast friends, in one way or another, of the whole 'Noctes

Ambrosianae' Club.

We thus have given the historical resume of Lord Byron's attacks on his

wife's reputation: we shall add, that they were based on philosophic

principles, showing a deep knowledge of mankind. An analysis will show

that they can be philosophically classified:--

1st. Those which addressed the sympathetic nature of man, representing

her as cold, methodical, severe, strict, unforgiving.

2nd. Those addressed to the faculty of association, connecting her with

ludicrous and licentious images; taking from her the usual protection of

womanly delicacy and sacredness.

3rd. Those addressed to the moral faculties, accusing her as artful,

treacherous, untruthful, malignant.

All these various devices he held in his hand, shuffling and dealing them

as a careful gamester his pack of cards according to the exigencies of

the game. He played adroitly, skilfully, with blinding flatteries and

seductive wiles, that made his victims willing dupes.

Nothing can more clearly show the power and perfectness of his

enchantments than the masterly way in which he turned back the moral

force of the whole English nation, which had risen at first in its

strength against him. The victory was complete.

CHAPTER IV. RESULTS AFTER LORD BYRON'S DEATH.

At the time of Lord Byron's death, the English public had been so

skilfully manipulated by the Byron propaganda, that the sympathy of the

whole world was with him. A tide of emotion was now aroused in England

by his early death--dying in the cause of Greece and liberty. There

arose a general wail for him, as for a lost pleiad, not only in England,

but over the whole world; a great rush of enthusiasm for his memory, to

which the greatest literary men of England freely gave voice. By general

consent, Lady Byron seems to have been looked upon as the only

cold-hearted unsympathetic person in this general mourning.

From that time the literary world of England apparently regarded Lady

Byron as a woman to whom none of the decorums, nor courtesies of ordinary

womanhood, nor even the consideration belonging to common humanity, were

due.

'She that is a widow indeed, and desolate,' has been regarded in all

Christian countries as an object made sacred by the touch of God's

afflicting hand, sacred in her very helplessness; and the old Hebrew

Scriptures give to the Supreme Father no dearer title than 'the widow's

God.' But, on Lord Byron's death, men not devoid of tenderness, men

otherwise generous and of fine feeling, acquiesced in insults to his

widow with an obtuseness that seems, on review, quite incredible.

Lady Byron was not only a widow, but an orphan. She had no sister for

confidante; no father and mother to whom to go in her sorrows--sorrows so

much deeper and darker to her than they could be to any other human

being. She had neither son nor brother to uphold and protect her. On

all hands it was acknowledged that, so far, there was no fault to be

found in her but her utter silence. Her life was confessed to be pure,

useful, charitable; and yet, in this time of her sorrow, the writers of

England issued article upon article not only devoid of delicacy, but

apparently injurious and insulting towards her, with a blind

unconsciousness which seems astonishing.

One of the greatest literary powers of that time was the 'Blackwood:' the

reigning monarch on that literary throne was Wilson, the lion-hearted,

the brave, generous, tender poet, and, with some sad exceptions, the

noble man. But Wilson had believed the story of Byron, and, by his very

generosity and tenderness and pity, was betrayed into injustice.

In 'The Noctes' of November 1824 there is a conversation of the Noctes

Club, in which North says, 'Byron and I knew each other pretty well; and

I suppose there's no harm in adding, that we appreciated each other

pretty tolerably. Did you ever see his letter to me?'

The footnote to this says, '_This letter, which was_ PRINTED _in Byron's

lifetime, was not published till_ 1830, when it appeared in Moore's "Life

of Byron." It is one of the most vigorous prose compositions in the

language. Byron had the highest opinion of Wilson's genius and noble

spirit.'

In the first place, with our present ideas of propriety and good taste,

we should reckon it an indecorum to make the private affairs of a pure

and good woman, whose circumstances under any point of view were trying,

and who evidently shunned publicity, the subject of public discussion in

magazines which were read all over the world.

Lady Byron, as they all knew, had on her hands a most delicate and

onerous task, in bringing up an only daughter, necessarily inheriting

peculiarities of genius and great sensitiveness; and the many

mortifications and embarrassments which such intermeddling with her

private matters must have given, certainly should have been considered by

men with any pretensions to refinement or good feeling.

But the literati of England allowed her no consideration, no rest, no

privacy.

In 'The Noctes' of November 1825 there is the record of a free

conversation upon Lord and Lady Byron's affairs, interlarded with

exhortations to push the bottle, and remarks on whisky-toddy. Medwin's

'Conversations with Lord Byron' is discussed, which, we are told in a

note, appeared a few months after the _noble_ poet's death.

There is a rather bold and free discussion of Lord Byron's character--his

fondness for gin and water, on which stimulus he wrote 'Don Juan;' and

James Hogg says pleasantly to Mullion, 'O Mullion! it's a pity you and

Byron could na ha' been acquaint. There would ha' been brave sparring to

see who could say the wildest and the dreadfullest things; for he had

neither fear of man or woman, and would ha' his joke or jeer, cost what

it might.' And then follows a specimen of one of his jokes with an

actress, that, in indecency, certainly justifies the assertion. From the

other stories which follow, and the parenthesis that occurs frequently

('Mind your glass, James, a little more!'), it seems evident that the

party are progressing in their peculiar kind of _civilisation_.

It is in this same circle and paper that Lady Byron's private affairs

come up for discussion. The discussion is thus elegantly introduced:--

Hogg.--'Reach me the black bottle. I say, Christopher, what, after

all, is your opinion o' Lord and Leddy Byron's quarrel? Do you

yoursel' take part with him, or with her? I wad like to hear your

real opinion.'

North.--'Oh, dear! Well, Hogg, since you will have it, I think

Douglas Kinnard and Hobhouse are bound to tell us whether there be any

truth, and how much, in this story about the _declaration_, signed by

Sir Ralph' [Milbanke].

The note here tells us that this refers to a statement that appeared in

'Blackwood' immediately after Byron's death, to the effect that, previous

to the formal separation from his wife, Byron required and obtained from

Sir Ralph Milbanke, Lady Byron's father, a statement to the effect that

Lady Byron had no charge of moral delinquency to bring against him. {61}

North continues:--

'And I think Lady Byron's letter--the "Dearest Duck" one I mean--should

really be forthcoming, if her ladyship's friends wish to stand fair

before the public. At present we have nothing but loose talk of

society to go upon; and certainly, _if the things that are said be

true, there must be thorough explanation from some quarter, or the

tide will continue, as it has assuredly begun, to flow in a direction

very opposite to what we were for years accustomed_. Sir, they must

_explain this business of the letter_. You have, of course, heard

about the invitation it contained, the warm, affectionate invitation,

to Kirkby Mallory'--

Hogg interposes,--

'I dinna like to be interruptin' ye, Mr. North; but I must inquire, Is

the _jug_ to stand still while ye're going on at that rate?'

North--'There, Porker! These things are part and parcel of the

chatter of every bookseller's shop; a fortiori, of every drawing-room

in May Fair. Can the matter stop here? Can a great man's memory be

permitted to incur damnation while these saving clauses are afloat

anywhere uncontradicted?'

And from this the conversation branches off into strong, emphatic praise

of Byron's conduct in Greece during the last part of his life.

The silent widow is thus delicately and considerately reminded in the

'Blackwood' that she is the talk, not only over the whisky jug of the

Noctes, but in every drawing-room in London; and that she must speak out

and explain matters, or the whole world will set against her.

But she does not speak yet. The public persecution, therefore, proceeds.

Medwin's book being insufficient, another biographer is to be selected.

Now, the person in the Noctes Club who was held to have the most complete

information of the Byron affairs, and was, on that account, first thought

of by Murray to execute this very delicate task of writing a memoir which

should include the most sacred domestic affairs of a noble lady and her

orphan daughter, was Maginn. Maginn, the author of the pleasant joke,

that 'man never reaches the apex of civilisation till he is too drunk to

pronounce the word,' was the first person in whose hands the

'Autobiography,' Memoirs, and Journals of Lord Byron were placed with

this view.

The following note from Shelton Mackenzie, in the June number of 'The

Noctes,' 1824, says,--

'At that time, had he been so minded, Maginn (Odoherty) could have got

up a popular Life of Byron as well as most men in England. Immediately

on the account of Byron's death being received in London, John Murray

proposed that Maginn should bring out Memoirs, Journals, and Letters

of Lord Byron, and, with this intent, placed in his hand every line

that he (Murray) possessed in Byron's handwriting. . . . . The strong

desire of Byron's family and executors that the "Autobiography" should

be burned, to which desire Murray foolishly yielded, made such an

hiatus in the materials, that Murray and Maginn agreed it would not

answer to bring out the work then. Eventually Moore executed it.'

The character of the times in which this work was to be undertaken will

appear from the following note of Mackenzie's to 'The Noctes' of August

1824, which we copy, with the author's own Italics:--

'In the "Blackwood" of July 1824 was a poetical epistle by the

renowned Timothy Tickler to the editor of the "John Bull" magazine, on

an article in his first number. This article. . . professed to be a

portion of the veritable "Autobiography" of Byron which was burned,

and was called "My Wedding Night." It appeared to relate in detail

everything that occurred in the twenty-four hours immediately

succeeding that in which Byron was married. It had plenty of

coarseness, and some to spare. It went into particulars such as

hitherto had been given only by Faublas; and it had, notwithstanding,

many phrases and some facts which evidently did not belong to a mere

fabricator. Some years after, I compared this "Wedding Night" with

what I had all assurance of having been transcribed from the actual

manuscripts of Byron, and was persuaded that the magazine-writer must

have had the actual statement before him, or have had a perusal of it.

The writer in "Blackwood" declared his conviction that it really was

Byron's own writing.'

The reader must remember that Lord Byron died April 1824; so that,

according to this, his 'Autobiography' was made the means of this gross

insult to his widow three months after his death.

If some powerful cause had not paralysed all feelings of gentlemanly

honour, and of womanly delicacy, and of common humanity, towards Lady

Byron, throughout the whole British nation, no editor would have dared to

open a periodical with such an article; or, if he had, he would have been

overwhelmed with a storm of popular indignation, which, like the fire

upon Sodom, would have made a pillar of salt of him for a warning to all

future generations.

'Blackwood' reproves the 'John Bull' in a poetical epistle, recognising

the article as coming from Byron, and says to the author,--

'But that you, sir, a wit and a scholar like you,

Should not blush to produce what he blushed not to do,--

Take your compliment, youngster; this doubles, almost,

The sorrow that rose when his honour was lost.'

We may not wonder that the 'Autobiography' was burned, as Murray says in

a recent account, by a committee of Byron's friends, including Hobhouse,

his sister, and Murray himself.

Now, the 'Blackwood' of July 1824 thus declares its conviction that this

outrage on every sentiment of human decency came from Lord Byron, and

that his honour was lost. Maginn does not undertake the memoir. No

memoir at all is undertaken; till finally Moore is selected, as, like

Demetrius of old, a well-skilled gilder and 'maker of silver shrines,'

though not for Diana. To Moore is committed the task of doing his best

for this battered image, in which even the worshippers recognise foul

sulphurous cracks, but which they none the less stand ready to worship as

a genuine article that 'fell down from Jupiter.'

Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that

matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average

associates to be. He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is rose-

coloured and refined. He does not burst out with such heroic stanzas as

Maginn's frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:--

'Jeremy, throw your pen aside,

And come get drunk with me;

And we'll go where Bacchus sits astride,

Perched high on barrels three.'

Moore's vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times

with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.

In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was as

much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to

him, at last, the task of editing Byron's 'Memoirs' was given.

This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most

drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license

spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts

of humanity; whose 'honour was lost,'--was submitted to this careful

manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for an

idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.

The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting

haloes,--admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred origin,--and

the world given to understand that no common rule or measure could apply

to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so the hearts of men were

to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the yearning pain of a god, and

with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on the sacredness of genius, till

they were ready to cast themselves at his feet, and adore.

Then he was to be set up on a pedestal, like Nebuchadnezzar's image on

the plains of Dura; and what time the world heard the sound of cornet,

sackbut, and dulcimer, in his enchanting verse, they were to fall down

and worship.

For Lady Byron, Moore had simply the respect that a commoner has for a

lady of rank, and a good deal of the feeling that seems to underlie all

English literature,--that it is no matter what becomes of the woman when

the man's story is to be told. But, with all his faults, Moore was not a

cruel man; and we cannot conceive such outrageous cruelty and

ungentlemanly indelicacy towards an unoffending woman, as he shows in

these 'Memoirs,' without referring them to Lord Byron's own influence in

making him an unscrupulous, committed partisan on his side.

So little pity, so little sympathy, did he suppose Lady Byron to be

worthy of, that he laid before her, in the sight of all the world,

selections from her husband's letters and journals, in which the

privacies of her courtship and married life were jested upon with a

vulgar levity; letters filled, from the time of the act of separation,

with a constant succession of sarcasms, stabs, stings, epigrams, and

vindictive allusions to herself, bringing her into direct and insulting

comparison with his various mistresses, and implying their superiority

over her. There, too, were gross attacks on her father and mother, as

having been the instigators of the separation; and poor Lady Milbanke, in

particular, is sometimes mentioned with epithets so offensive, that the

editor prudently covers the terms with stars, as intending language too

gross to be printed.

The last mistress of Lord Byron is uniformly brought forward in terms of

such respect and consideration, that one would suppose that the usual

moral laws that regulate English family life had been specially repealed

in his favour. Moore quotes with approval letters from Shelley, stating

that Lord Byron's connection with La Guiccioli has been of inestimable

benefit to him; and that he is now becoming what he should be, 'a

virtuous man.' Moore goes on to speak of the connection as one, though

somewhat reprehensible, yet as having all those advantages of marriage

and settled domestic ties that Byron's affectionate spirit had long

sighed for, but never before found; and in his last resume of the poet's

character, at the end of the volume, he brings the mistress into direct

comparison with the wife in a single sentence: 'The woman to whom he gave

the love of his maturer years idolises his name; and, with a single

unhappy exception, scarce an instance is to be found of one brought. . .

into relations of amity with him who did not retain a kind regard for him

in life, and a fondness for his memory.'

Literature has never yet seen the instance of a person, of Lady Byron's

rank in life, placed before the world in a position more humiliating to

womanly dignity, or wounding to womanly delicacy.

The direct implication is, that she has no feelings to be hurt, no heart

to be broken, and is not worthy even of the consideration which in

ordinary life is to be accorded to a widow who has received those awful

tidings which generally must awaken many emotions, and call for some

consideration, even in the most callous hearts.

The woman who we are told walked the room, vainly striving to control the

sobs that shook her frame, while she sought to draw from the servant that

last message of her husband which she was never to hear, was not thought

worthy even of the rights of common humanity.

The first volume of the 'Memoir' came out in 1830. Then for the first

time came one flash of lightning from the silent cloud; and she who had

never spoken before spoke out. The libels on the memory of her dead

parents drew from her what her own wrongs never did. During all this

time, while her husband had been keeping her effigy dangling before the

public as a mark for solemn curses, and filthy lampoons, and secretly-

circulated disclosures, that spared no sacredness and violated every

decorum, she had not uttered a word. She had been subjected to nameless

insults, discussed in the assemblies of drunkards, and challenged to

speak for herself. Like the chaste lady in 'Comus,' whom the vile wizard

had bound in the enchanted seat to be 'grinned at and chattered at' by

all the filthy rabble of his dehumanised rout, she had remained pure,

lofty, and undefiled; and the stains of mud and mire thrown upon her had

fallen from her spotless garments.

Now that she is dead, a recent writer in 'The London Quarterly' dares

give voice to an insinuation which even Byron gave only a suggestion of

when he called his wife Clytemnestra; and hints that she tried the power

of youth and beauty to win to her the young solicitor Lushington, and a

handsome young officer of high rank.

At this time, such insinuations had not been thought of; and the only and

chief allegation against Lady Byron had been a cruel severity of virtue.

At all events, when Lady Byron spoke, the world listened with respect,

and believed what she said.

Here let us, too, read her statement, and give it the careful attention

she solicits (Moore's 'Life of Byron,' vol. vi. p.275):--

'I have disregarded various publications in which facts within my own

knowledge have been grossly misrepresented; but I am called upon to

notice some of the erroneous statements proceeding from one who claims

to be considered as Lord Byron's confidential and authorised friend.

Domestic details ought not to be intruded on the public attention: if,

however, they are so intruded, the persons affected by them have a

right to refute injurious charges. Mr. Moore has promulgated his own

impressions of private events in which I was most nearly concerned, as

if he possessed a competent knowledge of the subject. Having survived

Lord Byron, I feel increased reluctance to advert to any circumstances

connected with the period of my marriage; nor is it now my intention

to disclose them further than may be indispensably requisite for the

end I have in view. Self-vindication is not the motive which actuates

me to make this appeal, and the spirit of accusation is unmingled with

it; but when the conduct of my parents is brought forward in a

disgraceful light by the passages selected from Lord Byron's letters,

and by the remarks of his biographer, I feel bound to justify their

characters from imputations which I know to be false. The passages

from Lord Byron's letters, to which I refer, are,--the aspersion on my

mother's character (p.648, l.4): {70a} "My child is very well and

flourishing, I hear; but I must see also. I feel no disposition to

resign it to the contagion of its grandmother's society." The

assertion of her dishonourable conduct in employing a spy (p.645, l.7,

etc.): "A Mrs. C. (now a kind of housekeeper and spy of Lady N's),

who, in her better days, was a washerwoman, is supposed to be--by the

learned--very much the occult cause of our domestic discrepancies."

The seeming exculpation of myself in the extract (p.646), with the

words immediately following it, "Her nearest relations are a---;"

where the blank clearly implies something too offensive for

publication. These passages tend to throw suspicion on my parents,

and give reason to ascribe the separation either to their direct

agency, or to that of "officious spies" employed by them. {70b} From

the following part of the narrative (p.642), it must also be inferred

that an undue influence was exercised by them for the accomplishment

of this purpose: "It was in a few weeks after the latter communication

between us (Lord Byron and Mr. Moore) that Lady Byron adopted the

determination of parting from him. She had left London at the latter

end of January, on a visit to her father's house in Leicestershire;

and Lord Byron was in a short time to follow her. They had parted in

the utmost kindness, she wrote him a letter, full of playfulness and

affection, on the road; and, immediately on her arrival at Kirkby

Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that she would return

to him no more."

'In my observations upon this statement, I shall, as far as possible,

avoid touching on any matters relating personally to Lord Byron and

myself. The facts are,--I left London for Kirkby Mallory, the

residence of my father and mother, on the 15th of January, 1816. Lord

Byron had signified to me in writing (Jan. 6) his absolute desire that

I should leave London on the earliest day that I could conveniently

fix. It was not safe for me to undertake the fatigue of a journey

sooner than the 15th. Previously to my departure, it had been

strongly impressed on my mind that Lord Byron was under the influence

of insanity. This opinion was derived in a great measure from the

communications made to me by his nearest relatives and personal

attendant, who had more opportunities than myself of observing him

during the latter part of my stay in town. It was even represented to

me that he was in danger of destroying himself. With the concurrence

of his family, I had consulted Dr. Baillie, as a friend (Jan. 8),

respecting this supposed malady. On acquainting him with the state of

the case, and with Lord Byron's desire that I should leave London, Dr.

Baillie thought that my absence might be advisable as an experiment,

assuming the fact of mental derangement; for Dr. Baillie, not having

had access to Lord Byron, could not pronounce a positive opinion on

that point. He enjoined that, in correspondence with Lord Byron, I

should avoid all but light and soothing topics. Under these

impressions I left London, determined to follow the advice given by

Dr. Baillie. Whatever might have been the nature of Lord Byron's

conduct towards me from the time of my marriage, yet, supposing him to

be in a state of mental alienation, it was not for me, nor for any

person of common humanity, to manifest at that moment a sense of

injury. On the day of my departure, and again on my arrival at Kirkby

(Jan. 16), I wrote to Lord Byron in a kind and cheerful tone,

according to those medical directions.

'The last letter was circulated, and employed as a pretext for the

charge of my having been subsequently influenced to "desert" {72} my

husband. It has been argued that I parted from Lord Byron in perfect

harmony; that feelings incompatible with any deep sense of injury had

dictated the letter which I addressed to him; and that my sentiments

must have been changed by persuasion and interference when I was under

the roof of my parents. These assertions and inferences are wholly

destitute of foundation. When I arrived at Kirkby Mallory, my parents

were unacquainted with the existence of any causes likely to destroy

my prospects of happiness; and, when I communicated to them the

opinion which had been formed concerning Lord Byron's state of mind,

they were most anxious to promote his restoration by every means in

their power. They assured those relations who were with him in

London, that "they would devote their whole care and attention to the

alleviation of his malady;" and hoped to make the best arrangements

for his comfort if he could be induced to visit them.

'With these intentions, my mother wrote on the 17th to Lord Byron,

inviting him to Kirkby Mallory. She had always treated him with an

affectionate consideration and indulgence, which extended to every

little peculiarity of his feelings. Never did an irritating word

escape her lips in her whole intercourse with him. The accounts given

me after I left Lord Byron, by the persons in constant intercourse

with him, added to those doubts which had before transiently occurred

to my mind as to the reality of the alleged disease; and the reports

of his medical attendant were far from establishing the existence of

anything like lunacy. Under this uncertainty, I deemed it right to

communicate to my parents, that, if I were to consider Lord Byron's

past conduct as that of a person of sound mind, nothing could induce

me to return to him. It therefore appeared expedient, both to them

and myself, to consult the ablest advisers. For that object, and also

to obtain still further information respecting the appearances which

seemed to indicate mental derangement, my mother determined to go to

London. She was empowered by me to take legal opinions on a written

statement of mine, though I had then reasons for reserving a part of

the case from the knowledge even of my father and mother. Being

convinced by the result of these inquiries, and by the tenor of Lord

Byron's proceedings, that the notion of insanity was an illusion, I no

longer hesitated to authorise such measures as were necessary in order

to secure me from being ever again placed in his power. Conformably

with this resolution, my father wrote to him on the 2nd of February to

propose an amicable separation. Lord Byron at first rejected this

proposal; but when it was distinctly notified to him that, if he

persisted in his refusal, recourse must be had to legal measures, he

agreed to sign a deed of separation. Upon applying to Dr. Lushington,

who was intimately acquainted with all the circumstances, to state in

writing what he recollected upon this subject, I received from him the

following letter, by which it will be manifest that my mother cannot

have been actuated by any hostile or ungenerous motives towards Lord

Byron:--

'"MY DEAR LADY BYRON,--I can rely upon the accuracy of my memory for

the following statement. I was originally consulted by Lady Noel, on

your behalf, whilst you were in the country. The circumstances

detailed by her were such as justified a separation; but they were not

of that aggravated description as to render such a measure

indispensable. On Lady Noel's representation, I deemed a

reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable, and felt most sincerely a

wish to aid in effecting it. There was not on Lady Noel's part any

exaggeration of the facts; nor, so far as I could perceive, any

determination to prevent a return to Lord Byron: certainly none was

expressed when I spoke of a reconciliation. When you came to town, in

about a fortnight, or perhaps more, after my first interview with Lady

Noel, I was for the first time informed by you of facts utterly

unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel. On receiving

this additional information, my opinion was entirely changed: I

considered a reconciliation impossible. I declared my opinion, and

added, that, if such an idea should be entertained, I could not,

either professionally or otherwise, take any part towards effecting

it.

'"Believe me, very faithfully yours,

'"STEPH. LUSHINGTON.

'"Great George Street, Jan. 31, 1830."

'I have only to observe, that, if the statements on which my legal

advisers (the late Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington) formed their

opinions were false, the responsibility and the odium should rest with

me only. I trust that the facts which I have here briefly

recapitulated will absolve my father and mother from all accusations

with regard to the part they took in the separation between Lord Byron

and myself.

'They neither originated, instigated, nor advised that separation; and

they cannot be condemned for having afforded to their daughter the

assistance and protection which she claimed. There is no other near

relative to vindicate their memory from insult. I am therefore

compelled to break the silence which I had hoped always to observe,

and to solicit from the readers of Lord Byron's "Life" an impartial

consideration of the testimony extorted from me.

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.

'Hanger Hill, Feb. 19, 1830.'

The effect of this statement on the literary world may be best judged by

the discussion of it by Christopher North (Wilson) in the succeeding May

number of 'The Noctes,' where the bravest and most generous of literary

men that then were--himself the husband of a gentle wife--thus gives

sentence: the conversation is between North and the Shepherd:--

North.--'God forbid I should wound the feelings of Lady Byron, of

whose character, known to me but by the high estimation in which it is

held by all who have enjoyed her friendship, I have always spoken with

respect! . . . But may I, without harshness or indelicacy, say, here

among ourselves, James, that, by marrying Byron, she took upon

herself, with eyes wide open and conscience clearly convinced, duties

very different from those of which, even in common cases, the

presaging foresight shadows. . . the light of the first nuptial moon?'

Shepherd.--'She did that, sir; by my troth, she did that.'

. . . .

North.--'Miss Milbanke knew that he was reckoned a rake and a roue;

and although his genius wiped off, by impassioned eloquence in love-

letters that were felt to be irresistible, or hid the worst stain of,

that reproach, still Miss Milbanke must have believed it a perilous

thing to be the wife of Lord Byron. . . . But still, by joining her

life to his in marriage, she pledged her troth and her faith and her

love, under probabilities of severe, disturbing, perhaps fearful

trials, in the future. . . .

'But I think Lady Byron ought not to have printed that Narrative.

Death abrogates not the rights of a husband to his wife's silence when

speech is fatal. . . to his character as a man. Has she not flung

suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of

a--monster? . . . If Byron's sins or crimes--for we are driven to use

terrible terms--were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the

Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted

that confession from his widow's breast? . . . But there was no such

pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm. Self-

collected, and gathering up all her faculties and feelings into

unshrinking strength, she denounced before all the world--and

throughout all space and all time--her husband, as excommunicated by

his vices from woman's bosom.

. . . .

''Twas to vindicate the character of her parents that Lady Byron

wrote,--a holy purpose and devout, nor do I doubt sincere. But filial

affection and reverence, sacred as they are, may be blamelessly, nay,

righteously, subordinate to conjugal duties, which die not with the

dead, are extinguished not even by the sins of the dead, were they as

foul as the grave's corruption.'

Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for woman,

in length and breadth; and, that all women may understand the doctrine,

the Shepherd now takes up his parable, and expounds the true position of

the wife. We render his Scotch into English:--

'Not a few such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage

husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,--as good, as bright,

as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There they

sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy

instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless

misery is least given to complaint.'

Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting

for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only

drink, to sit down on a 'knowe' and say a prayer.

'Yet she's decently, yea, tidily dressed, poor creature! in sair worn

widow's clothes, a single suit for Saturday and Sunday; her hair,

untimely gray, is neatly braided under her crape cap; and sometimes,

when all is still and solitary in the fields, and all labour has

disappeared into the house, you may see her stealing by herself, or

leading one wee orphan by the hand, with another at her breast, to the

kirkyard, where the love of her youth and the husband of her prime is

buried.

'Yet,' says the Shepherd, 'he was a brute, a ruffian, a monster. When

drunk, how he raged and cursed and swore! Often did she dread that,

in his fits of inhuman passion, he would have murdered the baby at her

breast; for she had seen him dash their only little boy, a child of

eight years old, on the floor, till the blood gushed from his ears;

and then the madman threw himself down on the body, and howled for the

gallows. Limmers haunted his door, and he theirs; and it was hers to

lie, not sleep, in a cold, forsaken bed, once the bed of peace,

affection, and perfect happiness. Often he struck her; and once when

she was pregnant with that very orphan now smiling on her breast,

reaching out his wee fingers to touch the flowers on his father's

grave. . . .

'But she tries to smile among the neighbours, and speaks of her boy's

likeness to its father; nor, when the conversation turns on bygone

times, does she fear to let his name escape her white lips, "My

Robert; the bairn's not ill-favoured, but he will never look like his

father,"--and such sayings, uttered in a calm, sweet voice. Nay, I

remember once how her pale countenance reddened with a sudden flush of

pride, when a gossiping crone alluded to their wedding; and the

widow's eye brightened through her tears to hear how the bridegroom,

sitting that sabbath in his front seat beside his bonny bride, had not

his equal for strength, stature, and all that is beauty in man, in all

the congregation. That, I say, sir, whether right or wrong,

was--forgiveness.

Here is a specimen of how even generous men had been so perverted by the

enchantment of Lord Byron's genius, as to turn all the pathos and power

of the strongest literature of that day against the persecuted, pure

woman, and for the strong, wicked man. These 'Blackwood' writers knew,

by Byron's own filthy, ghastly writings, which had gone sorely against

their own moral stomachs, that he was foul to the bone. They could see,

in Moore's 'Memoirs' right before them, how he had caught an innocent

girl's heart by sending a love-letter, and offer of marriage, at the end

of a long friendly correspondence,--a letter that had been written to

show to his libertine set, and sent on the toss-up of a copper, because

he cared nothing for it one way or the other.

They admit that, having won this poor girl, he had been savage, brutal,

drunken, cruel. They had read the filthy taunts in 'Don Juan,' and the

nameless abominations in the 'Autobiography.' They had admitted among

themselves that his honour was lost; but still this abused, desecrated

woman must reverence her brutal master's memory, and not speak, even to

defend the grave of her own kind father and mother.

That there was no lover of her youth, that the marriage-vow had been a

hideous, shameless cheat, is on the face of Moore's account; yet the

'Blackwood' does not see it nor feel it, and brings up against Lady Byron

this touching story of a poor widow, who really had had a true lover

once,--a lover maddened, imbruted, lost, through that very drunkenness in

which the Noctes Club were always glorying.

It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore

and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering, broken-

hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share

alike with the poor dog,--the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and

cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love

and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as

he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth of life in

him. Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor, loving

brute,--most mournful and most sacred

But, oh that a noble man should have no higher ideal of the love of a

high-souled, heroic woman! Oh that men should teach women that they owe

no higher duties, and are capable of no higher tenderness, than this

loving, unquestioning animal fidelity! The dog is ever-loving,

ever-forgiving, because God has given him no high range of moral

faculties, no sense of justice, no consequent horror at impurity and

vileness.

Much of the beautiful patience and forgiveness of women is made possible

to them by that utter deadness to the sense of justice which the laws,

literature, and misunderstood religion of England have sought to induce

in woman as a special grace and virtue.

The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is, that

man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine,

may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the

marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage-

vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour

his memory,--nay, to sacrifice to it the honour due to a kind father and

mother, slandered in their silent graves.

Such was the sympathy, and such the advice, that the best literature of

England could give to a young widow, a peeress of England, whose husband,

as they verily believed and admitted, might have done worse than all

this; whose crimes might have been 'foul, monstrous, unforgivable as the

sin against the Holy Ghost.' If these things be done in the green tree,

what shall be done in the dry? If the peeress as a wife has no rights,

what is the state of the cotter's wife?

But, in the same paper, North again blames Lady Byron for not having come

out with the whole story before the world at the time she separated from

her husband. He says of the time when she first consulted counsel

through her mother, keeping back one item,--

'How weak, and worse than weak, at such a juncture, on which hung her

whole fate, to ask legal advice on an imperfect document! Give the

delicacy of a virtuous woman its due; but at such a crisis, when the

question was whether her conscience was to be free from the oath of

oaths, delicacy should have died, and nature was privileged to show

unashamed--if such there were--the records of uttermost pollution.'

Shepherd.--'And what think ye, sir, that a' this pollution could hae

been, that sae electrified Dr. Lushington?'

North.--'Bad--bad--bad, James. Nameless, it is horrible; named, it

might leave Byron's memory yet within the range of pity and

forgiveness; and, where they are, their sister affections will not be

far; though, like weeping seraphs, standing aloof, and veiling their

wings.'

Shepherd.--'She should indeed hae been silent--till the grave had

closed on her sorrows as on his sins.'

North.--'Even now she should speak,--or some one else for her,-- . . .

and a few words will suffice. Worse the condition of the dead man's

name cannot be--far, far better it might--I believe it would be--were

all the truth somehow or other declared; and declared it must be, not

for Byron's sake only, but for the sake of humanity itself; and then a

mitigated sentence, or eternal silence.'

We have another discussion of Lady Byron's duties in a further number of

'Blackwood.'

The 'Memoir' being out, it was proposed that there should be a complete

annotation of Byron's works gotten up, and adorned, for the further

glorification of his memory, with portraits of the various women whom he

had delighted to honour.

Murray applied to Lady Byron for her portrait, and was met with a cold,

decided negative. After reading all the particulars of Byron's harem of

mistresses, and Moore's comparisons between herself and La Guiccioli, one

might imagine reasons why a lady, with proper self-respect, should object

to appearing in this manner. One would suppose there might have been

gentlemen who could well appreciate the motive of that refusal; but it

was only considered a new evidence that she was indifferent to her

conjugal duties, and wanting in that respect which Christopher North had

told her she owed a husband's memory, though his crimes were foul as the

rottenness of the grave.

Never, since Queen Vashti refused to come at the command of a drunken

husband to show herself to his drunken lords, was there a clearer case of

disrespect to the marital dignity on the part of a wife. It was a plain

act of insubordination, rebellion against law and order; and how shocking

in Lady Byron, who ought to feel herself but too much flattered to be

exhibited to the public as the head wife of a man of genius!

Means were at once adopted to subdue her contumacy, of which one may read

in a note to the 'Blackwood' (Noctes), September 1832. An artist was

sent down to Ealing to take her picture by stealth as she sat in church.

Two sittings were thus obtained without her knowledge. In the third one,

the artist placed himself boldly before her, and sketched, so that she

could not but observe him. We shall give the rest in Mackenzie's own

words, as a remarkable specimen of the obtuseness, not to say indelicacy

of feeling, which seemed to pervade the literary circles of England at

the time:--

'After prayers, Wright and his friend (the artist) were visited by an

ambassador from her ladyship to inquire the meaning of what she had

seen. The reply was, that Mr. Murray must have her portrait, and was

compelled to take what she refused to give. The result was, Wright

was requested to visit her, which he did; taking with him, not the

sketch, which was very good, but another, in which there was a strong

touch of caricature. Rather than allow that to appear as her likeness

(a very natural and womanly feeling by the way), she consented to sit

for the portrait to W. J. Newton, which was engraved, and is here

alluded to.'

The artless barbarism of this note is too good to be lost; but it is

quite borne out by the conversation in the Noctes Club, which it

illustrates.

It would appear from this conversation that these Byron beauties appeared

successively in pamphlet form; and the picture of Lady Byron is thus

discussed:--

Mullion.--'I don't know if you have seen the last brochure. It has a

charming head of Lady Byron, who, it seems, sat on purpose: and that's

very agreeable to hear of; for it shows her ladyship has got over any

little soreness that Moore's "Life" occasioned, and is now willing to

contribute anything in her power to the real monument of Byron's

genius.'

North.--'I am delighted to hear of this: 'tis really very noble in the

unfortunate lady. I never saw her. Is the face a striking one?'

Mullion.--'Eminently so,--a most calm, pensive, melancholy style of

native beauty,--and a most touching contrast to the maids of Athens,

Annesley, and all the rest of them. I'm sure you'll have the proof

Finden has sent you framed for the Boudoir at the Lodge.'

North.--'By all means. I mean to do that for all the Byron Beauties.'

But it may be asked, Was there not a man in all England with delicacy

enough to feel for Lady Byron, and chivalry enough to speak a bold word

for her? Yes: there was one. Thomas Campbell the poet, when he read

Lady Byron's statement, believed it, as did Christopher North; but it

affected him differently. It appears he did not believe it a wife's duty

to burn herself on her husband's funeral-pile, as did Christopher North;

and held the singular idea, that a wife had some rights as a human being

as well as a husband.

Lady Byron's own statement appeared in pamphlet form in 1830: at least,

such is the date at the foot of the document. Thomas Campbell, in 'The

New Monthly Magazine,' shortly after, printed a spirited, gentlemanly

defence of Lady Byron, and administered a pointed rebuke to Moore for the

rudeness and indelicacy he had shown in selecting from Byron's letters

the coarsest against herself, her parents, and her old governess Mrs.

Clermont, and by the indecent comparisons he had instituted between Lady

Byron and Lord Byron's last mistress.

It is refreshing to hear, at last, from somebody who is not altogether on

his knees at the feet of the popular idol, and who has some chivalry for

woman, and some idea of common humanity. He says,--

'I found my right to speak on this painful subject on its now

irrevocable publicity, brought up afresh as it has been by Mr. Moore,

to be the theme of discourse to millions, and, if I err not much, the

cause of misconception to innumerable minds. I claim to speak of Lady

Byron in the right of a man, and of a friend to the rights of woman,

and to liberty, and to natural religion. I claim a right, more

especially, as one of the many friends of Lady Byron, who, one and

all, feel aggrieved by this production. It has virtually dragged her

forward from the shade of retirement, where she had hid her sorrows,

and compelled her to defend the heads of her friends and her parents

from being crushed under the tombstone of Byron. Nay, in a general

view, it has forced her to defend herself; though, with her true sense

and her pure taste, she stands above all special pleading. To plenary

explanation she ought not--she never shall be driven. Mr. Moore is

too much a gentleman not to shudder at the thought of that; but if

other Byronists, of a far different stamp, were to force the savage

ordeal, it is her enemies, and not she, that would have to dread the

burning ploughshares.

'We, her friends, have no wish to prolong the discussion: but a few

words we must add, even to her admirable statement; for hers is a

cause not only dear to her friends, but having become, from Mr. Moore

and her misfortunes, a publicly-agitated cause, it concerns morality,

and the most sacred rights of the sex, that she should (and that, too,

without more special explanations) be acquitted out and out, and

honourably acquitted, in this business, of all share in the blame,

which is one and indivisible. Mr. Moore, on further reflection, may

see this; and his return to candour will surprise us less than his

momentary deviation from its path.

'For the tact of Mr. Moore's conduct in this affair, I have not to

answer; but, if indelicacy be charged upon me, I scorn the charge.

Neither will I submit to be called Lord Byron's accuser; because a

word against him I wish not to say beyond what is painfully wrung from

me by the necessity of owning or illustrating Lady Byron's

unblamableness, and of repelling certain misconceptions respecting

her, which are now walking the fashionable world, and which have been

fostered (though Heaven knows where they were born) most delicately

and warily by the Christian godfathership of Mr. Moore.

'I write not at Lady Byron's bidding. I have never humiliated either

her or myself by asking if I should write, or what I should write;

that is to say, I never applied to her for information against Lord

Byron, though I was justified, as one intending to criticise Mr.

Moore, in inquiring into the truth of some of his statements. Neither

will I suffer myself to be called her champion, if by that word be

meant the advocate of her mere legal innocence; for that, I take it,

nobody questions.

'Still less is it from the sorry impulse of pity that I speak of this

noble woman; for I look with wonder and even envy at the proud purity

of her sense and conscience, that have carried her exquisite

sensibilities in triumph through such poignant tribulations. But I am

proud to be called her friend, the humble illustrator of her cause,

and the advocate of those principles which make it to me more

interesting than Lord Byron's. Lady Byron (if the subject must be

discussed) belongs to sentiment and morality (at least as much as Lord

Byron); nor is she to be suffered, when compelled to speak, to raise

her voice as in a desert, with no friendly voice to respond to her.

Lady Byron could not have outlived her sufferings if she had not wound

up her fortitude to the high point of trusting mainly for consolation,

not to the opinion of the world, but to her own inward peace; and,

having said what ought to convince the world, I verily believe that

she has less care about the fashionable opinion respecting her than

any of her friends can have. But we, her friends, mix with the world;

and we hear offensive absurdities about her, which we have a right to

put down.

. . . .

'I proceed to deal more generally with Mr. Moore's book. You speak,

Mr. Moore, against Lord Byron's censurers in a tone of indignation

which is perfectly lawful towards calumnious traducers, but which will

not terrify me, or any other man of courage who is no calumniator,

from uttering his mind freely with regard to this part of your hero's

conduct. I question your philosophy in assuming that all that is

noble in Byron's poetry was inconsistent with the possibility of his

being devoted to a pure and good woman; and I repudiate your morality

for canting too complacently about "the lava of his imagination," and

the unsettled fever of his passions, being any excuses for his

planting the tic douloureux of domestic suffering in a meek woman's

bosom.

'These are hard words, Mr. Moore; but you have brought them on

yourself by your voluntary ignorance of facts known to me; for you

might and ought to have known both sides of the question; and, if the

subject was too delicate for you to consult Lady Byron's confidential

friends, you ought to have had nothing to do with the subject. But

you cannot have submitted your book even to Lord Byron's sister,

otherwise she would have set you right about the imaginary spy, Mrs.

Clermont.'

Campbell now goes on to print, at his own peril, he says, and without

time to ask leave, the following note from Lady Byron in reply to an

application he made to her, when he was about to review Moore's book, for

an 'estimate as to the correctness of Moore's statements.'

The following is Lady Byron's reply:--

'DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--In taking up my pen to point out for your private

information {86} those passages in Mr. Moore's representation of my

part of the story which were open to contradiction, I find them of

still greater extent than I had supposed; and to deny an assertion

here and there would virtually admit the truth of the rest. If, on

the contrary, I were to enter into a full exposure of the falsehood of

the views taken by Mr. Moore, I must detail various matters, which,

consistently with my principles and feelings, I cannot under the

existing circumstances disclose. I may, perhaps, convince you better

of the difficulty of the case by an example: It is not true that

pecuniary embarrassments were the cause of the disturbed state of Lord

Byron's mind, or formed the chief reason for the arrangements made by

him at that time. But is it reasonable for me to expect that you or

any one else should believe this, unless I show you what were the

causes in question? and this I cannot do.

'I am, etc.,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

Campbell then goes on to reprove Moore for his injustice to Mrs.

Clermont, whom Lord Byron had denounced as a spy, but whose

respectability and innocence were vouched for by Lord Byron's own family;

and then he pointedly rebukes one false statement of great indelicacy and

cruelty concerning Lady Byron's courtship, as follows:--

'It is a further mistake on Mr. Moore's part, and I can prove it to be

so, if proof be necessary, to represent Lady Byron, in the course of

their courtship, as one inviting her future husband to correspondence

by letters after she had at first refused him. She never proposed a

correspondence. On the contrary, he sent her a message after that

first refusal, stating that he meant to go abroad, and to travel for

some years in the East; that he should depart with a heart aching, but

not angry; and that he only begged a verbal assurance that she had

still some interest in his happiness. Could Miss Milbanke, as a well-

bred woman, refuse a courteous answer to such a message? She sent him

a verbal answer, which was merely kind and becoming, but which

signified no encouragement that he should renew his offer of marriage.

'After that message, he wrote to her a most interesting letter about

himself,--about his views, personal, moral, and religious,--to which

it would have been uncharitable not to have replied. The result was

an insensibly increasing correspondence, which ended in her being

devotedly attached to him. About that time, I occasionally saw Lord

Byron; and though I knew less of him than Mr. Moore, yet I suspect I

knew as much of him as Miss Milbanke then knew. At that time, he was

so pleasing, that, if I had had a daughter with ample fortune and

beauty, I should have trusted her in marriage with Lord Byron.

'Mr. Moore at that period evidently understood Lord Byron better than

either his future bride or myself; but this speaks more for Moore's

shrewdness than for Byron's ingenuousness of character.

'It is more for Lord Byron's sake than for his widow's that I resort

not to a more special examination of Mr. Moore's misconceptions. The

subject would lead me insensibly into hateful disclosures against poor

Lord Byron, who is more unfortunate in his rash defenders than in his

reluctant accusers. Happily, his own candour turns our hostility from

himself against his defenders. It was only in wayward and bitter

remarks that he misrepresented Lady Byron. He would have defended

himself irresistibly if Mr. Moore had left only his acknowledging

passages. But Mr. Moore has produced a "Life" of him which reflects

blame on Lady Byron so dexterously, that "more is meant than meets the

ear." The almost universal impression produced by his book is, that

Lady Byron must be a precise and a wan, unwarming spirit, a

blue-stocking of chilblained learning, a piece of insensitive

goodness.

'Who that knows Lady Byron will not pronounce her to be everything the

reverse? Will it be believed that this person, so unsuitably matched

to her moody lord, has written verses that would do no discredit to

Byron himself; that her sensitiveness is surpassed and bounded only by

her good sense; and that she is

'"Blest with a temper, whose unclouded ray

Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day"?

'She brought to Lord Byron beauty, manners, fortune, meekness,

romantic affection, and everything that ought to have made her to the

most transcendent man of genius--had he been what he should have

been--his pride and his idol. I speak not of Lady Byron in the

commonplace manner of attesting character: I appeal to the gifted Mrs.

Siddons and Joanna Baillie, to Lady Charlemont, and to other ornaments

of their sex, whether I am exaggerating in the least when I say, that,

in their whole lives, they have seen few beings so intellectual and

well-tempered as Lady Byron.

'I wish to be as ingenuous as possible in speaking of her. Her

manner, I have no hesitation to say, is cool at the first interview,

but is modestly, and not insolently, cool: she contracted it, I

believe, from being exposed by her beauty and large fortune, in youth,

to numbers of suitors, whom she could not have otherwise kept at a

distance. But this manner could have had no influence with Lord

Byron; for it vanishes on nearer acquaintance, and has no origin in

coldness. All her friends like her frankness the better for being

preceded by this reserve. This manner, however, though not the

slightest apology for Lord Byron, has been inimical to Lady Byron in

her misfortunes. It endears her to her friends; but it piques the

indifferent. Most odiously unjust, therefore, is Mr. Moore's

assertion, that she has had the advantage of Lord Byron in public

opinion. She is, comparatively speaking, unknown to the world; for

though she has many friends, that is, a friend in everyone who knows

her, yet her pride and purity and misfortunes naturally contract the

circle of her acquaintance.

'There is something exquisitely unjust in Mr. Moore comparing her

chance of popularity with Lord Byron's, the poet who can command men

of talents,--putting even Mr. Moore into the livery of his

service,--and who has suborned the favour of almost all women by the

beauty of his person and the voluptuousness of his verses. Lady Byron

has nothing to oppose to these fascinations but the truth and justice

of her cause.

'You said, Mr. Moore, that Lady Byron was unsuitable to her lord: the

word is cunningly insidious, and may mean as much or as little as may

suit your convenience. But, if she was unsuitable, I remark that it

tells all the worse against Lord Byron. I have not read it in your

book (for I hate to wade through it); but they tell me that you have

not only warily depreciated Lady Byron, but that you have described a

lady that would have suited him. If this be true, "it is the

unkindest cut of all,"--to hold up a florid description of a woman

suitable to Lord Byron, as if in mockery over the forlorn flower of

virtue that was drooping in the solitude of sorrow.

'But I trust there is no such passage in your book. Surely you must

be conscious of your woman, with her 'virtue loose about her, who

would have suited Lord Byron," to be as imaginary a being as the woman

without a head. A woman to suit Lord Byron! Poo, poo! I could paint

to you the woman that could have matched him, if I had not bargained

to say as little as possible against him.

'If Lady Byron was not suitable to Lord Byron, so much the worse for

his lordship; for let me tell you, Mr. Moore, that neither your

poetry, nor Lord Byron's, nor all our poetry put together, ever

delineated a more interesting being than the woman whom you have so

coldly treated. This was not kicking the dead lion, but wounding the

living lamb, who was already bleeding and shorn, even unto the quick.

I know, that, collectively speaking, the world is in Lady Byron's

favour; but it is coldly favourable, and you have not warmed its

breath. Time, however, cures everything; and even your book, Mr.

Moore, may be the means of Lady Byron's character being better

appreciated.

'THOMAS CAMPBELL.'

Here is what seems to be a gentlemanly, high-spirited, chivalric man,

throwing down his glove in the lists for a pure woman.

What was the consequence? Campbell was crowded back, thrust down,

overwhelmed, his eyes filled with dust, his mouth with ashes.

There was a general confusion and outcry, which reacted both on him and

on Lady Byron. Her friends were angry with him for having caused this re-

action upon her; and he found himself at once attacked by Lady Byron's

enemies, and deserted by her friends. All the literary authorities of

his day took up against him with energy. Christopher North, professor of

moral philosophy in the Edinburgh University, in a fatherly talk in 'The

Noctes,' condemns Campbell, and justifies Moore, and heartily recommends

his 'Biography,' as containing nothing materially objectionable on the

score either of manners or morals. Thus we have it in 'The Noctes' of

May 1830:--

'Mr. Moore's biographical book I admired; and I said so to my little

world, in two somewhat lengthy articles, which many approved, and

some, I am sorry to know, condemned.'

On the point in question between Moore and Campbell, North goes on to

justify Moore altogether, only admitting that 'it would have been better

had he not printed any coarse expression of Byron's about the old

people;' and, finally, he closes by saying,--

'I do not think that, under the circumstances, Mr. Campbell himself,

had he written Byron's "Life," could have spoken, with the sentiments

he then held, in a better, more manly, and more gentlemanly spirit, in

so far as regards Lady Byron, than Mr. Moore did: and I am sorry he

has been deterred from "swimming" through Mr. Moore's work by the fear

of "wading;" for the waters are clear and deep; nor is there any mud,

either at the bottom or round the margin.'

Of the conduct of Lady Byron's so-called friends on this occasion it is

more difficult to speak.

There has always been in England, as John Stuart Mill says, a class of

women who glory in the utter self-abnegation of the wife to the husband,

as the special crown of womanhood. Their patron saint is the Griselda of

Chaucer, who, when her husband humiliates her, and treats her as a brute,

still accepts all with meek, unquestioning, uncomplaining devotion. He

tears her from her children; he treats her with personal abuse; he

repudiates her,--sends her out to nakedness and poverty; he installs

another mistress in his house, and sends for the first to be her handmaid

and his own: and all this the meek saint accepts in the words of Milton,--

'My guide and head,

What thou hast said is just and right.'

Accordingly, Miss Martineau tells us that when Campbell's defence came

out, coupled with a note from Lady Byron,--

'The first obvious remark was, that there was no real disclosure; and

the whole affair had the appearance of a desire, on the part of Lady

Byron, to exculpate herself, while yet no adequate information was

given. Many, who had regarded her with favour till then, gave her up

so far as to believe that feminine weakness had prevailed at last.'

The saint had fallen from her pedestal! She had shown a human frailty!

Quite evidently she is not a Griselda, but possessed with a shocking

desire to exculpate herself and her friends.

Is it, then, only to slandered men that the privilege belongs of desiring

to exculpate themselves and their families and their friends from unjust

censure?

Lord Byron had made it a life-long object to vilify and defame his wife.

He had used for that one particular purpose every talent that he

possessed. He had left it as a last charge to Moore to pursue the

warfare after death, which Moore had done to some purpose; and

Christopher North had informed Lady Byron that her private affairs were

discussed, not only with the whisky-toddy of the Noctes Club, but in

every drawing-room in May Fair; and declared that the 'Dear Duck' letter,

and various other matters, must be explained, and urged somebody to

speak; and then, when Campbell does speak with all the energy of a real

gentleman, a general outcry and an indiscriminate melee is the result.

The world, with its usual injustice, insisted on attributing Campbell's

defence to Lady Byron.

The reasons for this seemed to be, first, that Campbell states that he

did not ask Lady Byron's leave, and that she did not authorise him to

defend her; and, second, that, having asked some explanations from her,

he prints a note in which she declines to give any.

We know not how a lady could more gently yet firmly decline to make a

gentleman her confidant than in this published note of Lady Byron; and

yet, to this day, Campbell is spoken of by the world as having been Lady

Byron's confidant at this time. This simply shows how very trustworthy

are the general assertions about Lady Byron's confidants.

The final result of the matter, so far as Campbell was concerned, is

given in Miss Martineau's sketch, in the following paragraph:--

'The whole transaction was one of poor Campbell's freaks. He excused

himself by saying it was a mistake of his; that he did not know what

he was about when he published the paper.'

It is the saddest of all sad things to see a man, who has spoken from

moral convictions, in advance of his day, and who has taken a stand for

which he ought to honour himself, thus forced down and humiliated, made

to doubt his own better nature and his own honourable feelings, by the

voice of a wicked world.

Campbell had no steadiness to stand by the truth he saw. His whole story

is told incidentally in a note to 'The Noctes,' in which it is stated,

that in an article in 'Blackwood,' January 1825, on Scotch poets, the

palm was given to Hogg over Campbell; 'one ground being, that he could

drink "eight and twenty tumblers of punch, while Campbell is hazy upon

seven."'

There is evidence in 'The Noctes,' that in due time Campbell was

reconciled to Moore, and was always suitably ashamed of having tried to

be any more generous or just than the men of his generation.

And so it was settled as a law to Jacob, and an ordinance in Israel, that

the Byron worship should proceed, and that all the earth should keep

silence before him. 'Don Juan,' that, years before, had been printed by

stealth, without Murray's name on the title-page, that had been denounced

as a book which no woman should read, and had been given up as a

desperate enterprise, now came forth in triumph, with banners flying and

drums beating. Every great periodical in England that had fired moral

volleys of artillery against it in its early days, now humbly marched in

the glorious procession of admirers to salute this edifying work of

genius.

'Blackwood,' which in the beginning had been the most indignantly

virtuous of the whole, now grovelled and ate dust as the serpent in the

very abjectness of submission. Odoherty (Maginn) declares that he would

rather have written a page of 'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe Harold.'

{95a} Timothy Tickler informs Christopher North that he means to tender

Murray, as Emperor of the North, an interleaved copy {95b} of 'Don Juan,'

with illustrations, as the only work of Byron's he cares much about; and

Christopher North, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, smiles

approval! We are not, after this, surprised to see the assertion, by a

recent much-aggrieved writer in 'The London Era,' that 'Lord Byron has

been, more than any other man of the age, the teacher of the youth of

England;' and that he has 'seen his works on the bookshelves of bishops'

palaces, no less than on the tables of university undergraduates.'

A note to 'The Noctes' of July 1822 informs us of another instance of

Lord Byron's triumph over English morals:--

'The mention of this' (Byron's going to Greece) 'reminds me, by the

by, of what the Guiccioli said in her visit to London, where she was

so lionised as having been the lady-love of Byron. She was rather

fond of speaking on the subject, designating herself by some Venetian

pet phrase, which she interpreted as meaning "Love-Wife."'

What was Lady Byron to do in such a world? She retired to the deepest

privacy, and devoted herself to works of charity, and the education of

her only child, that brilliant daughter, to whose eager, opening mind the

whole course of current literature must bring so many trying questions in

regard to the position of her father and mother,--questions that the

mother might not answer. That the cruel inconsiderateness of the

literary world added thorns to the intricacies of the path trodden by

every mother who seeks to guide, restrain, and educate a strong, acute,

and precociously intelligent child, must easily be seen.

What remains to be said of Lady Byron's life shall be said in the words

of Miss Martineau, published in 'The Atlantic Monthly:'--

'Her life, thenceforth, was one of unremitting bounty to society

administered with as much skill and prudence as benevolence. She

lived in retirement, changing her abode frequently; partly for the

benefit of her child's education and the promotion of her benevolent

schemes, and partly from a restlessness which was one of the few signs

of injury received from the spoiling of associations with home.

'She felt a satisfaction which her friends rejoiced in when her

daughter married Lord King, at present the Earl of Lovelace, in 1835;

and when grief upon grief followed, in the appearance of mortal

disease in her only child, her quiet patience stood her in good stead

as before. She even found strength to appropriate the blessings of

the occasion, and took comfort, as did her dying daughter, in the

intimate friendship, which grew closer as the time of parting drew

nigh.

'Lady Lovelace died in 1852; and, for her few remaining years, Lady

Byron was devoted to her grandchildren. But nearer calls never

lessened her interest in remoter objects. Her mind was of the large

and clear quality which could comprehend remote interests in their

true proportions, and achieve each aim as perfectly as if it were the

only one. Her agents used to say that it was impossible to mistake

her directions; and thus her business was usually well done. There

was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and

sneers about the misapplication of bounty.

'Her taste did not lie in the "Charity-Ball" direction; her funds were

not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle

and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as

admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and

improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that

she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of

solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she

did not administer.

'In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular

success. For one instance among a thousand: A lady with whom she had

had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished

in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty with an easy

conscience to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the

perfect rectitude of the resource. Lady Byron wrote to an

intermediate person exactly what she thought of the case. Whether the

judgment of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody's business

but her own: this was the first point. Next, a voluntary poverty

could never be pitied by anybody: that was the second. But it was

painful to others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings

which attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting

that pain. Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighbouring

bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent

purposes; and, in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had

made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so

that the sufferer's name need not appear at all.

'Five and thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must

make up a great amount of human happiness; but this was only one of a

wide variety of methods of doing good. It was the unconcealable

magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a

second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households

within the four seas. Years ago, it was said far and wide that Lady

Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was

difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.

'Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her

property while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he

could deprive her of by his will; yet she had, eventually, a large

income at her command. In the management of it, she showed the same

wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions. She

resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed

help at the moment. Her care was for the existing generation, rather

than for a future one, which would have its own friends. She usually

declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities;

preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve

definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help

over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.

'It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of

the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while

sorely misjudging her character. We hear much now--and everybody

hears it with pleasure--of the spread of education in "common things;"

but long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name

was found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the

thing, and put it in the way of making its own name.

'She was living at Ealing, in Middlesex, in 1834; and there she opened

one of the first industrial schools in England, if not the very first.

She sent out a master to Switzerland, to be instructed in De

Fellenburgh's method. She took, on lease, five acres of land, and

spent several hundred pounds in rendering the buildings upon it fit

for the purposes of the school. A liberal education was afforded to

the children of artisans and labourers during the half of the day when

they were not employed in the field or garden. The allotments were

rented by the boys, who raised and sold produce, which afforded them a

considerable yearly profit if they were good workmen. Those who

worked in the field earned wages; their labour being paid by the hour,

according to the capability of the young labourer. They kept their

accounts of expenditure and receipts, and acquired good habits of

business while learning the occupation of their lives. Some

mechanical trades were taught, as well as the arts of agriculture.

'Part of the wisdom of the management lay in making the pupils pay. Of

one hundred pupils, half were boarders. They paid little more than

half the expenses of their maintenance, and the day-scholars paid

threepence per week. Of course, a large part of the expense was borne

by Lady Byron, besides the payments she made for children who could

not otherwise have entered the school. The establishment flourished

steadily till 1852, when the owner of the land required it back for

building purposes. During the eighteen years that the Ealing schools

were in action, they did a world of good in the way of incitement and

example. The poor-law commissioners pointed out their merits. Land-

owners and other wealthy persons visited them, and went home and set

up similar establishments. During those years, too, Lady Byron had

herself been at work in various directions to the same purpose.

'A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her

Leicestershire property, and not far off she opened a girls' school

and an infant school; and when a season of distress came, as such

seasons are apt to befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers,

Lady Byron fed the children for months together, till they could

resume their payments. These schools were opened in 1840. The next

year, she built a schoolhouse on her Warwickshire property; and, five

years later, she set up an iron schoolhouse on another Leicestershire

estate.

'By this time, her educational efforts were costing her several

hundred pounds a year in the mere maintenance of existing

establishments; but this is the smallest consideration in the case.

She has sent out tribes of boys and girls into life fit to do their

part there with skill and credit and comfort. Perhaps it is a still

more important consideration, that scores of teachers and trainers

have been led into their vocation, and duly prepared for it, by what

they saw and learned in her schools. As for the best and the worst of

the Ealing boys, the best have, in a few cases, been received into the

Battersea Training School, whence they could enter on their career as

teachers to the greatest advantage; and the worst found their school a

true reformatory, before reformatory schools were heard of. At

Bristol, she bought a house for a reformatory for girls; and there her

friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and energetically carries out her

own and Lady Byron's aims, which were one and the same.

'There would be no end if I were to catalogue the schemes of which

these are a specimen. It is of more consequence to observe that her

mind was never narrowed by her own acts, as the minds of benevolent

people are so apt to be. To the last, her interest in great political

movements, at home and abroad, was as vivid as ever. She watched

every step won in philosophy, every discovery in science, every token

of social change and progress in every shape. Her mind was as liberal

as her heart and hand. No diversity of opinion troubled her: she was

respectful to every sort of individuality, and indulgent to all

constitutional peculiarities. It must have puzzled those who kept up

the notion of her being "strait-laced" to see how indulgent she was

even to Epicurean tendencies,--the remotest of all from her own.

'But I must stop; for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate

into panegyric. Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the

Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery

cause in the United States. Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft

must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers,

that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American to assist him under

any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist.

'All these deeds were done under a heavy burden of ill health. Before

she had passed middle life, her lungs were believed to be irreparably

injured by partial ossification. She was subject to attacks so

serious, that each one, for many years, was expected to be the last.

She arranged her affairs in correspondence with her liabilities: so

that the same order would have been found, whether she died suddenly

or after long warning.

'She was to receive one more accession of outward greatness before she

departed. She became Baroness Wentworth in November, 1856. This is

one of the facts of her history; but it is the least interesting to

us, as probably to her. We care more to know that her last days were

bright in honour, and cheered by the attachment of old friends worthy

to pay the duty she deserved. Above all, it is consoling to know that

she who so long outlived her only child was blessed with the

unremitting and tender care of her grand-daughter. She died on the

16th of May, 1860.

'The portrait of Lady Byron as she was at the time of her marriage is

probably remembered by some of my readers. It is very engaging. Her

countenance afterwards became much worn; but its expression of

thoughtfulness and composure was very interesting. Her handwriting

accorded well with the character of her mind. It was clear, elegant,

and womanly. Her manners differed with circumstances. Her shrinking

sensitiveness might embarrass one visitor; while another would be

charmed with her easy, significant, and vivacious conversation. It

depended much on whom she talked with. The abiding certainty was,

that she had strength for the hardest of human trials, and the

composure which belongs to strength. For the rest, it is enough to

point to her deeds, and to the mourning of her friends round the chasm

which her departure has made in their life, and in the society in

which it is spent. All that could be done in the way of personal love

and honour was done while she lived: it only remains now to see that

her name and fame are permitted to shine forth at last in their proper

light.'

We have simply to ask the reader whether a life like this was not the

best, the noblest answer that a woman could make to a doubting world.

CHAPTER V. THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON'S GRAVE.

We have now brought the review of the antagonism against Lady Byron down

to the period of her death. During all this time, let the candid reader

ask himself which of these two parties seems to be plotting against the

other.

Which has been active, aggressive, unscrupulous? which has been silent,

quiet, unoffending? Which of the two has laboured to make a party, and

to make that party active, watchful, enthusiastic?

Have we not proved that Lady Byron remained perfectly silent during Lord

Byron's life, patiently looking out from her retirement to see the waves

of popular sympathy, that once bore her up, day by day retreating, while

his accusations against her were resounding in his poems over the whole

earth? And after Lord Byron's death, when all the world with one consent

began to give their memorials of him, and made it appear, by their

various 'recollections of conversations,' how incessantly he had obtruded

his own version of the separation upon every listener, did she manifest

any similar eagerness?

Lady Byron had seen the 'Blackwood' coming forward, on the first

appearance of 'Don Juan,' to rebuke the cowardly lampoon in words

eloquent with all the unperverted vigour of an honest Englishman. Under

the power of the great conspirator, she had seen that 'Blackwood' become

the very eager recipient and chief reporter of the stories against her,

and the blind admirer of her adversary.

All this time, she lost sympathy daily by being silent. The world will

embrace those who court it; it will patronise those who seek its favour;

it will make parties for those who seek to make parties: but for the

often accused who do not speak, who make no confidants and no parties,

the world soon loses sympathy.

When at last she spoke, Christopher North says 'she astonished the

world.' Calm, clear, courageous, exact as to time, date, and

circumstance, was that first testimony, backed by the equally clear

testimony of Dr. Lushington.

It showed that her secret had been kept even from her parents. In words

precise, firm, and fearless, she says, 'If these statements on which Dr.

Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly formed their opinion were false, the

responsibility and the odium should rest with me only.' Christopher

North did not pretend to disbelieve this statement. He breathed not a

doubt of Lady Byron's word. He spoke of the crime indicated, as one

which might have been foul as the grave's corruption, unforgivable as the

sin against the Holy Ghost. He rebuked the wife for bearing this

testimony, even to save the memory of her dead father and mother, and, in

the same breath, declared that she ought now to go farther, and speak

fully the one awful word, and then--'a mitigated sentence, or eternal

silence!'

But Lady Byron took no counsel with the world, nor with the literary men

of her age. One knight, with some small remnant of England's old

chivalry, set lance in rest for her: she saw him beaten back unhorsed,

rolled in the dust, and ingloriously vanquished, and perceived that

henceforth nothing but injury could come to any one who attempted to

speak for her.

She turned from the judgments of man and the fond and natural hopes of

human nature, to lose herself in sacred ministries to the downcast and

suffering. What nobler record for woman could there be than that which

Miss Martineau has given?

Particularly to be noted in Lady Byron was her peculiar interest in

reclaiming fallen women. Among her letters to Mrs. Prof. Follen, of

Cambridge, was one addressed to a society of ladies who had undertaken

this difficult work. It was full of heavenly wisdom and of a large and

tolerant charity. Fenelon truly says, it is only perfection that can

tolerate imperfection; and the very purity of Lady Byron's nature made

her most forbearing and most tender towards the weak and the guilty. This

letter, with all the rest of Lady Byron's, was returned to the hands of

her executors after her death. Its publication would greatly assist the

world in understanding the peculiarities of its writer's character.

Lady Byron passed to a higher life in 1860. {105} After her death, I

looked for the publication of her Memoir and Letters as the event that

should give her the same opportunity of being known and judged by her

life and writings that had been so freely accorded to Lord Byron.

She was, in her husband's estimation, a woman of genius. She was the

friend of many of the first men and women of her times, and corresponded

with them on topics of literature, morals, religion, and, above all, on

the benevolent and philanthropic movements of the day, whose principles

she had studied with acute observation, and in connection with which she

had acquired a large experience.

The knowledge of her, necessarily diffused by such a series of letters,

would have created in America a comprehension of her character, of itself

sufficient to wither a thousand slanders.

Such a Memoir was contemplated. Lady Byron's letters to Mrs. Follen were

asked for from Boston; and I was applied to by a person in England, who I

have recently learned is one of the existing trustees of Lady Byron's

papers, to furnish copies of her letters to me for the purpose of a

Memoir. Before I had time to have copies made, another letter came,

stating that the trustees had concluded that it was best not to publish

any Memoir of Lady Byron at all.

This left the character of Lady Byron in our American world precisely

where the slanders of her husband, the literature of the Noctes Club, and

the unanimous verdict of May Fair as recorded by 'Blackwood,' had placed

it.

True, Lady Byron had nobly and quietly lived down these slanders in

England by deeds that made her name revered as a saint among all those

who valued saintliness.

But in France and Italy, and in these United States, I have had abundant

opportunity to know that Lady Byron stood judged and condemned on the

testimony of her brilliant husband, and that the feeling against her had

a vivacity and intensity not to be overcome by mere allusions to a

virtuous life in distant England.

This is strikingly shown by one fact. In the American edition of Moore's

'Life of Byron,' by Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, Philadelphia,

1869, which I have been consulting, Lady Byron's statement, which is

found in the Appendix of Murray's standard edition, is entirely omitted.

Every other paper is carefully preserved. This one incident showed how

the tide of sympathy was setting in this New World. Of course, there is

no stronger power than a virtuous life; but, for a virtuous life to bear

testimony to the world, its details must be told, so that the world may

know them.

Suppose the memoirs of Clarkson and Wilberforce had been suppressed after

their death, how soon might the coming tide have wiped out the record of

their bravery and philanthropy! Suppose the lives of Francis Xavier and

Henry Martyn had never been written, and we had lost the remembrance of

what holy men could do and dare in the divine enthusiasm of Christian

faith! Suppose we had no Fenelon, no Book of Martyrs!

Would there not be an outcry through all the literary and artistic world

if a perfect statue were allowed to remain buried for ever because some

painful individual history was connected with its burial and its

recovery? But is not a noble life a greater treasure to mankind than any

work of art?

We have heard much mourning over the burned Autobiography of Lord Byron,

and seen it treated of in a magazine as 'the lost chapter in history.'

The lost chapter in history is Lady Byron's Autobiography in her life and

letters; and the suppression of them is the root of this whole mischief.

We do not in this intend to censure the parties who came to this

decision.

The descendants of Lady Byron revere her memory, as they have every

reason to do. That it was their desire to have a Memoir of her

published, I have been informed by an individual of the highest character

in England, who obtained the information directly from Lady Byron's

grandchildren.

But the trustees in whose care the papers were placed drew back on

examination of them, and declared, that, as Lady Byron's papers could not

be fully published, they should regret anything that should call public

attention once more to the discussion of her history.

Reviewing this long history of the way in which the literary world had

treated Lady Byron, we cannot wonder that her friends should have doubted

whether there was left on earth any justice, or sense that anything is

due to woman as a human being with human rights. Evidently this lesson

had taken from them all faith in the moral sense of the world. Rather

than re-awaken the discussion, so unsparing, so painful, and so

indelicate, which had been carried on so many years around that loved

form, now sanctified by death, they sacrificed the dear pleasure of the

memorials, and the interests of mankind, who have an indefeasible right

to all the help that can be got from the truth of history as to the

living power of virtue, and the reality of that great victory that

overcometh the world.

There are thousands of poor victims suffering in sadness, discouragement,

and poverty; heart-broken wives of brutal, drunken husbands; women

enduring nameless wrongs and horrors which the delicacy of their sex

forbids them to utter,--to whom the lovely letters lying hidden away

under those seals might bring courage and hope from springs not of this

world.

But though the friends of Lady Byron, perhaps from despair of their kind,

from weariness of the utter injustice done her, wished to cherish her

name in silence, and to confine the story of her virtues to that circle

who knew her too well to ask a proof, or utter a doubt, the partisans of

Lord Byron were embarrassed with no such scruple.

Lord Byron had artfully contrived during his life to place his wife in

such an antagonistic position with regard to himself, that his intimate

friends were forced to believe that one of the two had deliberately and

wantonly injured the other. The published statement of Lady Byron

contradicted boldly and point-blank all the statement of her husband

concerning the separation; so that, unless she was convicted as a false

witness, he certainly was.

The best evidence of this is Christopher North's own shocked, astonished

statement, and the words of the Noctes Club.

The noble life that Lady Byron lived after this hushed every voice, and

silenced even the most desperate calumny, while she was in the world. In

the face of Lady Byron as the world saw her, of what use was the talk of

Clytemnestra, and the assertion that she had been a mean, deceitful

conspirator against her husband's honour in life, and stabbed his memory

after death?

But when she was in her grave, when her voice and presence and good deeds

no more spoke for her, and a new generation was growing up that knew her

not; then was the time selected to revive the assault on her memory, and

to say over her grave what none would ever have dared to say of her while

living.

During these last two years, I have been gradually awakening to the

evidence of a new crusade against the memory of Lady Byron, which

respected no sanctity,--not even that last and most awful one of death.

Nine years after her death, when it was fully understood that no story on

her side or that of her friends was to be forthcoming, then her

calumniators raked out from the ashes of her husband's sepulchre all his

bitter charges, to state them over in even stronger and more indecent

forms.

There seems to be reason to think that the materials supplied by Lord

Byron for such a campaign yet exist in society.

To 'The Noctes' of November 1824, there is the following note apropos to

a discussion of the Byron question:--

'Byron's Memoirs, given by him to Moore, were burned, as everybody

knows. But, before this, Moore had lent them to several persons. Mrs.

Home Purvis, afterwards Viscountess of Canterbury, is known to have

sat up all one night, in which, aided by her daughter, she had a copy

made. I have the strongest reason for believing that one other person

made a copy; for the description of the first twenty-four hours after

the marriage ceremonial has been in my hands. Not until after the

death of Lady Byron, and Hobhouse, who was the poet's literary

executor, can the poet's Autobiography see the light; but I am certain

it will be published.'

Thus speaks Mackenzie in a note to a volume of 'The Noctes,' published in

America in 1854. Lady Byron died in 1860.

Nine years after Lady Byron's death, when it was ascertained that her

story was not to see the light, when there were no means of judging her

character by her own writings, commenced a well-planned set of operations

to turn the public attention once more to Lord Byron, and to represent

him as an injured man, whose testimony had been unjustly suppressed.

It was quite possible, supposing copies of the Autobiography to exist,

that this might occasion a call from the generation of to-day, in answer

to which the suppressed work might appear. This was a rather delicate

operation to commence; but the instrument was not wanting. It was

necessary that the subject should be first opened by some irresponsible

party, whom more powerful parties might, as by accident, recognise and

patronise, and on whose weakness they might build something stronger.

Just such an instrument was to be found in Paris. The mistress of Lord

Byron could easily be stirred up and flattered to come before the world

with a book which should re-open the whole controversy; and she proved a

facile tool. At first, the work appeared prudently in French, and was

called 'Lord Byron juge par les Temoins de sa Vie,' and was rather a

failure. Then it was translated into English, and published by Bentley.

The book was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any

literary merits,--a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when

one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers,

it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that

account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius has

the art to tell his story so as to take both the cultivated few and the

average many. De Foe and John Bunyan are almost the only examples. But

there is a certain class of reading that sells and spreads, and exerts a

vast influence, which the upper circles of literature despise too much

ever to fairly estimate its power.

However, the Guiccioli book did not want for patrons in the high places

of literature. The 'Blackwood'--the old classic magazine of England; the

defender of conservatism and aristocracy; the paper of Lockhart, Wilson,

Hogg, Walter Scott, and a host of departed grandeurs--was deputed to

usher into the world this book, and to recommend it and its author to the

Christian public of the nineteenth century.

The following is the manner in which 'Blackwood' calls attention to it:--

'One of the most beautiful of the songs of Beranger is that addressed

to his Lisette, in which he pictures her, in old age, narrating to a

younger generation the loves of their youth; decking his portrait with

flowers at each returning spring, and reciting the verses that had

been inspired by her vanished charms:--

'Lorsque les yeux chercheront sous vos rides

Les traits charmants qui m'auront inspire,

Des doux recits les jeunes gens avides,

Diront: Quel fut cet ami tant pleure?

De men amour peignez, s'il est possible,

Vardeur, l'ivresse, et meme les soupcons,

Et bonne vieille, an coin d'un feu paisible

De votre ami repetez les chansons.

"On vous dira: Savait-il etre aimable?

Et sans rougir vous direz: Je l'aimais.

D'un trait mechant se montra-t-il capable?

Avec orgueil vous repondrez: Jamais!'"

'This charming picture,' 'Blackwood' goes on to say, 'has been

realised in the case of a poet greater than Beranger, and by a

mistress more famous than Lisette. The Countess Guiccioli has at

length given to the world her "Recollections of Lord Byron." The book

first appeared in France under the title of "Lord Byron juge par les

Temoins de sa Vie," without the name of the countess. A more

unfortunate designation could hardly have been selected. The

"witnesses of his life" told us nothing but what had been told before

over and over again; and the uniform and exaggerated tone of eulogy

which pervaded the whole book was fatal to any claim on the part of

the writer to be considered an impartial judge of the wonderfully

mixed character of Byron.

'When, however, the book is regarded as the avowed production of the

Countess Guiccioli, it derives value and interest from its very

faults. {113} There is something inexpressibly touching in the

picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago;

not faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous

as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty,

first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul

up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her

heart.

'To her there has been no change, no decay. The god whom she

worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is

still the "Pythian of the age" to her at seventy. To try such a book

by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign

the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of

indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.'

This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most

classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book,

simply because it was written by Lord Byron's mistress. That fact, we

are assured, lends grace even to its faults.

Having brought the authoress upon the stage, the review now goes on to

define her position, and assure the Christian world that

'The Countess Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble. At

the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third

wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate. A

fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage. A short time

afterwards, she accidentally met Lord Byron. Outraged and rebellious

nature vindicated itself in the deep and devoted passion with which he

inspired her. With the full assent of husband, father, and brother,

and in compliance with the usages of Italian society, he was shortly

afterwards installed in the office, and invested with all the

privileges, of her "Cavalier Servente."'

It has been asserted that the Marquis de Boissy, the late husband of this

Guiccioli lady, was in the habit of introducing her in fashionable

circles as 'the Marquise de Boissy, my wife, formerly mistress to Lord

Byron'! We do not give the story as a verity; yet, in the review of this

whole history, we may be pardoned for thinking it quite possible.

The mistress, being thus vouched for and presented as worthy of sympathy

and attention by one of the oldest and most classic organs of English

literature, may now proceed in her work of glorifying the popular idol,

and casting abuse on the grave of the dead wife.

Her attacks on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit than

those of Lord Byron. They want his literary polish and tact; but what of

that? 'Blackwood' assures us that even the faults of manner derive a

peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron's mistress;

and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in things like

this:--

'She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of her

husband. Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel to

condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of

justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the

guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion

overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical

life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its

consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment

that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea

of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more

than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.

'Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel

than Clytemnestra's poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady

Byron's silence was destined to kill the soul,--and such a

soul!--leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed

that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful

wrongs, perhaps even depravity. In vain did he, feeling his

conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination. She

refused; and the only favour she granted was to send him, one fine

day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.

'And, why, then, had she believed him mad? Because she, a methodical,

inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist

calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul, because she

could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits different to

those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life. Not to be

hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write while she was

sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to gratify the

requirements of material and intellectual life at hours different to

hers,--all that was not merely annoying for her, but it must be

madness; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could neither

submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.

'Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord

Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and

revenge of his enemies.

'She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely

organised,--the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and

proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and

fatally was it decreed that this woman alone of her species should be

Lord Byron's wife!'

In a note is added,--

'If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her

excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her

silence? Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons

which kill at once, and defy all remedies; thus insuring the culprit's

safety. This silence it is which will ever be her crime; for by it

she poisoned the life of her husband.'

The book has several chapters devoted to Lord Byron's peculiar virtues;

and under the one devoted to magnanimity and heroism, his forgiving

disposition receives special attention. The climax of all is stated to

be that he forgave Lady Byron. All the world knew that, since he had

declared this fact in a very noisy and impassioned manner in the fourth

canto of 'Childe Harold,' together with a statement of the wrongs which

he forgave; but the Guiccioli thinks his virtue, at this period, has not

been enough appreciated. In her view, it rose to the sublime. She says

of Lady Byron,--

'An absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of

female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light of

magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did

it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which Lady

Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her

harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which cause

such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom

suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause

persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation. Yet, with

his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act? what

did he say? I will not speak of his "farewell;" of the care he took

to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too

large a share to himself.'

With like vivacity and earnestness does the narrator now proceed to make

an incarnate angel of her subject by the simple process of denying

everything that he himself ever confessed,--everything that has ever been

confessed in regard to him by his best friends. He has been in the world

as an angel unawares from his cradle. His guardian did not properly

appreciate him, and is consequently mentioned as that wicked Lord

Carlisle. Thomas Moore is never to be sufficiently condemned for the

facts told in his biography. Byron's own frank and lawless admissions of

evil are set down to a peculiar inability he had for speaking the truth

about himself,--sometimes about his near relations; all which does not in

the least discourage the authoress from giving a separate chapter on

'Lord Byron's Love of Truth.'

In the matter of his relations with women, she complacently repeats (what

sounds rather oddly as coming from her) Lord Byron's own assurance, that

he never seduced a woman; and also the equally convincing statement, that

he had told her (the Guiccioli) that his married fidelity to his wife was

perfect. She discusses Moore's account of the mistress in boy's clothes

who used to share Byron's apartments in college, and ride with him to

races, and whom he presented to ladies as his brother.

She has her own view of this matter. The disguised boy was a lady of

rank and fashion, who sought Lord Byron's chambers, as, we are informed,

noble ladies everywhere, both in Italy and England, were constantly in

the habit of doing; throwing themselves at his feet, and imploring

permission to become his handmaids.

In the authoress's own words, 'Feminine overtures still continued to be

made to Lord Byron; but the fumes of incense never hid from his sight his

IDEAL.' We are told that in the case of these poor ladies, generally

'disenchantment took place on his side without a corresponding result on

the other: THENCE many heart-breakings.' Nevertheless, we are informed

that there followed the indiscretions of these ladies 'none of those

proceedings that the world readily forgives, but which his feelings as a

man of honour would have condemned.'

As to drunkenness, and all that, we are informed he was an anchorite.

Pages are given to an account of the biscuits and soda-water that on this

and that occasion were found to be the sole means of sustenance to this

ethereal creature.

As to the story of using his wife's money, the lady gives, directly in

the face of his own Letters and Journal, the same account given before by

Medwin, and which caused such merriment when talked over in the Noctes

Club,--that he had with her only a marriage portion of 10,000 pounds; and

that, on the separation, he not only paid it back, but doubled it. {119}

So on the authoress goes, sowing right and left the most transparent

absurdities and misstatements with what Carlyle well calls 'a composed

stupidity, and a cheerful infinitude of ignorance.' Who should know, if

not she, to be sure? Had not Byron told her all about it? and was not

his family motto Crede Byron?

The 'Blackwood,' having a dim suspicion that this confused style of

attack and defence in reference to the two parties under consideration

may not have great weight, itself proceeds to make the book an occasion

for re-opening the controversy of Lord Byron with his wife.

The rest of the review devoted to a powerful attack on Lady Byron's

character, the most fearful attack on the memory of a dead woman we have

ever seen made by living man. The author proceeds, like a lawyer, to

gather up, arrange, and restate, in a most workmanlike manner, the

confused accusations of the book.

Anticipating the objection, that such a re-opening of the inquiry was a

violation of the privacy due to womanhood and to the feelings of a

surviving family, he says, that though marriage usually is a private

matter which the world has no right to intermeddle with or discuss, yet--

'Lord Byron's was an exceptional case. It is not too much to say,

that, had his marriage been a happy one, the course of events of the

present century might have been materially changed; that the genius

which poured itself forth in "Don Juan" and "Cain" might have flowed

in far different channels; that the ardent love of freedom which sent

him to perish at six and thirty at Missolonghi might have inspired a

long career at home; and that we might at this moment have been

appealing to the counsels of his experience and wisdom at an age not

exceeding that which was attained by Wellington, Lyndhurst, and

Brougham.

'Whether the world would have been a gainer or a loser by the exchange

is a question which every man must answer for himself, according to

his own tastes and opinions; but the possibility of such a change in

the course of events warrants us in treating what would otherwise be a

strictly private matter as one of public interest.

'More than half a century has elapsed, the actors have departed from

the stage, the curtain has fallen; and whether it will ever again be

raised so as to reveal the real facts of the drama, may, as we have

already observed, be well doubted. But the time has arrived when we

may fairly gather up the fragments of evidence, clear them as far as

possible from the incrustations of passion, prejudice, and malice, and

place them in such order, as, if possible, to enable us to arrive at

some probable conjecture as to what the skeleton of the drama

originally was.'

Here the writer proceeds to put together all the facts of Lady Byron's

case, just as an adverse lawyer would put them as against her, and for

her husband. The plea is made vigorously and ably, and with an air of

indignant severity, as of an honest advocate who is thoroughly convinced

that he is pleading the cause of a wronged man who has been ruined in

name, shipwrecked in life, and driven to an early grave, by the arts of a

bad woman,--a woman all the more horrible that her malice was disguised

under the cloak of religion.

Having made an able statement of facts, adroitly leaving out ONE, {121}

of which he could not have been ignorant had he studied the case

carefully enough to know all the others, he proceeds to sum up against

the criminal thus:--

'We would deal tenderly with the memory of Lady Byron. Few women have

been juster objects of compassion. It would seem as if Nature and

Fortune had vied with each other which should be most lavish of her

gifts, and yet that some malignant power had rendered all their bounty

of no effect. Rank, beauty, wealth, and mental powers of no common

order, were hers; yet they were of no avail to secure common

happiness. The spoilt child of seclusion, restraint, and parental

idolatry, a fate (alike evil for both) cast her into the arms of the

spoilt child of genius, passion, and the world. What real or fancied

wrongs she suffered, we may never know; but those which she inflicted

are sufficiently apparent.

'It is said that there are some poisons so subtle that they will

destroy life, and yet leave no trace of their action. The murderer

who uses them may escape the vengeance of the law; but he is not the

less guilty. So the slanderer who makes no charge; who deals in hints

and insinuations: who knows melancholy facts he would not willingly

divulge,--things too painful to state; who forbears, expresses pity,

sometimes even affection, for his victim, shrugs his shoulders, looks

with

"The significant eye,

Which learns to lie with silence,--"

is far more guilty than he who tells the bold falsehood which may be

met and answered, and who braves the punishment which must follow upon

detection.

'Lady Byron has been called

"The moral Clytemnestra of her lord."

The "moral Brinvilliers" would have been a truer designation.

'The conclusion at which we arrive is, that there is no proof whatever

that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a

separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him

rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied wrongs

Lady Byron may have endured are shrouded in an impenetrable mist of

her own creation,--a poisonous miasma in which she enveloped the

character of her husband, raised by her breath, and which her breath

only could have dispersed.

"She dies and makes no sign. O God! forgive her."'

As we have been obliged to review accusations on Lady Byron founded on

old Greek tragedy, so now we are forced to abridge a passage from a

modern conversations-lexicon, that we may understand what sort of

comparisons are deemed in good taste in a conservative English review,

when speaking of ladies of rank in their graves.

Under the article 'Brinvilliers,' we find as follows:--

MARGUERITE D'AUBRAI, MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS.--The singular

atrocity of this woman gives her a sort of infamous claim to notice.

She was born in Paris in 1651; being daughter of D'Aubrai, lieutenant-

civil of Paris, who married her to the Marquis of Brinvilliers.

Although possessed of attractions to captivate lovers, she was for

some time much attached to her husband, but at length became madly in

love with a Gascon officer. Her father imprisoned the officer in the

Bastille; and, while there, he learned the art of compounding subtle

and most mortal poisons; and, when he was released, he taught it to

the lady, who exercised it with such success, that, in one year, her

father, sister, and two brothers became her victims. She professed

the utmost tenderness for her victims, and nursed them assiduously. On

her father she is said to have made eight attempts before she

succeeded. She was very religious, and devoted to works of charity;

and visited the hospitals a great deal, where it is said she tried her

poisons on the sick.'

People have made loud outcries lately, both in America and England, about

violating the repose of the dead. We should like to know what they call

this. Is this, then, what they mean by respecting the dead?

Let any man imagine a leading review coming out with language equally

brutal about his own mother, or any dear and revered friend.

Men of America, men of England, what do you think of this?

When Lady Byron was publicly branded with the names of the foulest

ancient and foulest modern assassins, and Lord Byron's mistress was

publicly taken by the hand, and encouraged to go on and prosper in her

slanders, by one of the oldest and most influential British reviews, what

was said and what was done in England?

That is a question we should be glad to have answered. Nothing was done

that ever reached us across the water.

And why was nothing done? Is this language of a kind to be passed over

in silence?

Was it no offence to the house of Wentworth to attack the pure character

of its late venerable head, and to brand her in her sacred grave with the

name of one of the vilest of criminals?

Might there not properly have been an indignant protest of family

solicitors against this insult to the person and character of the

Baroness Wentworth?

If virtue went for nothing, benevolence for nothing, a long life of

service to humanity for nothing, one would at least have thought, that,

in aristocratic countries, rank might have had its rights to decent

consideration, and its guardians to rebuke the violation of those rights.

We Americans understand little of the advantages of rank; but we did

understand that it secured certain decorums to people, both while living

and when in their graves. From Lady Byron's whole history, in life and

in death, it would appear that we were mistaken.

What a life was hers! Was ever a woman more evidently desirous of the

delicate and secluded privileges of womanhood, of the sacredness of

individual privacy? Was ever a woman so rudely dragged forth, and

exposed to the hardened, vulgar, and unfeeling gaze of mere

curiosity?--her maiden secrets of love thrown open to be handled by

roues; the sanctities of her marriage-chamber desecrated by leering

satyrs; her parents and best friends traduced and slandered, till one

indignant public protest was extorted from her, as by the rack,--a

protest which seems yet to quiver in every word with the indignation of

outraged womanly delicacy!

Then followed coarse blame and coarser comment,--blame for speaking at

all, and blame for not speaking more. One manly voice, raised for her in

honourable protest, was silenced and overborne by the universal roar of

ridicule and reprobation; and henceforth what refuge? Only this

remained: 'Let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the

keeping of their souls to him as to a faithful Creator.'

Lady Byron turned to this refuge in silence, and filled up her life with

a noble record of charities and humanities. So pure was she, so

childlike, so artless, so loving, that those who knew her best, feel, to

this day, that a memorial of her is like the relic of a saint. And could

not all this preserve her grave from insult? O England, England!

I speak in sorrow of heart to those who must have known, loved, and

revered Lady Byron, and ask them, Of what were you thinking when you

allowed a paper of so established literary rank as the 'Blackwood,' to

present and earnestly recommend to our New World such a compendium of

lies as the Guiccioli book?

Is the great English-speaking community, whose waves toss from Maine to

California, and whose literature is yet to come back in a thousand voices

to you, a thing to be so despised?

If, as the solicitors of the Wentworth family observe, you might be

entitled to treat with silent contempt the slanders of a mistress against

a wife, was it safe to treat with equal contempt the indorsement and

recommendation of those slanders by one of your oldest and most powerful

literary authorities?

No European magazine has ever had the weight and circulation in America

that the 'Blackwood' has held. In the days of my youth, when New England

was a comparatively secluded section of the earth, the wit and genius of

the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' were in the mouths of men and maidens, even in

our most quiet mountain-towns. There, years ago, we saw all Lady Byron's

private affairs discussed, and felt the weight of Christopher North's

decisions against her. Shelton Mackenzie, in his American edition,

speaks of the American circulation of 'Blackwood' being greater than that

in England. {126} It was and is now reprinted monthly; and, besides

that, 'Littell's Magazine' reproduces all its striking articles, and they

come with the weight of long established position. From the very fact

that it has long been considered the Tory organ, and the supporter of

aristocratic orders, all its admissions against the character of

individuals in the privileged classes have a double force.

When 'Blackwood,' therefore, boldly denounces a lady of high rank as a

modern Brinvilliers, and no sensation is produced, and no remonstrance

follows, what can people in the New World suppose, but that Lady Byron's

character was a point entirely given up; that her depravity was so well

established and so fully conceded, that nothing was to be said, and that

even the defenders of aristocracy were forced to admit it?

I have been blamed for speaking on this subject without consulting Lady

Byron's friends, trustees, and family. More than ten years had elapsed

since I had had any intercourse with England, and I knew none of them.

How was I to know that any of them were living? I was astonished to

learn, for the first time, by the solicitors' letters, that there were

trustees, who held in their hands all Lady Byron's carefully prepared

proofs and documents, by which this falsehood might immediately have been

refuted.

If they had spoken, they might have saved all this confusion. Even if

bound by restrictions for a certain period of time, they still might have

called on a Christian public to frown down such a cruel and indecent

attack on the character of a noble lady who had been a benefactress to so

many in England. They might have stated that the means of wholly

refuting the slanders of the 'Blackwood' were in their hands, and only

delayed in coming forth from regard to the feelings of some in this

generation. Then might they not have announced her Life and Letters,

that the public might have the same opportunity as themselves for knowing

and judging Lady Byron by her own writings?

Had this been done, I had been most happy to have remained silent. I

have been astonished that any one should have supposed this speaking on

my part to be anything less than it is,--the severest act of

self-sacrifice that one friend can perform for another, and the most

solemn and difficult tribute to justice that a human being can be called

upon to render.

I have been informed that the course I have taken would be contrary to

the wishes of my friend. I think otherwise. I know her strong sense of

justice, and her reverence for truth. Nothing ever moved her to speak to

the public but an attack upon the honour of the dead. In her statement,

she says of her parents, 'There is no other near relative to vindicate

their memory from insult: I am therefore compelled to break the silence I

had hoped always to have observed.'

If there was any near relative to vindicate Lady Byron's memory, I had no

evidence of the fact; and I considered the utter silence to be strong

evidence to the contrary. In all the storm of obloquy and rebuke that

has raged in consequence of my speaking, I have had two unspeakable

sources of joy; first, that they could not touch her; and, second, that

they could not blind the all-seeing God. It is worth being in darkness

to see the stars.

It has been said that I have drawn on Lady Byron's name greater obloquy

than ever before. I deny the charge. Nothing fouler has been asserted

of her than the charges in the 'Blackwood,' because nothing fouler could

be asserted. No satyr's hoof has ever crushed this pearl deeper in the

mire than the hoof of the 'Blackwood,' but none of them have defiled it

or trodden it so deep that God cannot find it in the day 'when he maketh

up his jewels.'

I have another word, as an American, to say about the contempt shown to

our great people in thus suffering the materials of history to be

falsified to subserve the temporary purposes of family feeling in

England.

Lord Byron belongs not properly either to the Byrons or the Wentworths.

He is not one of their family jewels to be locked up in their cases. He

belongs to the world for which he wrote, to which he appealed, and before

which he dragged his reluctant, delicate wife to a publicity equal with

his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.

We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every insult

and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have heaped

upon Lady Byron. We have been betrayed into injustice and a complicity

with villainy. After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders in

England, and died full of years and honours, the 'Blackwood' takes

occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of

slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past. What was

the consequence in America? My attention was first called to the result,

not by reading the 'Blackwood' article, but by finding in a popular

monthly magazine two long articles,--the one an enthusiastic

recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over

the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.

Both articles represented Lady Byron as a cold, malignant, mean,

persecuting woman, who had been her husband's ruin. They were so full of

falsehoods and misstatements as to astonish me. Not long after, a

literary friend wrote to me, 'Will you, can you, reconcile it to your

conscience to sit still and allow that mistress so to slander that

wife,--you, perhaps, the only one knowing the real facts, and able to set

them forth?'

Upon this, I immediately began collecting and reading the various

articles and the book, and perceived that the public of this generation

were in a way of having false history created, uncontradicted, under

their own eyes.

I claim for my countrymen and women, our right to true history. For

years, the popular literature has held up publicly before our eyes the

facts as to this man and this woman, and called on us to praise or

condemn. Let us have truth when we are called on to judge. It is our

right.

There is no conceivable obligation on a human being greater than that of

absolute justice. It is the deepest personal injury to an honourable

mind to be made, through misrepresentation, an accomplice in injustice.

When a noble name is accused, any person who possesses truth which might

clear it, and withholds that truth, is guilty of a sin against human

nature and the inalienable rights of justice. I claim that I have not

only a right, but an obligation, to bring in my solemn testimony upon

this subject.

For years and years, the silence-policy has been tried; and what has it

brought forth? As neither word nor deed could be proved against Lady

Byron, her silence has been spoken of as a monstrous, unnatural crime, 'a

poisonous miasma,' in which she enveloped the name of her husband.

Very well; since silence is the crime, I thought I would tell the world

that Lady Byron had spoken.

Christopher North, years ago, when he condemned her for speaking, said

that she should speak further,--

'She should speak, or some one for her. One word would suffice.'

That one word has been spoken.

PART II.

CHAPTER I. LADY BYRON AS I KNEW HER.

An editorial in The London Times' of Sept. 18 says:--

'The perplexing feature in this "True Story" is, that it is impossible

to distinguish what part in it is the editress's, and what Lady

Byron's own. We are given the impression made on Mrs. Stowe's mind by

Lady Byron's statements; but it would have been more satisfactory if

the statement itself had been reproduced as bare as possible, and been

left to make its own impression on the public.'

In reply to this, I will say, that in my article I gave a brief synopsis

of the subject-matter of Lady Byron's communications; and I think it must

be quite evident to the world that the main fact on which the story turns

was one which could not possibly be misunderstood, and the remembrance of

which no lapse of time could ever weaken.

Lady Byron's communications were made to me in language clear, precise,

terrible; and many of her phrases and sentences I could repeat at this

day, word for word. But if I had reproduced them at first, as 'The

Times' suggests, word for word, the public horror and incredulity would

have been doubled. It was necessary that the brutality of the story

should, in some degree, be veiled and softened.

The publication, by Lord Lindsay, of Lady Anne Barnard's communication,

makes it now possible to tell fully, and in Lady Byron's own words,

certain incidents that yet remain untold. To me, who know the whole

history, the revelations in Lady Anne's account, and the story related by

Lady Byron, are like fragments of a dissected map: they fit together,

piece by piece, and form one connected whole.

In confirmation of the general facts of this interview, I have the

testimony of a sister who accompanied me on this visit, and to whom,

immediately after it, I recounted the story.

Her testimony on the subject is as follows:--

'MY DEAR SISTER,--I have a perfect recollection of going with you to

visit Lady Byron at the time spoken of in your published article. We

arrived at her house in the morning; and, after lunch, Lady Byron and

yourself spent the whole time till evening alone together.

'After we retired to our apartment that night, you related to me the

story given in your published account, though with many more

particulars than you have yet thought fit to give to the public.

'You stated to me that Lady Byron was strongly impressed with the idea

that it might be her duty to publish a statement during her lifetime,

and also the reasons which induced her to think so. You appeared at

that time quite disposed to think that justice required this step, and

asked my opinion. We passed most of the night in conversation on the

subject,--a conversation often resumed, from time to time, during

several weeks in which you were considering what opinion to give.

'I was strongly of opinion that justice required the publication of

the truth, but felt exceedingly averse to its being done by Lady Byron

herself during her own lifetime, when she personally would be subject

to the comments and misconceptions of motives which would certainly

follow such a communication.

'Your sister,

'M. F. PERKINS.'

I am now about to complete the account of my conversation with Lady

Byron; but as the credibility of a history depends greatly on the

character of its narrator, and as especial pains have been taken to

destroy the belief in this story by representing it to be the wanderings

of a broken-down mind in a state of dotage and mental hallucination, I

shall preface the narrative with some account of Lady Byron as she was

during the time of our mutual acquaintance and friendship.

This account may, perhaps, be deemed superfluous in England, where so

many knew her; but in America, where, from Maine to California, her

character has been discussed and traduced, it is of importance to give

interested thousands an opportunity of learning what kind of a woman Lady

Byron was.

Her character as given by Lord Byron in his Journal, after her first

refusal of him, is this:--

'She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled; which is

strange in an heiress, a girl of twenty, a peeress that is to be in

her own right, an only child, and a savante, who has always had her

own way. She is a poetess, a mathematician, a metaphysician; yet,

withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension.

Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions and a tenth

of her advantages.'

Such was Lady Byron at twenty. I formed her acquaintance in the year

1853, during my first visit in England. I met her at a lunch-party in

the house of one of her friends.

The party had many notables; but, among them all, my attention was fixed

principally on Lady Byron. She was at this time sixty-one years of age,

but still had, to a remarkable degree, that personal attraction which is

commonly considered to belong only to youth and beauty.

Her form was slight, giving an impression of fragility; her motions were

both graceful and decided; her eyes bright, and full of interest and

quick observation. Her silvery-white hair seemed to lend a grace to the

transparent purity of her complexion, and her small hands had a pearly

whiteness. I recollect she wore a plain widow's cap of a transparent

material; and was dressed in some delicate shade of lavender, which

harmonised well with her complexion.

When I was introduced to her, I felt in a moment the words of her

husband:--

'There was awe in the homage that she drew;

Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne.'

Calm, self-poised, and thoughtful, she seemed to me rather to resemble an

interested spectator of the world's affairs, than an actor involved in

its trials; yet the sweetness of her smile, and a certain very delicate

sense of humour in her remarks, made the way of acquaintance easy.

Her first remarks were a little playful; but in a few moments we were

speaking on what every one in those days was talking to me about,--the

slavery question in America.

It need not be remarked, that, when any one subject especially occupies

the public mind, those known to be interested in it are compelled to

listen to many weary platitudes. Lady Byron's remarks, however, caught

my ear and arrested my attention by their peculiar incisive quality,

their originality, and the evidence they gave that she was as well

informed on all our matters as the best American statesman could be. I

had no wearisome course to go over with her as to the difference between

the General Government and State Governments, nor explanations of the

United States Constitution; for she had the whole before her mind with a

perfect clearness. Her morality upon the slavery question, too,

impressed me as something far higher and deeper than the common

sentimentalism of the day. Many of her words surprised me greatly, and

gave me new material for thought.

I found I was in company with a commanding mind, and hastened to gain

instruction from her on another point where my interest had been aroused.

I had recently been much excited by Kingsley's novels, 'Alton Locke' and

'Yeast,' on the position of religious thought in England. From these

works I had gathered, that under the apparent placid uniformity of the

Established Church of England, and of 'good society' as founded on it,

there was moving a secret current of speculative enquiry, doubt, and

dissent; but I had met, as yet, with no person among my various

acquaintances in England who seemed either aware of this fact, or able to

guide my mind respecting it. The moment I mentioned the subject to Lady

Byron, I received an answer which showed me that the whole ground was

familiar to her, and that she was capable of giving me full information.

She had studied with careful thoughtfulness all the social and religious

tendencies of England during her generation. One of her remarks has

often since occurred to me. Speaking of the Oxford movement, she said

the time had come when the English Church could no longer remain as it

was. It must either restore the past, or create a future. The Oxford

movement attempted the former; and of the future she was beginning to

speak, when our conversation was interrupted by the presentation of other

parties.

Subsequently, in reply to a note from her on some benevolent business, I

alluded to that conversation, and expressed a wish that she would finish

giving me her views of the religious state of England. A portion of the

letter that she wrote me in reply I insert, as being very characteristic

in many respects:--

'Various causes have been assigned for the decaying state of the

English Church; which seems the more strange, because the clergy have

improved, morally and intellectually, in the last twenty years. Then

why should their influence be diminished? I think it is owing to the

diffusion of a spirit of free enquiry.

'Doubts have arisen in the minds of many who are unhappily bound by

subscription not to doubt; and, in consequence, they are habitually

pretending either to believe or to disbelieve. The state of Denmark

cannot but be rotten, when to seem is the first object of the

witnesses of truth.

'They may lead better lives, and bring forward abler arguments; but

their efforts are paralysed by that unsoundness. I see the High

Churchman professing to believe in the existence of a church, when the

most palpable facts must show him that no such church exists; the

"Low" Churchman professing to believe in exceptional interpositions

which his philosophy secretly questions; the "Broad" Churchman

professing as absolute an attachment to the Established Church as the

narrowest could feel, while he is preaching such principles as will at

last pull it down.

'I ask you, my friend, whether there would not be more faith, as well

as earnestness, if all would speak out. There would be more unanimity

too, because they would all agree in a certain basis. Would not a

wider love supersede the creed-bound charity of sects?

'I am aware that I have touched on a point of difference between us,

and I will not regret it; for I think the differences of mind are

analogous to those differences of nature, which, in the most

comprehensive survey, are the very elements of harmony.

'I am not at all prone to put forth my own opinions; but the tone in

which you have written to me claims an unusual degree of openness on

my part. I look upon creeds of all kinds as chains,--far worse chains

than those you would break,--as the causes of much hypocrisy and

infidelity. I hold it to be a sin to make a child say, "I believe."

Lead it to utter that belief spontaneously. I also consider the

institution of an exclusive priesthood, though having been of service

in some respects, as retarding the progress of Christianity at

present. I desire to see a lay ministry.

'I will not give you more of my heterodoxy at present: perhaps I need

your pardon, connected as you are with the Church, for having said so

much.

'There are causes of decay known to be at work in my frame, which lead

me to believe I may not have time to grow wiser; and I must therefore

leave it to others to correct the conclusions I have now formed from

my life's experience. I should feel happy to discuss them personally

with you; for it would be soul to soul. In that confidence I am yours

most truly,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

It is not necessary to prove to the reader that this letter is not in the

style of a broken-down old woman subject to mental hallucinations. It

shows Lady Byron's habits of clear, searching analysis, her

thoughtfulness, and, above all, that peculiar reverence for truth and

sincerity which was a leading characteristic of her moral nature. {139}

It also shows her views of the probable shortness of her stay on earth,

derived from the opinion of physicians about her disease, which was a

gradual ossification of the lungs. It has been asserted that pulmonary

diseases, while they slowly and surely sap the physical life, often

appear to give added vigour to the play of the moral and intellectual

powers.

I parted from Lady Byron, feeling richer in that I had found one more

pearl of great price on the shore of life.

Three years after this, I visited England to obtain a copyright for the

issue of my novel of 'Dred.'

The hope of once more seeing Lady Byron was one of the brightest

anticipations held out to me in this journey. I found London quite

deserted; but, hearing that Lady Byron was still in town, I sent to her,

saying in my note, that, in case she was not well enough to call, I would

visit her. Her reply I give:--

'MY DEAR FRIEND,--I will be indebted to you for our meeting, as I am

barely able to leave my room. It is not a time for small

personalities, if they could ever exist with you; and, dressed or

undressed, I shall hope to see you after two o'clock.

'Yours very truly,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

I found Lady Byron in her sick-room,--that place which she made so

different from the chamber of ordinary invalids. Her sick-room seemed

only a telegraphic station whence her vivid mind was flashing out all

over the world.

By her bedside stood a table covered with books, pamphlets, and files of

letters, all arranged with exquisite order, and each expressing some of

her varied interests. From that sick-bed she still directed, with

systematic care, her various works of benevolence, and watched with

intelligent attention the course of science, literature, and religion;

and the versatility and activity of her mind, the flow of brilliant and

penetrating thought on all the topics of the day, gave to the

conversations of her retired room a peculiar charm. You forgot that she

was an invalid; for she rarely had a word of her own personalities, and

the charm of her conversation carried you invariably from herself to the

subjects of which she was thinking. All the new books, the literature of

the hour, were lighted up by her keen, searching, yet always kindly

criticism; and it was charming to get her fresh, genuine, clear-cut modes

of expression, so different from the world-worn phrases of what is called

good society. Her opinions were always perfectly clear and positive, and

given with the freedom of one who has long stood in a position to judge

the world and its ways from her own standpoint. But it was not merely in

general literature and science that her heart lay; it was following

always with eager interest the progress of humanity over the whole world.

This was the period of the great battle for liberty in Kansas. The

English papers were daily filled with the thrilling particulars of that

desperate struggle, and Lady Byron entered with heart and soul into it.

Her first letter to me, at this time, is on this subject. It was while

'Dred' was going through the press.

'CAMBRIDGE TERRACE, Aug. 15.

'MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--Messrs. Chambers liked the proposal to publish

the Kansas Letters. The more the public know of these matters, the

better prepared they will be for your book. The moment for its

publication seems well chosen. There is always in England a floating

fund of sympathy for what is above the everyday sordid cares of life;

and these better feelings, so nobly invested for the last two years in

Florence Nightingale's career, are just set free. To what will they

next be attached? If you can lay hold of them, they may bring about a

deeper abolition than any legislative one,--the abolition of the heart-

heresy that man's worth comes, not from God, but from man.

'I have been obliged to give up exertion again, but hope soon to be

able to call and make the acquaintance of your daughters. In case you

wish to consult H. Martineau's pamphlets, I send more copies. Do not

think of answering: I have occupied too much of your time in reading.

'Yours affectionately,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

As soon as a copy of 'Dred' was through the press, I sent it to her,

saying that I had been reproved by some excellent people for representing

too faithfully the profane language of some of the wicked characters. To

this she sent the following reply:--

'Your book, dear Mrs. Stowe, is of the little leaven kind, and must

prove a great moral force; perhaps not manifestly so much as secretly.

And yet I can hardly conceive so much power without immediate and

sensible effects: only there will be a strong disposition to resist on

the part of all hollow-hearted professors of religion, whose

heathenisms you so unsparingly expose. They have a class feeling like

others.

'To the young, and to those who do not reflect much on what is offered

to their belief, you will do great good by showing how spiritual food

is often adulterated. The bread from heaven is in the same case as

bakers' bread.

'If there is truth in what I heard Lord Byron say, that works of

fiction live only by the amount of truth which they contain, your

story is sure of a long life. Of the few critiques I have seen, the

best is in "The Examiner." I find an obtuseness as to the spirit and

aim of the book, as if you had designed to make the best novel of the

season, or to keep up the reputation of one. You are reproached, as

Walter Scott was, with too much scriptural quotation; not, that I have

heard, with phrases of an opposite character.

'The effects of such reading till a late hour one evening appeared to

influence me very singularly in a dream. The most horrible spectres

presented themselves, and I woke in an agony of fear; but a faith

still stronger arose, and I became courageous from trust in God, and

felt calm. Did you do this? It is very insignificant among the many

things you certainly will do unknown to yourself. I know more than

ever before how to value communion with you. I have sent Robertson's

Sermons for you; and, with kind regards to your family, am

'Yours affectionately,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

I was struck in this note with the mention of Lord Byron, and, the next

time I saw her, alluded to it, and remarked upon the peculiar qualities

of his mind as shown in some of his more serious conversations with Dr.

Kennedy.

She seemed pleased to continue the subject, and went on to say many

things of his singular character and genius, more penetrating and more

appreciative than is often met with among critics.

I told her that I had been from childhood powerfully influenced by him;

and began to tell her how much, as a child, I had been affected by the

news of his death,--giving up all my plays, and going off to a lonely

hillside, where I spent the afternoon thinking of him. She interrupted

me before I had quite finished, with a quick, impulsive movement. 'I

know all that,' she said: 'I heard it all from Mrs. ---; and it was one

of the things that made me wish to know you. I think you could

understand him.' We talked for some time of him then; she, with her pale

face slightly flushed, speaking, as any other great man's widow might,

only of what was purest and best in his works, and what were his

undeniable virtues and good traits, especially in early life. She told

me many pleasant little speeches made by him to herself; and, though

there was running through all this a shade of melancholy, one could never

have conjectured that there were under all any deeper recollections than

the circumstances of an ordinary separation might bring.

Not many days after, with the unselfishness which was so marked a trait

with her, she chose a day when she could be out of her room, and invited

our family party, consisting of my husband, sister, and children, to

lunch with her.

What showed itself especially in this interview was her tenderness for

all young people. She had often enquired after mine; asked about their

characters, habits, and tastes; and on this occasion she found an

opportunity to talk with each one separately, and to make them all feel

at ease, so that they were able to talk with her. She seemed interested

to point out to them what they should see and study in London; and the

charm of her conversation left on their minds an impression that

subsequent years have never effaced. I record this incident, because it

shows how little Lady Byron assumed the privileges or had the character

of an invalid absorbed in herself, and likely to brood over her own woes

and wrongs.

Here was a family of strangers stranded in a dull season in London, and

there was no manner of obligation upon her to exert herself to show them

attention. Her state of health would have been an all-sufficient reason

why she should not do it; and her doing it was simply a specimen of that

unselfish care for others, even down to the least detail, of which her

life was full.

A little while after, at her request, I went, with my husband and son, to

pass an evening at her house.

There were a few persons present whom she thought I should be interested

to know,--a Miss Goldsmid, daughter of Baron Goldsmid, and Lord Ockham,

her grandson, eldest son and heir of the Earl of Lovelace, to whom she

introduced my son.

I had heard much of the eccentricities of this young nobleman, and was

exceedingly struck with his personal appearance. His bodily frame was of

the order of the Farnese Hercules,--a wonderful development of physical

and muscular strength. His hands were those of a blacksmith. He was

broadly and squarely made, with a finely-shaped head, and dark eyes of

surpassing brilliancy. I have seldom seen a more interesting combination

than his whole appearance presented.

When all were engaged in talking, Lady Byron came and sat down by me, and

glancing across to Lord Ockham and my son, who were talking together, she

looked at me, and smiled. I immediately expressed my admiration of his

fine eyes and the intellectual expression of his countenance, and my

wonder at the uncommon muscular development of his frame.

She said that that of itself would account for many of Ockham's

eccentricities. He had a body that required a more vigorous animal life

than his station gave scope for, and this had often led him to seek it in

what the world calls low society; that he had been to sea as a sailor,

and was now working as a mechanic on the iron work of 'The Great

Eastern.' He had laid aside his title, and went in daily with the other

workmen, requesting them to call him simply Ockham.

I said that there was something to my mind very fine about this, even

though it might show some want of proper balance.

She said he had noble traits, and that she felt assured he would yet

accomplish something worthy of himself. 'The great difficulty with our

nobility is apt to be, that they do not understand the working-classes,

so as to feel for them properly; and Ockham is now going through an

experience which may yet fit him to do great good when he comes to the

peerage. I am trying to influence him to do good among the workmen, and

to interest himself in schools for their children. I think,' she added,

'I have great influence over Ockham,--the greater, perhaps, that I never

make any claim to authority.'

This conversation is very characteristic of Lady Byron as showing her

benevolent analysis of character, and the peculiar hopefulness she always

had in regard to the future of every one brought in connection with her.

Her moral hopefulness was something very singular; and in this respect

she was so different from the rest of the world, that it would be

difficult to make her understood. Her tolerance of wrong-doing would

have seemed to many quite latitudinarian, and impressed them as if she

had lost all just horror of what was morally wrong in transgression; but

it seemed her fixed habit to see faults only as diseases and

immaturities, and to expect them to fall away with time.

She saw the germs of good in what others regarded as only evil. She

expected valuable results to come from what the world looked on only as

eccentricities; {147} and she incessantly devoted herself to the task of

guarding those whom the world condemned, and guiding them to those higher

results of which she often thought that even their faults were prophetic.

Before I quit this sketch of Lady Byron as I knew her, I will give one

more of her letters. My return from that visit in Europe was met by the

sudden death of the son mentioned in the foregoing account. At the time

of this sorrow, Lady Byron was too unwell to write to me. The letter

given alludes to this event, and speaks also of two coloured persons of

remarkable talent, in whose career in England she had taken a deep

interest. One of them is the 'friend' she speaks of.

'LONDON, Feb. 6, 1859.

DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I seem to feel our friend as a bridge, over which

our broken outward communication can be renewed without effort. Why

broken? The words I would have uttered at one time were like drops of

blood from my heart. Now I sympathise with the calmness you have

gained, and can speak of your loss as I do of my own. Loss and

restoration are more and more linked in my mind, but "to the present

live." As long as they are in God's world they are in ours. I ask no

other consolation.

'Mrs. W---'s recovery has astonished me, and her husband's prospects

give me great satisfaction. They have achieved a benefit to their

coloured people. She had a mission which her burning soul has worked

out, almost in defiance of death. But who is "called" without being

"crucified," man or woman? I know of none.

'I fear that H. Martineau was too sanguine in her persuasion that the

slave power had received a serious check from the ruin of so many of

your Mammon-worshippers. With the return of commercial facilities,

that article of commerce will again find purchasers enough to raise

its value. Not that way is the iniquity to be overthrown. A deeper

moral earthquake is needed. {148} We English had ours in India; and

though the cases are far from being alike, yet a consciousness of what

we ought to have been and ought to be toward the natives could not

have been awakened by less than the reddened waters of the Ganges. So

I fear you will have to look on a day of judgment worse than has been

painted.

'As to all the frauds and impositions which have been disclosed by the

failures, what a want of the sense of personal responsibility they

show. It seems to be thought that "association" will "cover a

multitude of sins;" as if "and Co." could enter heaven. A firm may be

described as a partnership for lowering the standard of morals. Even

ecclesiastical bodies are not free from the "and Co.;" very different

from "the goodly fellowship of the apostles."

'The better class of young gentlemen in England are seized with a

mediaeval mania, to which Ruskin has contributed much. The chief

reason for regretting it is that taste is made to supersede

benevolence. The money that would save thousands from perishing or

suffering must be applied to raise the Gothic edifice where their last

prayer may be uttered. Charity may be dead, while Art has glorified

her. This is worse than Catholicism, which cultivates heart and eye

together. The first cathedral was Truth, at the beginning of the

fourth century, just as Christianity was exchanging a heavenly for an

earthly crown. True religion may have to cast away the symbol for the

spirit before "the kingdom" can come.

'While I am speculating to little purpose, perhaps you are doing--what?

Might not a biography from your pen bring forth again some great, half-

obscured soul to act on the world? Even Sir Philip Sidney ought to be

superseded by a still nobler type.

'This must go immediately, to be in time for the bearer, of whose

meeting with you I shall think as the friend of both. May it be

happy!

'Your affectionate

'A. I. N. B.'

One letter more from Lady Byron I give,--the last I received from her:--

LONDON, May 3, 1859.

DEAR FRIEND,--I have found, particularly as to yourself, that, if I

did not answer from the first impulse, all had evaporated. Your

letter came by 'The Niagara,' which brought Fanny Kemble to learn the

loss of her best friend, the Miss F---- whom you saw at my house.

'Her death, after an illness in which she was to the last a minister

of good to others, is a soul-loss to me also; and your remarks are

most appropriate to my feelings. I have been taught, however, to

accept survivorship; even to feel it, in some cases, Heaven's best

blessing.

'I have an intense interest in your new novel. {149} More power in

these few numbers than in any of your former writings, relating, at

least, to my own mind. It would amuse you to hear my granddaughter

and myself attempting to foresee the future of the love-story; being,

for the moment, quite persuaded that James is at sea, and the minister

about to ruin himself. We think that Mary will labour to be in love

with the self-devoted man, under her mother's influence, and from that

hyper-conscientiousness so common with good girls; but we don't wish

her to succeed. Then what is to become of her older lover? Time will

show.

'The lady you desired to introduce to me will be welcomed as of you.

She has been misled with respect to my having any house in Yorkshire

(New Leeds). I am in London now to be of a little use to A----; not

ostensibly, for I can neither go out, nor give parties: but I am the

confidential friend to whom she likes to bring her social gatherings,

as she can see something of the world with others. Age and infirmity

seem to be overlooked in what she calls the harmony between us,--not

perfect agreement of opinion (which I should regret, with almost fifty

years of difference), but the spirit-union: can you say what it is?

'I am interrupted by a note from Mrs. K----. She says that she cannot

write of our lost friend yet, though she is less sad than she will be.

Mrs. F---- may like to hear of her arrival, should you be in

communication with our friend. She is the type of youth in age.

'I often converse with Miss S----, a judicious friend of the W----s,

about what is likely to await them. She would not succeed here as

well as where she was a novelty. The character of our climate this

year has been injurious to the respiratory organs; but I hope still to

serve them.

'I have just missed Dale Owen, with whom I wished to have conversed on

spiritualism. {150} Harris is lecturing here on religion. I do not

hear him praised.

'People are looking for helps to believe, everywhere but in life,--in

music, in architecture, in antiquity, in ceremony; and upon all these

is written, "Thou shalt not believe." At least, if this be faith,

happier the unbeliever. I am willing to see through that materialism;

but, if I am to rest there, I would rend the veil.

'June 1.

'The day of the packet's sailing. I shall hope to be visited by you

here. The best flowers sent me have been placed in your little vases,

giving life to the remembrance of you, though not, like them, to pass

away.

'Ever yours,

'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'

Shortly after, I was in England again, and had one more opportunity of

resuming our personal intercourse. The first time that I called on Lady

Byron, I saw her in one of those periods of utter physical exhaustion to

which she was subject on account of the constant pressure of cares beyond

her strength. All who knew her will testify, that, in a state of health

which would lead most persons to become helpless absorbents of service

from others, she was assuming burdens, and making outlays of her vital

powers in acts of love and service, with a generosity that often reduced

her to utter exhaustion. But none who knew or loved her ever

misinterpreted the coldness of those seasons of exhaustion. We knew that

it was not the spirit that was chilled, but only the frail mortal

tabernacle. When I called on her at this time, she could not see me at

first; and when, at last, she came, it was evident that she was in a

state of utter prostration. Her hands were like ice; her face was deadly

pale; and she conversed with a restraint and difficulty which showed what

exertion it was for her to keep up at all. I left as soon as possible,

with an appointment for another interview. That interview was my last on

earth with her, and is still beautiful in memory. It was a long, still

summer afternoon, spent alone with her in a garden, where we walked

together. She was enjoying one of those bright intervals of freedom from

pain and languor, in which her spirits always rose so buoyant and

youthful; and her eye brightened, and her step became elastic.

One last little incident is cherished as most expressive of her. When it

became time for me to leave, she took me in her carriage to the station.

As we were almost there, I missed my gloves, and said, 'I must have left

them; but there is not time to go back.'

With one of those quick, impulsive motions which were so natural to her

in doing a kindness, she drew off her own and said, 'Take mine if they

will serve you.'

I hesitated a moment; and then the thought, that I might never see her

again, came over me, and I said, 'Oh, yes! thanks.' That was the last

earthly word of love between us. But, thank God, those who love worthily

never meet for the last time: there is always a future.