ALLEGRA

A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;

A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being;

Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;

With eyes--Oh! speak not of her eyes! which seem

Two mirrors of Italian heaven.

In these Wordsworthian lines Shelley describes Lord Byron’s little

daughter, Allegra, then under two years of age; and the word “toy”--so

keenly suggestive of both the poetic and the masculine point of

view--has in this case an unconscious and bitter significance. Allegra

was a toy at which rude hands plucked violently, until death lifted

her from their clutches, and hid her away in the safety and dignity of

the tomb. “She is more fortunate than we are,” said her father, with a

noble and rare lapse into simplicity, and the words were sadly true.

Never did a little child make a happier escape from the troublesome

burden of life.

In the winter of 1816, a handsome, vivacious, dark-eyed girl sought

the acquaintance of Lord Byron, and begged him to use his influence

in obtaining for her an engagement at Drury Lane. She was the type

of young woman who aspires to a career on the stage, or in any other

field, without regard to qualifications, and without the burden

of study. She wrote in her first letter (it had many successors):

“The theatre presents an easy method of independence.” She objected

vehemently to “the intolerable drudgery of provincial boards.” She

wanted to appear at once in London. And she signed her name, “Clara

Clairmont,” which was prettily alliterative, and suited her better than

Jane.

It was an inauspicious beginning of an unhappy intimacy, destined to

bring nothing but disaster in its train. Miss Clairmont’s stepfather,

William Godwin, had confessed, not without reason, “a feeling of

incompetence for the education of daughters.” His own child, Mary,

had fled to Europe eighteen months before, with the poet Shelley.

Miss Clairmont accompanied their flight; and their inexplicable folly

in taking her with them was punished--as folly always is--with a

relentless severity seldom accorded to sin. To the close of Shelley’s

life, his sister-in-law continued to be a source of endless irritation

and anxiety.

No engagement at Drury Lane was procurable. Indeed, Miss Clairmont

soon ceased to desire one. Her infatuation for Lord Byron drove all

other thoughts and hopes and ambitions from her heart. She wrote to him

repeatedly,--clever, foolish, half-mad, and cruelly long letters. She

praised the “wild originality of his countenance.” She sent him her

manuscripts to read. There is something pathetic in Byron’s unheeded

entreaty that she should “write short.” There is something immeasurably

painful in his unconcealed indifference, in his undisguised contempt.

The glamour of his fame as a poet gave a compelling power to that

fatal beauty which was his undoing. When we read what _men_ have

written about Byron’s head; when we recall the rhapsodies of Moore,

the reluctant praise of Trelawney, the eloquence of Coleridge; when

we remember that Scott--the sanest man in Great Britain--confessed

ruefully that Byron’s face was a thing to dream of, we are the less

surprised that women should have flung themselves at his feet in a

frenzy of self-surrender, which a cold legacy of busts and portraits

does little to explain. Miss Clairmont--to use one of Professor

Dowden’s flowers of speech--“was lightly whirled out of her regular

orbit.” In the spring she travelled with Shelley and Mary Godwin to

Switzerland, and at Sécheron, a little suburb of Geneva, they met

Lord Byron, who was then writing the splendid third canto of “Childe

Harold.” His letter to his sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh, bears

witness to his annoyance at the encounter; but the two poets became

for a season daily companions, and, in some sort, friends. Shelley

thought Byron “as mad as the winds” (an opinion which was returned with

interest), and deeply regretted his slavery “to the vilest and most

vulgar prejudices;”--among them a prejudice in favour of Christianity,

for which ancient institution Byron always entertained a profound

though unfruitful reverence. Indeed, despite the revolutionary impetus

of his verse, and despite the fact that he died for revolting Greece,

the settled order of things appealed with force to his eminently

practical nature. “Sanity and balance,” says Mr. Morley, “mark the

foundations of his character. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch

over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance.”

Miss Clairmont did not confide to her guardians the secret of her

intimacy with Lord Byron until after the meeting at Geneva. When her

relations with him were understood, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin saw

at first any occasion for distress. They cared nothing for the broken

marriage bond, and they believed, or hoped, that some true affection

had been--as in their own case--the impelling and upholding power. It

was the swift withering of this hope which filled their hearts with

apprehension. They carried Miss Clairmont back to England in the autumn

(“I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back,” wrote

Byron to his sister); and in Bath, the following January, her little

daughter was born.

It was a blue-eyed baby of exceptional loveliness. Mrs. Shelley (Mary

Godwin had been married to the poet on the death of his wife, two

months earlier) fills her letters with praises of its beauty. Miss

Clairmont wrote to Byron in 1820 that her health had been injured by

her “attentions” to her child during its first year; but she found time

to study Italian, and to write a book, for which Shelley tried in vain

to find a publisher, and the very title of which is now forgotten.

The little household at Great Marlow was not a tranquil one. Mrs.

Shelley had grown weary of her step-sister’s society. Her diary--all

these young people kept diaries with uncommendable industry--abounds

in notes, illustrative of Claire’s ill-temper, and of her own chronic

irritation. “Clara imagines that I treat her unkindly.” “Clara in an

ill-humour.” “Jane[1] gloomy.” “Jane for some reason refuses to walk.”

“Jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day.”

[1] Clara Mary Jane Clairmont was “Claire’s” full name.

This was bad enough, but there were other moods more trying than mere

sulkiness. Miss Clairmont possessed nerves. She had “the horrors” when

“King Lear” was read aloud. She was, or professed to be, afraid of

ghosts. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell

Shelley that an invisible hand had lifted her pillow from her bed, and

dumped it on a chair. To such thrilling recitals the poet lent serious

attention. “Her manner,” he wrote in his journal, “convinced me that

she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals

engaged in awful conversation, relative to the nature of these

mysteries;”--that is, to the migrations of the pillow. As a result of

sympathetic treatment, Claire would wind up the night with hysterics,

writhing in convulsions on the floor, and shrieking dismally, until

poor Mrs. Shelley would be summoned from a sick-bed to soothe her to

slumber. “Give me a garden, and _absentia_ Claire, and I will thank my

love for many favours,” is the weary comment of the wife, after months

of inextinguishable agitation.

There was no loophole of escape, however, from a burden so rashly

shouldered. Miss Clairmont made one or two ineffectual efforts at

self-support; but found them little to her liking. She could not, and

she would not, live with her mother, Mrs. Godwin;--“a very disgusting

woman, and wears green spectacles,” is Charles Lamb’s description

of this lady, whom, in common with most of her acquaintances, he

cordially disliked. When Byron wrote, offering to receive and provide

for his little daughter, Shelley vehemently opposed the plan, thinking

it best that so young an infant should remain under its mother’s care.

But his wife, who was at heart a singularly sagacious woman, never

ceased to urge the advisability of the step. Claire, though reluctant

to part from her baby, yielded to these persuasions; and the journey

to Italy in the spring of 1818 was undertaken mainly as a sure though

expensive method of conveying Allegra to her father.

That Byron wanted the child, there is no doubt, nor that he had been

from the first deeply concerned for her uncertain future. Three months

after her birth, he wrote to his sister that he had resolved to send

for her, and place her in a convent, “to become a good Catholic, and

(it may be) a nun,--being a character somewhat needed in our family.”

“They tell me,” he adds, “that she is very pretty, with blue eyes and

dark hair; and although I never was attached, nor pretended attachment

to the mother, still, in case of the eternal war and alienation which

I foresee about my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have

something to repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age;

and circumstances may render this poor little creature a great, and

perhaps my only, comfort.”

It is not often that Byron’s letters reveal this grace of sentiment.

Never, after Allegra’s arrival, does he allude to any affection he

bears her, and he once assured Moore that he did not bear any;--a

statement which that partial biographer thought fit to disregard.

On the other hand, he dwells over and over again, both in his

correspondence and in his journal, upon plans for her education

and future settlement. He was at all times sternly practical, and

pitilessly clear-sighted. He never regarded his daughter as a “lovely

toy,” but as a very serious and troublesome responsibility. The poetic

view of childhood failed to appeal to him. “Any other father,” wrote

Claire bitterly, “would have made of her infancy a sweet idyl of

flowers and innocent joy.” Byron was not idyllic. He dosed Allegra with

quinine when she had a fever. He abandoned a meditated journey because

she was ill. He dismissed a servant who had let her fall. He added a

codicil to his will, bequeathing her five thousand pounds. These things

do not indicate any stress of emotion, but they have their place in the

ordinary calendar of parental cares.

A delicate baby, not yet sixteen months old, was a formidable and

inharmonious addition to the poet’s Venetian household. The Swiss

nurse, Elise, who had been sent by the Shelleys from Milan, proved to

be a most incapable and unworthy woman, who later on made infinite

mischief by telling the foulest of lies. Byron was sorely perplexed by

the situation; and when Mrs. Hoppner, the Genevan wife of the English

consul-general, offered to take temporary charge of the child, he

gladly and gratefully consented. One difficulty in his path he had not

failed to foresee;--that Claire, having relinquished Allegra of her own

free will, would quickly want her back again. In fact, before the end

of the summer, Miss Clairmont insisted upon going to Venice, and poor

Shelley very ruefully and reluctantly accompanied her. Byron received

_him_ with genuine delight, and, in an access of good humour, proposed

lending the party his villa at Este. There Mrs. Shelley, who had lost

her infant daughter, might recover from sorrow and fatigue, and there

Allegra might spend some weeks under her mother’s care. The offer

was frankly accepted, and the two men came once more to an amicable

understanding. They were not fitted to be friends,--the gods had ruled

a severance wide and deep;--but when unpricked by the contentiousness

of other people, they passed pleasant and profitable hours together.

Meanwhile, the poor little apple of discord was ripening every day

into a fairer bloom. “Allegra has been with me these three months,”

writes Byron to his sister in August. “She is very pretty, remarkably

intelligent, and a great favourite with everybody.... She has very

blue eyes, a singular forehead, fair curly hair, and a devil of a

Spirit,--but that is Papa’s.” “I have here my natural daughter, by

name Allegra,” he tells Moore six weeks later. “She is a pretty little

girl enough, and reckoned like Papa.” To Murray he writes in the same

paternal strain. “My daughter Allegra is well, and growing pretty; her

hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways,

Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features. She will

make, in that case, a manageable young lady.”

Other pens bear ready witness to Allegra’s temper. Mr. Jeaffreson, who

has written a very offensive book about Lord Byron, takes pains to tell

us that the poor child was “greedy, passionate, and, in her fifth year,

precocious, vain and saucy.” Mr. Hoppner, after the publication of the

Countess Guiccioli’s “Recollections,” wrote an agitated letter to the

“Athenæum,” assuring an indifferent public that he had no acquaintance

with the lady, and that his own respectability was untarnished by any

intimacy with the poet, of whose morals he disapproved, and whose

companionship he eschewed, save when they rode together,--on Byron’s

horses. “Allegra was not by any means an amiable child,” he added

sourly, “nor was Mrs. Hoppner nor I particularly fond of her.”

It could hardly have been expected that the daughter of Byron and

Claire Clairmont would have been “amiable;” nor can we wonder that Mr.

Hoppner, who had a seven-months-old baby of his own, should have failed

to wax enthusiastic over another infant. But his warm-hearted wife did

love her little charge, and grieved sincerely when the child’s quick

temper subsided into listlessness under the fierce Italian heat. “Mon

petit brille, et il est toujours gai et sautillant,” she wrote prettily

to the Shelleys, after their departure from Venice; “et Allegra, par

contre, est devenue tranquille et sérieuse, comme une petite vieille,

ce que nous peine beaucoup.”

Byron was frankly grateful to Mrs. Hoppner for her kindness to his

daughter; and after he had carried the child to Ravenna, where the

colder, purer air brought back her gayety and bloom, he wrote again and

again to her former guardians, now thanking them for “a whole treasure

of toys” which they had sent, now assuring them that “Allegrina is

flourishing like a pomegranate blossom,” and now reiterating the

fact which seemed to make most impression upon his mind,--that she

was growing prettier and more obstinate every day. He added many

little details about her childish ailments, her drives with the

Countess Guiccioli, and her popularity in his household. It was to the

over-indulgence of his servants, as well as to heredity, that he traced

her high temper and imperious will. He consulted Mrs. Hoppner more than

once about Allegra’s education; and he poured into her husband’s ears

his bitter resentment at Miss Clairmont’s pardonable, but exasperating

interference.

For Claire, clever about most things, was an adept in the art of

provocation. She wrote him letters calculated to try the patience of

a saint, and he retaliated by a cruel and contemptuous silence. In

vain Shelley attempted to play the difficult part of peacemaker. “I

wonder,” he pleaded, “at your being provoked by what Claire writes,

though that she should write what is provoking is very probable. You

are conscious of performing your duty to Allegra, and your refusal to

allow her to visit Claire at this distance you conceive to be part of

that duty. That Claire should have wished to see her is natural. That

her disappointment should vex her, and her vexation make her write

absurdly, is all in the natural order of things. But, poor thing, she

is very unhappy and in bad health, and she ought to be treated with

as much indulgence as possible. The weak and the foolish are in this

respect the kings,--they can do no wrong.”

Byron was less generous. The weak and the foolish--especially when

their weakness and folly took the form of hysteria--irritated him

beyond endurance. The penalty that an hysterical woman pays for her

self-indulgence is that no one believes in the depth or sincerity of

her emotions. Byron had no pity for the pain that Claire was suffering.

She was to him simply a young woman who never lost an opportunity to

make a scene, and he hated scenes. On one point he was determined.

Allegra should never again be sent to her mother, nor to the Shelleys.

He had views of his own upon the education of little girls, which by no

means corresponded with theirs.

“About Allegra,” he writes to Mr. Hoppner in 1820, “I can only say

to Claire that I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children’s

treatment in their family, that I should look upon the Child as going

into a hospital. Is it not so? Have they reared one? Her health has

hitherto been excellent, and her temper not bad. She is sometimes vain

and obstinate, but always clean and cheerful; and as, in a year or

two, I shall either send her to England, or put her in a Convent for

education, these defects will be remedied as far as they can in human

nature. But the Child shall not quit me again to perish of Starvation

and green fruit, or be taught to believe that there is no Deity.

Whenever there is convenience of vicinity and access, her Mother can

always have her with her; otherwise no. It was so stipulated from the

beginning.”

Five months later, he reiterates these painfully prosaic views. He

has taken a house in the country, because the air agrees better with

Allegra. He has two maids to attend her. He is doing his best, and he

is very angry at Claire’s last batch of letters. “Were it not for the

poor little child’s sake,” he writes, “I am almost tempted to send

her back to her atheistical mother, but that would be too bad.... If

Claire thinks that she shall ever interfere with the child’s morals

or education, she mistakes; she never shall. The girl shall be a

Christian, and a married woman, if possible.”

On these two points Byron had set his heart. The Countess

Guiccioli--kindly creature--assures us that “his dearest paternal

care was the religious training to be given to his natural daughter,

Allegra;” and while the words of this sweet advocate weigh little in

the scale, they are in some degree confirmed by the poet’s conduct and

correspondence. When he felt the growing insecurity of his position in

Ravenna, he determined to place the child at a convent school twelve

miles away, and he explained very clearly and concisely to all whom

it might concern his reasons for the step. “Allegra is now four years

old complete,” he wrote to Mr. Hoppner in April, 1821; “and as she is

quite above the control of the servants, and as a man living without

any woman at the head of his house cannot much attend to a nursery, I

had no resource but to place her for a time (at a high pension too)

in the convent of Bagnacavallo (twelve miles off), where the air is

good, and where she will, at least, have her learning advanced, and her

morals and religion inculcated. I had also another motive. Things were

and are in such a state here, that I have no reason to look upon my own

personal safety as insurable, and thought the infant best out of harm’s

way for the present.

“It is also fit that I should add that I by no means intended nor

intend to give a natural child an English education, because, with

the disadvantages of her birth, her after settlement would be doubly

difficult. Abroad, with a fair foreign education, and a portion of

five or six thousand pounds, she might and may marry very respectably.

In England, such a dowry would be a pittance, while elsewhere it is a

fortune. It is, besides, my wish that she should be a Roman Catholic, a

religion which I look upon as the best, as it is assuredly the oldest,

of the various branches of Christianity. I have now explained my

notions as to the place where she is. It is the best I could find for

the present, but I have no prejudices in its favour.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner were strongly in favour of a Swiss, rather

than an Italian school; and Byron, who never doubted the sincerity of

their affection for his child, lent a ready ear to their suggestions.

“If I had but known your ideas about Switzerland before,” he wrote to

Mr. Hoppner in May; “I should have adopted them at once. As it is, I

shall let Allegra remain in her convent, where she seems healthy and

happy, for the present. But I shall feel much obliged if you will

inquire, when you are in the cantons, about the usual and better modes

of education there for females, and let me know the result of your

inquiries. It is some consolation that both Mr. and Mrs. Shelley have

written to approve entirely of my placing the child with the nuns for

the present. I can refer to my whole conduct, as having spared no

trouble, nor kindness, nor expense, since she was sent to me. People

may say what they please. I must content myself with not deserving (in

this case) that they should speak ill.

“The place is a country town, in a good air, where there is a large

establishment for education, and many children, some of considerable

rank, placed in it. As a country town, it is less liable to objections

of every kind. It has always appeared to me that the moral defect in

Italy does not proceed from a conventual training,--because, to my

certain knowledge, girls come out of their convents innocent, even

to ignorance, of moral evil;--but to the society into which they are

plunged directly on coming out of it. It is like educating an infant on

a mountain top, and then taking him to the sea, and throwing him into

it, and desiring him to swim.”

Other letters to Mr. Hoppner, to Shelley, and to Moore are equally

practical and explicit. Byron writes that he has regular reports of

Allegra’s health; that she has mastered her alphabet; that he is having

her reared a Catholic, “so that she may have her hands full;” that he

meditates increasing her dowry, “if I live, and she is correct in her

conduct;” that he thinks a Swiss gentleman might make her a better

husband than an Italian. Pamela the virtuous was not more set upon

her own “marriage lines” than was Lord Byron upon his daughter’s.

Respectability was the golden boon he coveted for the poor little

pledge of an illicit and unhappy passion. No one knew better than

he how well it is to walk a safe and sheltered road; and no correct

church-going father in England was ever more concerned for the decent

settlement of his child.

There were others who took a more impassioned view of the situation.

Miss Clairmont was spending her Carnival merrily in Florence, when

word came that Allegra had been sent to school. It was a blow, says

Professor Dowden, “under which she staggered and reeled.” In vain

Shelley and his wife represented to her the wisdom of the step. In

vain Byron wrote that the air of the Romagna was exceptionally good,

and that he paid double fees for his little daughter, to insure her

every care and attention. Claire, piteously unreasonable, answered only

with frenzied reproaches and appeals. She taunted the poet with his

unhappy married life,--which was applying vitriol to a raw wound; she

inveighed against the “ignorance and degradation” of convent-reared

women, she implored permission to carry her child to England. “I

propose,” she wrote, with maddening perversity, “to place her at my

own expense in one of the very best English boarding-schools, where,

if she is deprived of the happiness of a home and paternal care, she

at least would receive an English education, which would enable her,

after many years of painful and unprotected childhood, to be benefited

by the kindness and affection of her parents’ friends.... By adopting

this plan, you will save yourself credit and also the expense; and the

anxiety for her safety and well-being need never trouble you. You will

become as free as if you had no such tie.”

As an example of the purely exasperating, this letter has few peers

in recorded correspondence. “At my own expense,” meant at Shelley’s

expense; and Byron, loving or unloving, had never sought to shirk his

paternal responsibilities. The alluring prospect of freedom from all

concern offered little temptation to a father who had his child’s

future very seriously at heart. Miss Clairmont was surrounded at this

time by a group of eminently foolish counsellors, the most prominent of

whom were Lady Mountcashell, Mr. Tighe, and Miss Elizabeth Parker. Lady

Mountcashell had a venerable husband in England, but preferred living

in Italy with Mr. Tighe. There she employed her leisure in writing a

book upon the training of children,--a work which her friends highly

esteemed, and which they held to be an ample compensation to society

for any irregularities in her own life. The couple were known as Mr.

and Mrs. Mason. Miss Parker was an orphan girl, sent from England by

Mrs. Godwin to be a companion to Lady Mountcashell, and profit by

her example. These people kept alive in Claire’s heart the flame of

resentment and unrest. Mr. Tighe dwelt mournfully upon the austerity,

as well as upon the degradation of convent life, until the mother’s

grief grew so excessive that in August, 1821, the long-suffering

Shelley made a pilgrimage to Ravenna and to Bagnacavallo, to see how

Allegra was placed, and to assure himself of her health and happiness.

His charming letter--too long to be quoted in full--gives us the

prettiest imaginable picture of a little school-girl, not yet five

years old.

“I went the other day to see Allegra at her convent, and stayed with

her about three hours. She is grown tall and slight for her age, and

her face is somewhat altered. She yet retains the beauty of her deep

blue eyes and of her mouth; but she has a contemplative seriousness,

which, mixed with her excessive vivacity which has not yet deserted

her, has a very peculiar effect in a child. She is under strict

discipline, as may be observed from the immediate obedience she accords

to the will of her attendants. This seems contrary to her nature; but I

do not think it has been obtained at the expense of much severity. Her

hair, scarcely darker than it was, is beautifully profuse, and hangs

in large curls on her neck. She was prettily dressed in white muslin,

and an apron of black silk, with trousers. Her light and airy figure

and her graceful motions were a striking contrast to the other children

there. She seemed a thing of a finer and a higher order. At first

she was very shy; but after a little caressing, and especially after

I had given her a gold chain which I had bought for her at Ravenna,

she grew more familiar, and led me all over the garden, and all over

the convent, running and skipping so fast that I could hardly keep up

with her. She showed me her little bed, and the chair where she sat at

dinner, and the _carozzina_ in which she and her favourite companions

drew each other along a walk in the garden. I had brought her a basket

of sweetmeats, and, before eating any of them, she gave her friends

and each of the nuns a portion. This is not like the old Allegra....

Her intellect is not much cultivated. She knows certain _orazioni_ by

heart, and talks and dreams of _Paradiso_ and all sorts of things, and

has a prodigious list of saints, and is always talking of the Bambino.

This will do her no harm; but the idea of bringing up so sweet a

creature in the midst of such trash ‘till sixteen.”

Shelley’s content with Allegra’s situation (the little tempest-tossed

bark had at last sailed into quiet waters) failed to bring comfort to

Claire. The convent walls rose--a hopeless barrier--between mother

and child; and the finality of the separation weighed cruelly upon

her spirits. One of her most bitter grievances was the fear that her

daughter was being educated with the children of tradespeople,--an

unfounded alarm, as we see from the list compiled by Signor Biondi of

the little _marchesas_ and _contessas_ who were Allegra’s playmates.

Another, and a reasonable anxiety, came with the approach of winter.

Miss Clairmont then thinks less about the ignorance and immorality of

Italian women, and more about the undoubted cold of Italian convents.

She is afraid, and naturally afraid, that her child is not warm enough.

There is one piteous letter in which she says that she cannot look at a

glowing fire without a sorrowful remembrance of her little daughter in

the chilly convent halls.

All these sources of disquietude were strengthened the following

year by a new and unreasoning terror. Miss Clairmont appears to have

actually persuaded herself that Lord Byron meant to leave Allegra

at Bagnacavallo, in the event of his own departure from Italy. We

know now from his letters that it was his settled purpose to take

her with him, wherever he went. Even when he meditated--briefly--an

exile to South America, the child was to accompany his flight. But

his persistent silence, his maddening refusal to answer Claire’s

appeals or remonstrances, left her in painful ignorance, and a prey to

consuming fears. She conceived the mad design of stealing Allegra from

the convent,--a scheme which was warmly supported by those discreet

monitors, Lady Mountcashell and Mr. Tighe. Together they discussed ways

and means. Mr. Tighe was of the opinion that the time had come for

extreme measures; and the ardent Miss Parker assured Miss Clairmont

that, were _she_ Allegra’s mother, she would not hesitate to stab Lord

Byron to the heart, and so free his unhappy offspring from captivity.

In the midst of this melodramatic turmoil we hear Mrs. Shelley’s voice,

pleading vainly for patience and common sense. She points out in an

earnest letter to Claire that Lady Noel’s death will probably compel

Byron to go to England, and may even lead to a reconciliation with his

wife. In that event he will be more willing to give back Allegra to

her mother; and for the present, there is no cause for apprehension.

“Your anxiety about the child’s health,” she writes reassuringly, “is

to a great extent unfounded. You ought to know, and any one will

tell you, that the towns of Romagna, situated where Bagnacavallo is,

enjoy the best air in Italy. Imola and the neighbouring _paese_ are

famous. Bagnacavallo especially, being fifteen miles from the sea, and

situated on an eminence, is peculiarly salutary. Considering the affair

reasonably, Allegra is well taken care of there. She is in good health,

and in all probability will continue so.”

One fact she strives to make clear. Her husband has no money for the

furtherance of any plots that Miss Clairmont and Mr. Tighe may devise.

On this score, Shelley himself is equally explicit. He had never wanted

Allegra to go to her father, and he cannot resist the temptation of

saying, “I told you so,” though he says it with grave kindness. But he

was even less willing that, having been given up, she should be stolen

back again. His letter of remonstrance proves both the anxiety he felt,

and his sense of shame at the part he was expected to play.

MY DEAR CLARE,--I know not what to think of the state of your

mind, nor what to fear for you. Your plan about Allegra seems

to me, in its present form, pregnant with irremediable infamy

to all the actors in it except yourself;--in any form wherein

_I_ must actively coöperate, with inevitable destruction. _I

could not_ refuse Lord Byron’s challenge; though that, however

to be deprecated, would be the least in the series of mischiefs

consequent upon my intervention in such a plan. I am shocked at the

thoughtless violence of your designs, and I wish to put my sense

of their madness in the strongest light. I may console myself,

however, with the reflection that the attempt even is impossible,

as I have no money. So far from being ready to lend me three or

four hundred pounds, Horace Smith has lately declined to advance

six or seven napoleons for a musical instrument which I wished to

buy for Jane Williams in Paris. Nor have I any other friends to

whom I could apply.

There was no need of heroics on the one side, nor of apprehension on

the other. While Miss Clairmont was fretting and scheming in Florence,

fever was scourging the Romagna, so seldom visited by infection, and

the little English-born girl fell one of its earliest victims. Allegra

died at her convent school in the spring of 1822. Byron admitted

that death was kind. “Her position in the world would scarcely have

allowed her to be happy,” he said, pitying remorsefully the “sinless

child of sin,” so harshly handicapped in life. But he felt his loss,

and bitterly, though silently, mourned it. The Countess Guiccioli was

with him when the tidings came. In her eyes, he had always been a

fond and solicitous father; yet the violence of his distress amazed

and frightened her. He sent her away, and faced his grief, and his

remorse--if he felt remorse--alone. The next day, when she sought him,

he said very simply, “It is God’s will. She is more fortunate than we

are;” and never spoke of the child again. “From that time,” she adds,

“he became more anxious about his daughter Ada;--so much so as to

disquiet himself when the usual accounts sent him were for a post or

two delayed.”

Byron’s letters to Shelley, to Murray, and to Scott, bear witness to

the sincerity of his grief, and also to his sense of compunction.

He was still ready to defend his conduct; but to Shelley, at least,

he admitted: “It is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this

or that had been done, such an event might have been prevented.”

Indeed, of the four actors so deeply concerned in this brief tragedy

of life, Shelley alone could hold himself free from blame. From first

to last he had been generous, reasonable, and kind. It was his painful

part to comfort Miss Clairmont, to restrain her frenzy of anger and

wretchedness, to make what shadow of peace he could between the parents

of the dead child. In all this he endured more than his share of worry

and vexation. Two weeks after Allegra’s death, he wrote to Lord Byron:

“I have succeeded in dissuading Clare from the melancholy design of

visiting the coffin at Leghorn, much to the profit of my own shattered

health and spirits, which would have suffered greatly in accompanying

her on such a journey. She is much better. She has, indeed, altogether

suffered in a manner less terrible than I expected, after the first

shock, during which, of course, she wrote the letter you enclose. I

had no idea that her letter was written in that temper; and I think I

need not assure you that, whatever mine or Mary’s ideas might have been

respecting the system of education you intended to adopt, we sympathize

too much in your loss, and appreciate too well your feelings, to have

allowed such a letter to be sent to you, had we suspected its contents.”

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble. By early summer,

Shelley was able to report Miss Clairmont as once more “talkative and

vivacious.” It was he who befriended her to the end, and who bequeathed

her a large share of his estate. It was he who saw--or deemed he

saw--the image of Allegra rise smiling and beckoning from the sea.

According to the Countess Guiccioli, Byron bore the “profound sorrow”

occasioned by his little daughter’s death “with all the fortitude

belonging to his great soul.” In reality his sense of loss was tempered

by relief. Allegra’s future had always been to him a subject of

anxiety, and it was not without an emotion of joy that he realized

the child’s escape from a world which he had found bad, and which he

had done little to make better. Two days after she died, he wrote to

Murray: “You will regret to hear that I have received intelligence

of the death of my daughter, Allegra, of a fever, in the convent of

Bagnacavallo, where she was placed for the last year to commence

her education. It is a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be

borne,--with time.”

A fortnight later he wrote to Scott: “I have just lost my natural

daughter, Allegra, by a fever. The only consolation, save time, is

the reflection that she is either at rest or happy; for her few years

(only five) prevented her from having incurred any sin, except what we

inherit from Adam.

“‘Whom the gods love die young.’”

In a third letter, published by Mr. Prothero, Byron repeats these

sentiments with even greater emphasis, and with a keener appreciation

of their value. “Death has done his work, and I am resigned.... Even

at my age I have become so much worn and harassed by the trials of the

world, that I cannot refrain from looking upon that early rest which is

at times granted to the young, as a blessing. There is a purity and

holiness in the apotheosis of those who leave us in their brightness

and their beauty, which instinctively lead us to a persuasion of their

beatitude.”

It was the irony of fate that, after being an innocent object of

contention all her life, Allegra should, even in death, have been made

the theme of an angry and bitter dispute. Her body was sent to England,

and Byron begged Murray to make all the necessary arrangements for

her burial. His directions were exceedingly minute. He indicated the

precise spot in Harrow Church where he wished the child interred, and

he wrote the inscription to be engraved upon her tablet.

IN MEMORY OF

ALLEGRA,

DAUGHTER OF G. G. LORD BYRON,

WHO DIED AT BAGNACAVALLO,

IN ITALY, APRIL 20TH, 1822,

AGED FIVE YEARS AND THREE MONTHS.