A VINDICATION 
 
 LORD BYRON 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN. 
 
 
 " La fiera moglie piQ ch'altro mi nuoce."— Dante. 
 More than all else hurts me my cold proud spouse. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1869. 
 
tOiJU^ 
 
 U--v^ 
 
> , > i \l • > > 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 What may be called the skeleton of the following 
 Vindication appeared in the columns of an influential 
 daily newspaper at the time that the controversy raised 
 by Mrs. Stowe's article in Macniillaii's Magazine had 
 just commenced. As will readily be comprehended. I 
 was not quite a free agent either in the matter of space 
 or time ; and though all Byroniaiia have been widi me 
 a study ever since my first recollection of men and 
 books, I was not able, within the limits imposed, to 
 do anything like full justice to the subject. This I 
 have striven to accomplish in the ensuing pages. 
 
 It will be perceived that I entertain no doubt what- 
 ever as to Mrs. Stowe's good faith, however ill I may 
 think of her judgment. Of all incredible things, nothing 
 is so incredible as that Lady Byron did not in substance 
 tell her the story she in turn has told to us. But if 
 Lady Byron told her the story, and the story is proved 
 
 392096 
 
4A : ; . , . , .PREFACE. 
 
 to be untrue in its entirety, and in many particulars 
 utterly impossible, what becomes of Lady Byron's cre- 
 dibility as a witness on the subject at all? 
 
 This is a highly important question, seeing that those 
 who desire to depreciate Byron's name and fame, now 
 that they are beginning to discover that incest cannot 
 be proved against him, are changing their tactics, and 
 commencing to harp upon his cruelty. But who says 
 he was cruel ? Lady Byron, and Lady Byron only — the 
 same person who asserts that he was guilty of incest, 
 and that she herself took charge of the child which was 
 the result of his sin ! 
 
 Even supposing that Lady Byron's value as a witness 
 was not thus under a cloud, why should she be believed 
 rather than Lord Byron? On account of his general 
 " immorality," in the ordinary sense of that term ? If so, 
 the word of the average woman must be much more 
 trustworthy than that of the average man. Yet, is it ? 
 Everybody knows that it is not, and that " immorality " 
 and untruthfulness have no connection, either essential 
 or inferential. Lord Byron's credibility, therefore, would 
 be quite equal to that of Lady Byron, even if hers 
 remained excellent. After the discredit into which it 
 has now fallen, his must, by all the laws of impartiality, 
 be taken to be considerably superior. 
 
 Such being the case, let us select the following as a 
 crucial test of the charge of cruelty. Lady Byron says 
 
PREFACE. 5 
 
 that it commenced the moment she quitted the altar 
 with her husband. She has given two accounts of 
 what occurred, and here they both are. The first is the 
 one she gave to Mrs. Stowe : — 
 
 "The moment the carriage doors were shut upon the bridegroom 
 and bride the paroxysm of remorse and despair — unrepentant re- 
 morse and angry despair — broke forth upon her gentle head. ' You 
 ■ might have saved me from all this, madam ! You had it all in your 
 own power when I offered myself to you first. Then you might 
 have made me what you pleased; but now you will find that you 
 have mariied a devil.' " 
 
 This, we say, was the account narrated by Lady 
 Byron herself to Mrs. Stowe. The following is the one 
 whicli, again, Lady Byron herself narrated to Lady Anne 
 Barnard : — 
 
 " They had not been an hour in the carriage which conveyed 
 them from the church when, breaking into a mahgnant sneer, ' Oh, 
 what a dupe you have been to your imagination ! How is it pos- 
 sible a woman of your sense could form the wild hope of reform- 
 ing 7ne ? INIany are the tears you will have to shed ere that plan 
 is accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my wife to 
 hate you ; if you were the wife of any other man I might own 
 you had charms.' " 
 
 Now I should have very much liked to see either Sir 
 Samuel Romilly or Dr. Lushington, who both so readily 
 believed whatever it may happen to have been that Lady 
 Byron told them, with a witness under cross-examination 
 who had given two such contradictory accounts of the 
 same transaction as are contained in the above extracts. 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 Wliy, such evidence, if brought against a pickpocket, 
 would ensure his acquittal ! Yet it is upon this testimony 
 tliat we are invited to believe that Byron's sister — never 
 before arraigned before any tribunal, and hitherto sup- 
 ])Osed to be an angel of "sweetness and light" — was 
 guilty of adultery and incest, and Byron himself of both 
 these offences, linked with brutal cruelty, life-long hypo- 
 crisy — in fact, with every foul sin and mean crime under 
 heaven. 
 
 It so happens, however, that some such story as one 
 of the above — perhaps some different one again — did 
 reach Lord Byron's ears, and these are his recorded com- 
 ments upon it : — 
 
 " I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and some- 
 what out of humour to find the lady's-maid stuck between me and 
 my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband ; so I 
 was forced to submit, but it was not with a good grace. I have 
 been accused of saj'ing, on getting into the carriage, that I had 
 married Lady B. out of spite, and because she had refused me 
 twice. Though I was for a moment vexed at her pmdeiy, or 
 what you may choose to call it, if I had made so uncavalier, not 
 to say so brutal a speech, I am con^•inccd Lady Byron would 
 instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid. She had spirit 
 enough to have done so, and would properly have resented the 
 affront. Our honeymoon was not all sunshine ; it had its clouds." 
 
 The individual who arbitrarily rejects this statement 
 and arbitrarily selects for belief one of Lady Byron's 
 various different statements, must be constitutionally in- 
 culpable of weighing evidence, or be of the settled 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 opinion that accusation of guilt Is equivalent to proof 
 of It. 
 
 Many people regret that this question has been opened 
 at all. For my part, I rejoice at it. " There will come 
 a day of reckoning," Byron wrote to Mr. Murray from 
 Bologna In 1819, "even if I should not live to see it." 
 It appears to me that day has come. That Byron was 
 sadly " sinning," no one would dream of denying ; but 
 he was shockingly " sinned against" — and now, thank 
 God ! we know it. 
 
 September 10, 1869. 
 
%o tht Mtmox^ of 
 BYRON'S "SWEET SISTER" 
 
 I INSCRIBE 
 
 THIS VINDICATION 
 
 OF HER NAME 
 
 AND 
 
 HER FATHER'S IMMORTAL SON. 
 
Man.— And what are they who do avouch these things ? 
 Abbot.—* * Pious brethren * * ♦ 
 
 Even thine own vassals. — Manfred. 
 
 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 nought to dread. 
 
 ****** 
 
 And thus upon the world — trust in thy truth, 
 
 And the wild fame of my un governed youth — 
 On things that were not and on things that are — 
 
 Even upon such a basis hast thou built. 
 
 ****** 
 
 But of thy virtues didst thou make a vice, 
 ****** 
 And buying others' grief at any price. 
 And thus once entered into crooked ways, 
 The early truth, which 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 * * * ♦ 
 
 ****** 
 All found a place in thy philosophy. 
 
 The means were worthy, and the end is won ; 
 
 I would not do by thee as thou hast done. 
 
 Lmes on Hearing that Lady Byron was III. 
 September^ 1816. 
 
A VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 
 
 FiVE-AND-FORTY ycars ago a poet died in the cause of 
 freedom at Missolonghi, whom Macaulay, with appro- 
 priate pomp of language, has called " the most illustrious 
 Englishman of the nineteenth century." During the brief 
 space of manhood that was allotted to him — only sixteen 
 years in all — he kept the world hanging upon the accents 
 of his lyre. Master of all moods^ he had his generation 
 attentive at his feet ; and even the philosophic Goethe, 
 who alone among modern men of letters could pretend to 
 be his peer, declared him to be the greatest human 
 product the world has ever seen, or is likely to see. In 
 times nearer to our own, this applause of applauded men 
 has not been echoed by those whose endorsement would 
 scarcely increase its authority. Literary criticism has 
 long been dead amongst us, and the current opinions o f 
 fashionable conventionality have fondly attached them- 
 selves to the more feminine and academical verse of their 
 
12 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 own smaller day. Yet the comparatively silent but 
 sounder portion of the public voice has all along stead- 
 fastly clung to the higher and better judgments we have 
 cited ; and we feel fully assured that the declaration 
 made by Goethe on another occasion — that " the won- 
 derful glory to which Byron has in the present, and 
 through all future ages, elevated his country, will be as 
 boundless in its splendour as it is incalculable in its 
 consequences ; nor can there be any doubt that the 
 nation which boasts so many great names will class 
 Byron among the first of those through whom she has 
 acquired such glory " — embodies the definitive conclusion 
 of every competent critic. There is one name below 
 that does rival Shakespeare's, and it is his of whom the 
 same great German has averred that " his unfathomable 
 qualities are not to be reached by words." 
 
 But it was not by his writings alone that Byron became 
 during hfe and after it a household word. He contracted 
 an infelicitous marriage ; and his separation from his 
 wife aroused as much excitement in the public mind as 
 a couple of years before was wont to be manifested on 
 the news of a fresh disaster of Buonaparte's, or the 
 tidings of a fresh victory by Wellington. The attitude 
 of the world on the occasion has been portrayed by the 
 most brilliant of English essayists in one of the most 
 epigrammatic passages he ever wrote, and its sentences 
 are too familiar to need reproduction or imitation here. 
 
LORD BYRON. 13 
 
 Though the whole world was dying to know the cause of 
 the separation, not a soul was able to fathom it. Lord 
 Byron publicly asserted that he was himself completely 
 in the dark on the subject ; while Lady Byron at the time 
 refused to communicate her knowledge, save to a couple 
 of lawyers, on whose lips she set the solemn seal of 
 silence. People were thus left to their own surmises, 
 and these naturally varied with the temper which under- 
 took to solve the insoluble out of the depths of its own 
 consciousness. It is enough to say that whilst the 
 uncharitable, the inexperienced, and the prurient attri- 
 buted to Lord Byron unutterable things, sensible men 
 of the world came to the conclusion that there was 
 nothing to solve ; that what is called incompatibility of 
 temper, an imperfect fidelity on the part of the husband, 
 and an exacting jealousy on the part of the wife, had 
 conspired to put asunder a couple who never ought to 
 have been joined together. Great compassion was always 
 felt for the lady, for no one could pretend that Byron 
 was likely to make an exemplary husband ; and con- 
 siderable sympathy was always felt for the man, because 
 he was superlatively gifted, had bestowed on his race 
 immortal verse, and in more discreet or less exacting 
 hands 
 
 " Might still have risen from out the grave of strife, 
 And found a nobler duty than to part." 
 
 Forty-five years after the death of the husband, and 
 
14 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 nine after that of the wife, during all which time not a 
 word was ever authoritatively uttered to solve what some 
 still declared to be a mystery, but what the majority 
 believed to be no mystery at all, but only a mystification 
 — an American authoress, who is known to the public 
 by a clever but uncandid romance, has been permitted 
 by the editors of what has hitherto been thought a 
 respectable magazine to tell in its pages what she calls 
 " The True Story of Lady Byron's Life." She does so, 
 she affirms, on the authority of Lady Byron herself, who, 
 four years before her death, made her the confidante of 
 the real cause of the separation. She adds that Lady 
 Byron, besides recounting the history which is embodied 
 in the article, showed the writer of it a paper contain- 
 ing a brief memorandum of the whole, with the dates 
 affixed. 
 
 Now I am not going to allow the authoress of 
 " Uncle Tom's Cabin " to employ over again in these 
 pages the well-known dexterity of the romance writer, 
 when fiction has to be made to look like fact. I shall 
 state Mrs. Stowe's " True Story " in a much more naked 
 form than that in which she, with her novelist's skill, in- 
 stinctively felt it would be wise to state it, if it was ever 
 to carry conviction to those who read it. I shall sup- 
 press none of her language, but I shall add some plainer 
 and more unvarnished language of my own. 
 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe's statement, then, professedly 
 
LORD BYRON. 15 
 
 taken from Lady Byron's own lips and handwriting, is 
 that the real causes of her separation from Lord Byron 
 were that he had formed an adulterous and incestuous 
 intrigue with his half-sister Augusta, the wife of Colonel 
 Leigh ; that in the very first hours of his marriage with 
 Lady Byron he informed her that his soul was the deposi- 
 tory of a dreadful secret of guilt, and torn with agonies of 
 remorse ; that she might have saved him from it had she 
 accepted him when he first proposed to her ; that then 
 she might have made of him what she pleased, but that 
 now she would find she had married a devil ; that there 
 came an hour of revelation — note the melodramatic lan- 
 guage and the total absence of any reference to a date — 
 when Lady Byron was made acquainted by Lord Byron 
 of this incestuous and adulterous connection, and was 
 told by him that he would on no account abandon it ; 
 that he had married her simply that she might be the 
 cloak and accomplice of this atrocious passion ; that on 
 hearing such a disclosure Lady Byron neither fled from 
 him, nor exposed nor denounced the crime ; that she was 
 resolved neither to leave nor to betray him; that she 
 struggled with him convulsively for two years — again 
 mark the melodramatic inaccuracy as to facts, for Lord 
 and Lady Byron's real married life consisted altogether 
 not of two years, but of one year and a fortnight exactly ! 
 — that Lord Byron argued the case with her with all the 
 sophistries of his powerful mind, tried to destroy her faith 
 
i6 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 in right and wrong, to persuade her of the just claim 
 of every human being to follow out what he called the 
 impulses of nature, and to bring her to accept the 
 marriage-tie as a friendly alliance to cover licence, both 
 on his part and on hers ; that he could extract from her 
 neither anger, scorn, loathing, threats, nor compliance, 
 but only the stereotyped and long-suffering answer, " I 
 am too truly your friend to do this ; " that when he found 
 he had to do with one who would not yield, he deter- 
 mined to get rid of her altogether ; that he did get rid of 
 her; that Lady Byron did not leave her husband, but 
 was by cruelty driven from him ; that he drove her from 
 him in order to follow up the guilty infatuation which 
 was consuming him ; that having done so, he went 
 abroad, never seeing his sister again because Lady Byron 
 made it a condition — a condition of what, is not stated 
 — that the unhappy partner of his sin should not follow 
 him out of England, but that the ruinous intrigue should 
 be given up ; that all the beautiful, tender, and pathetic 
 verse, and all the letters he ever penned upon the subject, 
 were part and parcel of a deliberate and life-long hypo- 
 crisy ; that he hated Lady Byron with undying hate, and 
 that the enmity which, it is asserted, was constantly 
 expressing itself in some publication or other, arose from 
 her inflexible resolve that he and his sister should be 
 separated ; that he remained impenitent and implacable 
 on this point to the hour of his death ; that Lady Byron 
 
LORD BYRON. 17 
 
 loved her husband with "deep affection and divine 
 charity," manifesting " intense faithfidness and love " to 
 his memory to the very last ; and that always, and ever 
 before her, during the few remaining years of her widow- 
 hood — mark, again, the melodramatic hand ; the feiv 
 remaining years of her widowhood were thirty-six, ex- 
 actly as long (strange coincidence!) as her husband's 
 entire life — was the image of Lord Byron purified and 
 ennobled, " the angel in him made perfect, according to 
 the divine ideal." 
 
 Such is the substance of the " True Story " related in 
 Macniillaii's Magazine for the current month by the 
 authoress of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." I have no hesi- 
 tation in declaring that in the mind of any one even 
 decently capable of examining and sifting evidence, it is 
 the most preposterous fable that was ever attempted to 
 be foisted by mingled hallucination and credulity on the 
 curiosity of the public. 
 
 Not to dwell at present upon the obvious inconsis- 
 tencies contained in the above long catalogue of state- 
 ments, nearly every one of them is, a priori, so intensely 
 improbable, that nothing but absolute demonstration 
 would make any sane and unbiassed person believe it 
 implicitly; and all of them, when taken together, con- 
 stitute a cumulative improbability so enormous that no 
 person, unless the most credulous creature in the world, 
 could think of believing it at all. 
 
l8 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 Indeed, it is enough to array them side by side to 
 discredit them. Even probable stories must be con- 
 sistent, but what credence can be given by any man in 
 his senses to stories that are grossly improbable and 
 grossly inconsistent as well? For the "True Story" to 
 be even credible, it ought to have run thus. Byron 
 maintained an incestuous intrigue with his sister, and 
 Lady Byron found it out. She then either left him at 
 once, or as soon after as he had flatly refused to promise 
 that it should be given up. He did refuse, and she left 
 him. He then renewed the incestuous connection ; or 
 he abandoned it and held his peace for the remainder 
 of his life through fear of his wife denouncing him. This, 
 we say, though an uncommonly improbable story, would 
 hang together in a fashion ; but still there would have 
 been difficulties in the way of its acceptance, which to 
 our thinking would be insuperable. To begin with, and 
 granting the guilt of the lovers, discovery by the wife 
 would not be very likely; and, in the second place, 
 discovery, if attended with an offer of condonation, would 
 have been sure to bring at least feigned repentance. 
 Even then the fact would still remain, that not feigning 
 repentance. Lord Byron lost no opportunity of parading 
 his wrongs and calling upon his wife to speak out. But 
 this story, difficult as it would be to believe it, is not the 
 story at all. How infinitely more incredible still it is, 
 we have seen. 
 
LORD BYRON. 19 
 
 Having thus paused to mark the probability of this 
 narrative when taken in its entirety, let us now examine 
 its principal statements in detail. 
 
 What evidence have we of the terrible charge now 
 made, for the first time, against Lord Byron and his 
 sister ? None whatever, but Mrs. Stowe's assertion of 
 Lady Byron's assertion, made thirty-two years after the 
 death of the first, and seventeen years after the death of 
 the second. What is the evidence against it ? Let us 
 see ; for it happens to be very considerable. 
 
 In 181 2, as all the world knows, the first two cantos 
 of " Childe Harold " were pubHshed, and it was by virtue 
 of their success that Byron woke up one morning, as he 
 said, and found himself famous. This was three years 
 before his marriage, and two, according to Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe's account, before he commenced the incestuous 
 intrigue with his sister, who had already been married 
 five years, and was the Honourable Mrs. Leigh. To her 
 one of the first presentation copies of " Childe Harold " 
 was sent, and in it, if the volume has not been destroyed 
 by the accusers of the fair fame of each, may to this 
 day be read the following inscription, in Byron's hand- 
 writing : — 
 
 " To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has 
 loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by 
 her father's son, and most affectionate brother." 
 
 In a letter written to the Times, it has been said that 
 
20 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 the gallantries of Augusta's mother, Baroness Conyers, 
 were so notorious, and the absences from home of her 
 husband, Captain Byron, so frequent, that probably Lord 
 Byron and the Honourable Mrs. Leigh did not regard 
 each other as brother and sister at all. This may be 
 taken as a fair sample of the inexact comments that have 
 been made on the subject during the last few weeks. 
 For nothing can be made more clear, as will be seen, 
 than that Byron regarded Mrs. Leigh as peculiarly his 
 sister from her goodness to him, and loved to call her by 
 that title, which he regarded as the highest and purest 
 of all. We have just seen one instance. Let us now 
 look at some others. In his journal, dated the 28th of 
 March, 18 14, occurs the following entry : — 
 
 " Augusta wants me to make it up with Carlisle. I have refused 
 eveiybody else, but I can't deny her anything ; so I must e'en do 
 it, though I had as lief * drink up Eisel, eat a crocodile.' " 
 
 In a letter written about a month earlier, from New- 
 stead, to Mr. Murray, he says incidentally : — " Mrs. Leigh 
 is with me — much pleased with the place, and less so 
 with me for parting with it, to which not even the price 
 can reconcile her. Your parcel has not yet arrived — at 
 least the magazines, &c." Six days later he writes to 
 Moore : — " I arrived in town late yesterday evening, 
 having been absent about three weeks, which I passed in 
 Notts " — at Newstead, and also at Colonel Leigh's, that 
 is — " quietly and pleasantly." No references could well 
 
LORD BYRON. 21 
 
 be more natural ; yet they were penned just about the 
 
 time that Mrs. Stowe inthnates the incestuous passion 
 
 commenced, i.e.^ shortly after Lady Byron refused his 
 
 first offer, and he himself had entered in his journal, "A 
 
 wife would be the salvation of me." On the i8th of 
 
 July of the same year we come across the following P.S. 
 
 in a letter to Mr. Murray : — 
 
 ' ' If you could spare the Edinburgh Re-view for an hour in the 
 evening, I msh you to send it up to Mrs. Leigh, your neighbour, at 
 tlie London Hotel, Albemarle Street." 
 
 On the 24th he writes to the same correspondent con- 
 cerning the well-known portrait of him done by Phillips, 
 in this strain : — 
 
 " For my own part, I have no objection at all; but Mrs. Leigh 
 and my cousin must be better judges of the likeness than others ; 
 and they hate it ; and so I won't have it at all." 
 
 " Mrs. Leigh and my cousin." As we shall more than 
 once have occasion to remark, he was a firm believer 
 in " cousinship " and all ties of blood. On the 2nd of 
 January of the following year, as everybody knows, he 
 was married. On the 8th of March he says in a letter 
 to Moore : — 
 
 " We leave this place " — his father-in-law's — " to-morrow, and 
 shall stop on oiu" way to town (in the interval of taking a house 
 there) at Colonel Leigh's, near Newmarket, where any epistle of 
 yours will find its welcome way." 
 
 The next testimony of his affection for his sister that 
 
 we may cite was his desire that his daughter should be 
 
22 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 called after her. She is best known by the name of 
 Ada, in consequence of the famous line — 
 
 " Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart ! " 
 
 but her complete name was Augusta Ada ; and, whilst 
 we are thus presented with the astounding fact that Lady 
 Byron knowingly allowed her own child to be called after 
 the name of her husband's incestuous paramour, we 
 discern another proof of Byron's loving attachment 
 even to the very name of his sister. 
 
 Augusta Ada B}Ton was born on the loth of Decem- 
 ber, 1815 : — "The little girl," Byron wrote to Moore, 
 " was and is very flourishing and fat, and reckoned very 
 large for her days — squalls and sucks incessantly. Her 
 mother is doing very well, and up again." 
 
 By the middle of January it was all over. Lady 
 Byron refused even to see her husband again, or, as 
 Mrs. Stowe puts it, had been purposely driven away 
 by him. On the 25th of April — not till more than 
 three months later — Byron quitted England. Concerning 
 Mrs. Stowe's assertion that Lady Byron made it a con- 
 dition — as I have observed, she does not say a condi- 
 tion of what — that the partner of his guilt should not 
 accompany him to the Continent, I shall have a word 
 more to say anon. But on the i6th of April, or nine 
 days before his departure, I find B)Ton writing this short 
 note to Rogers : — 
 
LORD BYRON, 23 
 
 *' My sister is now with me, and leaves town to-morrow. We 
 shall not meet again for some time at all events, if ever ; and, under 
 these circumstances, I trust to stand excused to you and Mr. Sheridan 
 for being unable to wait upon him this evening." 
 
 Moore adds, in the " Life ":—" This was his last 
 inten-iew with his sister — almost the only person from 
 whom he now parted with regret ; it being, as he said, 
 doubtful which had given him most pain, the enemies 
 who attacked, or the friends who condoled with him." 
 I put it to anybody if there is in the foregoing note, 
 written at such a crisis, anything to bear out the shock- 
 ing story told by Mrs. Stowe, and not, on the contrary, 
 everything to make belief in it impossible. Where are 
 the secret guilt, the agony of soul, the remorse, the 
 " insane fear of detection," which she says marked all 
 his words and actions in this matter ? His sister does 
 not frantically stay with him to the last moment; his 
 parting with her takes place nine days before he sails ; 
 and his allusion to this last interview is precisely what 
 one would expect from an affectionate brother, and 
 nothing more. 
 
 He went abroad ; and what are henceforward the re- 
 corded mentions that he made of this cherished sister ? 
 Writing to Mr. Murray from Venice, on the 2nd of 
 January, 181 7, he says, among a number of other 
 things : — " I have received a letter from my sister, 
 written on the loth of December, my daughter's birth- 
 day (and relative chiefly to my daughter).^' 
 
24 
 
 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 On the 3rd of March he writes thus to the same 
 correspondent : — 
 
 " Ever since the conclusion of the Carnival I have been unwell 
 (do not mention this on any account to Augusta, for if I grow worse 
 she will know it too soon, and if I get better there is no occasion 
 she should know it at all)." 
 
 The "on no account" seems, however, to have been 
 a mere faco?i de parier, such as we all of us employ so 
 often, and to have been disregarded ; for in another 
 letter shortly afterwards, to the same correspondent, I 
 find him writing : — 
 
 << I have had another letter from my poor dear Augusta, who is 
 in a sad fuss about my late illness ; do pray tell her (the truth) that 
 I am better than ever, and in importunate health, growing (if not 
 (^rowH) large and ruddy, and congratulated by impertinent persons 
 on my robustious appearance, when I ought to be pale and interest- 
 ing." 
 
 In 182 1, after the first two cantos of "Don Juan" 
 had been pubHshed, he thus frankly records his sister's 
 attitude towards that poem — a striking testimony to the, 
 some will think, excessive squeamishness of one whom we 
 are invited to regard as the most impure and degraded 
 of her sex : — 
 
 " Augusta writes that they are thought * execrable ' (bitter word 
 that for an author — eh, Murray }) as a composition even, and that 
 she had heard so much against them that she would never read 
 them, a7td never has. Be that as it may, I can't alter ; that is not 
 my forte." 
 
LORD BYRON. 25 
 
 This is the last reference I find to her, save his remem- 
 brance of her in his will ; and the person who can make 
 anything out of these passages but easy and beautiful 
 brotherly love, must be determined to believe an 
 unpleasant story at all costs, the cost of evidence in- 
 cluded. Her name, together with that of "my wife — 
 Ada — Hobhouse — Kinnaird — Greece," was on his dying 
 lips. He would not have been the brother we take 
 him for, if it had not been ; and it is evident from the 
 mention of Hobhouse and Kinnaird that he was thinking 
 of " poor Augusta's " narrow means, and recommending 
 her to Lady Byron's kindness — of which more anon. 
 
 So much for prose testimony on this head. Let me 
 now turn to verse, since Mrs. Stowe has availed herself 
 of " Manfred " and " Cain " to support her story, and 
 has done it in a way that does little credit to the purity 
 of her imagination. Were I not speaking of a woman, 
 I should express myself more strongly. She quotes a 
 passage from " Cain," with the object of showing that 
 its author strove to argue that incest is no sin. I need 
 not reproduce it here. Neither need I reproduce all 
 that was said for and against " Cain " when it first 
 appeared. But Byron himself wrote pages on pages in 
 vindication of it, and one brief extract from them must 
 content me. It occurs in a letter to Mr. Murray : — 
 
 "As to ' alarms,' do you really think such things ever led any- 
 body astray } Are these people more impious than Milton's Satan, 
 
26 . A VINDICATION OF 
 
 or the Prometheus of -^schylus ? Aie not Adam, Eve, Adah, and 
 Abel as pious as the catechism ? I beg leave to observe that there 
 is no creed nor personal hypothesis of mine in all this, but I was 
 obliged to make Cain and Lucifer talk consistently, and surely this 
 has always been permitted to poetry." 
 
 When I add that " Cain " was dedicated to Sir Walter 
 Scott, who wrote to Mr. Murray : — 
 
 " I accept, with feelings of great obligation, the flattering pro- 
 posal of Lord Byron to prefix my name to his very grand and tre- 
 mendous drama He certainly has matched INIilton on his 
 
 own ground They must condemn the "Paradise Lost" if 
 
 they intend to be consistent ", 
 
 I think I may dismiss the nasty charge that it contains 
 a defence of incest. 
 
 The way in which Mrs. Stowe tries to turn " Manfred " 
 to account deserves, if possible, to be still more warmly 
 stigmatised. She would lead the ignorant reader to 
 suppose that Byron, quitting England with the cherished 
 guilt and heavy punishment of incest uppermost in his 
 thoughts, forthwith composed " Manfred," the mystery 
 of which, she avers, plainly turns upon that crime ; and 
 with an inaccurate audacity to which I in vain seek for 
 a parallel, she affirms that " anybody who reads the 
 tragedy of ' Manfred ' with this story " — i.e., her true story 
 of Lady Byron's life — " in his mind, will see that it is 
 true." We must observe, firstly, that, far from " Manfred " 
 being the first work Byron composed after leaving Eng- 
 land, both the third canto of " Childe Harold," and the 
 
LORD BYRON. 
 
 27 
 
 ** Prisoner of Chillon," which even the authoress of 
 *' Uncle Tom's Cabin " would find it difficult to argue 
 have any reference to incest, were written before it, 
 along with various minor pieces. The precise value of 
 the argument that if an allusion to incest can be con- 
 strued out of any passage of " Manfred," everybody must 
 see that Mrs. Stowe's story is true, and that Byron must 
 have committed incest with his sister, may be dismissed 
 with the remark that if it is good for anything, it is good 
 to show tiiat Byron committed murder as well ; or, at 
 least, that if Lady Byron, through Mrs. Stowe, chooses 
 to say so, we shall be obliged to believe it. Whilst, with 
 a strategy not usually considered commendable, Mrs. 
 Stowe cites passages from " Manfred " utterly irrelevant 
 to her particular accusation, but strongly calculated to 
 impress upon the reader the conviction that the Manfred 
 represented was capable of any and every crime, and 
 that Lord Byron and Manfred are one, she abstains 
 from quoting the particular passage to which we refer, 
 and which runs as follows : — 
 
 Ma7ifred. — I lov'd her and destroyed her. 
 
 Witch.— With thy hand .? 
 
 Manfred. — Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart ; 
 It gazed on mine and withered. / have shed 
 Blood, hut not hers — and yet her blood was shed ; 
 I saw, and could not stanch it. 
 
 Possibly Mrs. Stowe believes tliat Lord Byron was a 
 
28 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 murderer, but she would be at a loss to show any reason 
 whatever for thinking so, and even her own fabulous 
 account of poor Mrs. Leigh bears testimony to the fact 
 that she at least was murdered neither by her brother nor 
 by anybody. And yet " anybody who reads the tragedy 
 of ' Manfred ' with this story in his mind, will see that it 
 is true !" Again we say that such a strange instance of a 
 person zealously playing the part of " devil's-advocate " 
 was never before known. 
 
 Although we have no fear that anybody reading 
 " Manfred " will arrive at the conclusion Mrs. Stowe, 
 with fierce perversity, labours to enforce, it will be well, 
 whilst on this part of the subject, to refer to another 
 cock-and-bull story evolved out of " Manfred " by no 
 less a person than Goethe ; for, in the first place, it will 
 prove that "incest," at least, never entered Goethe's 
 mind ; and, secondly, it will show how absolutely without 
 bounds are the crimes that may be imputed to authors if 
 we once adopt Mrs. Stowe's process of seeking in their 
 works for a confirmation of affirmed enormities : — 
 
 "It is related," says Goethe, writing of "Manfred," "that 
 Byron, when a bold and enterprising young man, won the affections 
 of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and mur- 
 dered his wife ; but the murderer the same night was found dead 
 in the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be 
 attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits 
 haunted him all his life after. This romantic incident is rendered 
 highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems,'* 
 
LORD BYRON. 2g 
 
 and, as we have seen, by the words of Manfred : — > 
 
 *' I have shed 
 Blood, but not hers — and yet her blood was shed ; 
 I saw, and could not stanch it." 
 
 If Goethe had said of his story what Mrs. Stowe says 
 of hers, that " anybody who reads the tragedy of ' Man- 
 fred ' with this story in his mind will see that it is true," 
 he would at least have had Manfred to justify him. Mrs. 
 Stowe has absolutely nothing to justify her, save her 
 incomprehensible feminine zeal. 
 
 Upon Goethe's " highly probable incident " Moore has 
 the following remarks : — 
 
 " The grave confidence with which the venerahle critic traces the 
 fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, affords an 
 amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe 
 io pictur-e Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his 
 life as in his poetr}\ The consequence is, so utterly out of truth 
 and nature are the representations of his life and character long cur- 
 rent upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real 
 flesh and blood hero of these pages — the social, practical, and, with 
 all his faults and inconsistencies, English Lord Byron — may not, to 
 the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, 
 appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage." 
 
 In 182 1 Byron first heard of this story of Goethe, and 
 this is how he treats it, in writing to Moore : — 
 
 " Pray, where did you get hold of Goethe's Florentine husband- 
 killing story ? Upon such matters in general, I may say, with 
 Beau Clincher, in reply to Errand's wife, ' Oh, the villain ! he has 
 mmrJered my poor Timothy ! ' Clincher : ' Damn your Timothy 1 I 
 
30 A VIXDICATIOX OF 
 
 tell you, woman, your husband has murdered me — he has carried 
 away my fine jubilee clothes ! ' " 
 
 But for the supreme horror of Mrs. Store's story, it 
 would deserve to be treated in the same tone of persi- 
 flage. 
 
 There are several references to " Manfred " in ByTon's 
 journal and letters. One extract from the latter may 
 suffice, for it is crushing in its unpremeditated evidence. 
 In a letter written from Ravenna to Mr. Murray, in 
 August, 1 82 1, just at the time that he had made a pre- 
 sent of materials for his life to Moore, he writes : — 
 
 "AVith regard to additions, he, there is a journal which you 
 must get from Mrs. Leigh, of my journey in the Alps, which contains 
 all the germs of ' Manfred.' " 
 
 On another occasion, four years earlier, he had 
 written : — 
 
 " The germs of * Manfred ' may be found in the journal which I 
 sent to Mrs. Leigh, when I first went on the Dent de Jaman, &c., &c. 
 ... I have the whole scene of ' INIanfred ' before me, as if it was 
 but yesterday, and could point it out, spot by spot, torrent and all." 
 
 Could anything more clearly demonstrate that Mrs. 
 Leigh was not previously in possession of the germs which, 
 on the supposition of the "True Story," she was only too 
 well acquainted with, and that whatever they were, there 
 was nothing to conceal in them ? 
 
 I cannot leave this particular part of the subject with- 
 
LORD BYRON. 31 
 
 out referring to the line taken on it by the Saturday 
 Reinnv. Mrs. Stowe, as I have said, does not distinctly 
 state, but leaves the reader to suppose, that " Manfred " 
 was the first work written by Byron after the separation 
 from his wife. The Saturday Review, only too willingly 
 misled by her, asserts it in so many words. The assertion 
 is utterly untrue. The first works written by Byron after 
 the separation were the third canto of " Childe Harold," 
 the " Prisoner of Chillon," and the " Monody on Sheri- 
 dan." His intervals of leisure were spent in studying the 
 Armenian grammar. The Saturday Revieiv, vituperating 
 — as a matter of course — both Mrs. Stowe and Lord 
 Byron, says that the former cannot be at the trouble to 
 spell Lady Byron's maiden name correctly. That is per- 
 fectly true ; but the Saturday Review cannot be at the 
 trouble to learn Mrs. Leigh's mother's maiden name cor- 
 rectly at all. It calls her Lady Carnarvon, instead of 
 Lady Caermarthen. That, of course, is a small matter, 
 except in the case of such mighty critics. Would, how- 
 ever, that the Saturday Revinv had fallen into no more 
 lamentable errors than that ! I have already pointed out 
 its misstatements in regard to " Manfred." Equally gross, 
 and perhaps still graver, inaccuracy remains behind. It 
 says that Byron in 1814 gave Moore a song, "which was 
 never published till after the death of the former," and 
 "which at this time seems significant." The song in 
 question was the beautiful one beginning : — 
 
32 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 " I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name." 
 The origin of the song was as follows : — 
 
 "Dear Tom, — Thou hast asked for a song, and I enclose you 
 an experiment, which has cost me something more than trouble, 
 and is, therefore, less likely to be worth your taking any trouble in 
 setting. Now, if it be so, throw it into the fire without phrase." 
 " Yours ever, " Bvron." 
 
 In a note, Moore says, " I had begged of him to write 
 something for me to set to music." The whole of this 
 simple explanation, with which it is diflicult to believe it 
 was not acquainted, the Saturday Rrcicw suppresses; 
 the song is garbled, just as are all the other quotations 
 bearing, or supposed to bear, on the point; and the 
 remark is then made, that the song now — i.e., after Mrs. 
 Stowe's story — is "significant!" I am aware that 
 honourable and accomplished men have occasionally 
 contributed to the Saturday Review. Still I feel con- 
 fident that public opinion will bear me out when I say 
 that this most notorious, but least respected of English 
 weekly journals, systematically makes capital out of 
 nastiness and the depreciation of great names ; and that 
 had it not believed that Lord Byron and Mrs. Leigh were 
 guilty of incest, I should have been as much surprised 
 as if I had discovered a jackal rejecting oftal.--' 
 
 * The Saturday Review takes under its patronage an article in 
 the Temple Bar Magazine for June. The only possible reason for 
 doing so must be the malignity of that article. All that it really 
 proves, however, is— what everybody knew before— that Bpon was 
 
LORD BYRON. 33 
 
 Just one word of protest before I resume the thread 
 of my criticism, on the attempt made, be it where it may, 
 to prove a man guilty of crimes from the tone or context 
 of his works. Nothing can be more unfair or more 
 uncritical. Some of my readers are probably aware of the 
 imputations which certain critics have brought against 
 Shakespeare, arising out of constructions they conceive 
 may be put on some of his sonnets. These imputations 
 I indignantly repudiate ; but had Shakespeare's wife— to 
 whom we know he was not particularly attached — only 
 made the abominable charge the imputations involve, and 
 had she chosen further to communicate it to a contemporary 
 authoress like Mrs. Stowe, the latter's seventeenth cen- 
 tury analogue would certainly have argued that anybody 
 who read the Sonnets with her story in his mind would 
 see that the story was true ! In Byron's case, the trouble 
 he took — like St. Augustine before his conversion — to 
 make himself out worse than he was, joined to " the wild 
 fame of his ungoverned youth," disposes many people to 
 believe anything and everything that can be said against 
 him; and they are just as ready to convict him out of 
 his own writings as they would on the evidence of their 
 
 not a man of pure morals, and had an incurable habit of levity 
 both in speaking and writing. In it " incest " is plainly hinted 
 at, and no wonder. The writer of it is an attorney. WJiose attorney, 
 I leave my reader to surmise. In fact, the conspiracy against Lord 
 Byron's reputation is a deeper one than has yet been fully ferreted 
 out. 
 
34 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 own senses. Yet let them but look at the way in which he 
 continually tries to mystify people, and then declares that 
 he has been laughing at them ! The following are quota- 
 tions taken at random up and down his journals and 
 letters : — 
 
 " Last night I finished Zuleika "—the " Bride of Abydos," that 
 is — " my second Turkish tale. I beheve the composition of it kept 
 me alive, for it was written to drive away the thoughts of," &c. . . . 
 " The ' Bride of Abydos ' was written in four nights to distract my 
 dreams from .... Were it not thus, it had never been composed ; 
 and had I not done something at the time, I should have gone mad 
 by eating my own heart — bitter diet .... I awoke from a dream ! 
 — well ! and have not others dreamed ? Such a dream ! but she 
 
 did not overtake me. I wish the dead would rest, however 
 
 No dreams last night of the dead nor the li\ing Hobhouse 
 
 told me an odd report — that /am the actual Conrad, the veritable 
 Corsair. Um ! people sometimes hit near the truth, but never the 
 whole truth. H. don't know what I was about, the year after he 
 left the Levant ; nor does any one — nor — nor — nor — however, it is a 
 lie ; but ' I doubt the equivocation of the friend that lies like 
 truth.'" 
 
 The person who can make anything out of the fore- 
 going passages, much more believe that they faithfully 
 refer to actual incidents, must be — let us write it plainly 
 — an ass ; the ass Byron intended to make of him. 
 
 When he was serious he wrote very differently : — 
 
 " The fools think," he says in a letter to INIr. Murray, " that all 
 my poeshie is always allusive to my own adventures; I have had 
 at one time or another better and more extraordinary, and perilous, 
 and pleasant than these every day of the week, if I might tell them : 
 but that must never be." 
 
LORD BYRON. 35 
 
 Yet, according to Mrs. Sto\\e and the Saturday Review^ 
 he has done it in four different poems, and various 
 smaller pieces ! 
 
 Still more expository of the real truth of the matter 
 are two or three sentences in a letter to Moore, written 
 from Ravenna in 182 1 : — 
 
 " I suppose I told you that the Giaour story had actually some 
 foundation in facts. However, the real incident is still remote 
 enough from ihe poetical one, being such as, happening to a man of 
 imagination, might suggest such a composition. The worst of any 
 real adventures is that they involve living people." 
 
 After this I trust we shall hear no more of such 
 nonsense as that horrible stories " must be true," because 
 something like them may be unearthed from the com- 
 positions of the accused. 
 
 To return now to Mrs. Stowe and the use she has 
 thought proper to make of Lord Byron's poetical com- 
 positions, in the strenuous attempt to convict him and 
 his " dearest sister and best friend " of incest. I 
 think that every one will acknowledge they recoil upon 
 herself. Now, however, I will myself have recourse to 
 his poetry, having already appealed to his prose, to 
 establish affirmatively, by yet another method, that the 
 notion of the relationship charged can be harboured only 
 by minds whose state we do not like to describe. The 
 Times, which at first swallowed " The True Story " whole, 
 without the faintest attempt at criticism or consideration, 
 
36 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 concluded its observations by saying that a black mark 
 must hencefonvard be affixed to certain of Byron's com- 
 positions, if indeed we are ever to look at the man's 
 works again. If, instead of penning this hasty language, 
 the Times had taken the pains to read over the three 
 poems addressed by Byron to Augusta, and which are 
 the ones evidently alluded to, we cannot think such 
 a remark would ever have appeared in its columns. 
 Even if there were no other reasons to disbelieve this 
 dreadful story — and, thank Heaven ! they are legion ; 
 while the reasons on the other side are monstrous and 
 contradictory to the last degree — I would fearlessly 
 appeal to these poems in order to rebut the abominable 
 ^accusation. How does one begin ? — 
 
 "J/v sister, my sweet sister I if a name 
 
 Dearer a7id purer were, it should be thine ; 
 
 Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim 
 No tears, but tenderness to answer mine. 
 
 Go where I will, to me thou art the same — 
 A loved regret which I would not resign. 
 
 There yet are two things in my destiny — 
 
 A world to roam through and a home with thee. 
 
 *' The first were nothing ; had I still the last, 
 
 It were the haven of my happiness ; 
 But other claims and other ties thou hast, 
 
 And m,ine is not the wish to make them, less, 
 A strange doom is thy father's son's, and past 
 
 Recalling, as it lies beyond redress. 
 Reversed for him our grandsire's fate of yore — 
 He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore." 
 
LORD BYRON. 37 
 
 Is not this the same hand, influenced by the same 
 heart, which in the flush of its first triumph wrote the 
 inscription in one of the earliest presentation copies of 
 the first two cantos of " Childe Harold ?" " To Augusta, 
 my dearest sister and my best friend, who has loved me 
 much better than I deserved, this volume is presented 
 by her father's son, and most affectionate brother." In 
 the poem it is the grandsire, in the prose inscription it 
 is the sire, to whom he alludes as binding them together ; 
 but it is always the strong tie, and the deep feeling of 
 blood and kinship, the only one he can trust. Again he 
 writes, in another of these poems to which a black mark 
 is to be henceforth attached : — 
 
 '* When all around grew drear and dark, 
 And reason half withheld her ray, 
 And hope but shed a dying spark, 
 Which more misled my lonely way ; 
 
 •' When fortune changed and love fled far, 
 And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast, 
 Thou wert the solitary star, 
 
 That rose and set not to the last ! 
 
 " Oh ! blest be thine unbroken light ! 
 That watched me as a seraph's eye. 
 And stood between me and the night. 
 For ever shining sweetly nigh. 
 
 " But thou and thine shall know no blight, 
 Whatever fate on me may fall ; 
 For Heaven in sunshine will requite 
 The kind — and thee the most of all." 
 
38 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 The third poem remains, and its tone is precisely 
 similar : — 
 
 " From the wreck of the past, which hath perished. 
 
 Thus much I at least may recall, 
 It hath taught me that what I most cherished 
 
 Deserved to be dearest of all. 
 In the desert a fountain is springing, 
 
 In the wide waste there still is a tree, 
 And a bird in the solitude singing, 
 
 Which speak to mj- spirit of thee.'''' 
 
 Turn to " Childe Harold," that third canto, as we 
 have said, which was the first thing he wTOte after 
 quitting England for ever, and which alone would make 
 us not only amply forgive, but be deeply thankful to 
 those who drove him from it. Who does not know the 
 lines commencing : — 
 
 " The castle crag of Drachenfels " ? 
 
 They, too, are addressed to " My sister, my sweet sister," 
 and he here speaks of her as " the one soft breast " 
 
 *' Wliose love was pure and far above disguise.'''' 
 
 Hark, how he addresses her : — 
 
 •' I send the lilies given to me ; 
 
 Though long before thy hand they touch 
 I know that they must withered be ; 
 
 But yet reject them not as such, 
 For I have cherished them as dear 
 
 Because they yet may meet thine eye, 
 
LORD BYRON. 39 
 
 And guide thy soul to mine even here, 
 
 When thou behold'st them drooping nigh, 
 And know'st them gathered by the Rhine, 
 And offered from my heart to thine ! " 
 
 Is that the language of incestuous passion ? Is that 
 the utterance of one degraded soul to another? Shame 
 on the man or woman who for a moment should think 
 so ! It is the voice of one love, and one only — the love 
 in which there is no constraint, no inequality, no fear, 
 no tumult, no jealousy, no dread — the love of brother to 
 sister — and lilies are its emblem. This was the sole 
 sweet oasis in the life of one who, as has well been 
 said of him, " was inspired by the Genius of Pain." 
 
 One more quotation on this score, and we have done. 
 He once wanted a simile for peace, happiness, tranquil- 
 lity ; and where did he find it ? 
 
 " Clear, placid Leman ! thy contrasted lake, 
 
 AVith the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing 
 Which warns me with its stillness to forsake 
 
 Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring. 
 
 This quiet sail is as a noiseless Aving 
 To waft me from distraction ; once I loved 
 
 Torn Ocean's roar, but thy soft murmming 
 Sounds sweet as z/" a sister's voice reproved 
 That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved''' 
 
 He never had but one sister, and yet his unquenchable 
 notion of Sister was of one who lures a brother from 
 *' stern delights." He would perforce have associated 
 
40 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 her with one who lured to them, if this horrible tale 
 could for one moment be admitted. 
 
 If the reader will turn back to the catalogue of state- 
 ments which I have said must one and all be believed if 
 this "True Story" is to be accepted, I think he will 
 see that they are one and all really disposed of by what 
 I have already said. Not wishing in any respect to 
 imitate Mrs. Stowe, but avoiding all side issues, I have 
 grappled directly with the one new, specific accusation 
 she has attempted to fasten on the memory of Byron ; 
 and in the full confidence that I shall be considered 
 successfully to have rebutted it, I might well here dismiss 
 the matter. But the charge is one of such infamy, and 
 the issue raised is of such vast moment, that I think 
 I am justified in yet begg'.ng for the attention of my 
 readers whilst I very briefly show the further inaccuracies 
 as to fact, and the ludicrous contradictions into which 
 Mrs. Stowe, by the zeal that outruns discretion and even 
 candour, has been betrayed. And I pray my readers 
 to bear in mind, whilst following my observations, that 
 Mrs. Stowe's account professes to be not a happy guess 
 or a plausible statement as to the causes which led to 
 the separation of Lord and Lady Byron, but the one 
 true story, exact in every particular, taken down from the 
 lips and copied from the handwriting of Lady Byron 
 herself, in an interview which had all the solemnity of a 
 death-bed avowal. 
 
LORD BYRON, 41 
 
 We have seen how, though Mrs. Stowe expressly states 
 that Lady Byron gave her " a paper containing a brief 
 memorandum of the whole, with the dates affixed" no 
 dates are mentioned by her at all, and Lady Byron is 
 represented as having struggled convulsively with her 
 husband for two years, whereas in reality they were not 
 united for two years, but only for one. Furthermore, 
 she dwells with all the force in her power upon Lord 
 Byron's "damning, guilty secret filling him with an 
 insane dread of detection," and yet she represents him 
 both as making this secret the subject of his dramas and 
 himself the guilty hero of them, and then goading Lady 
 Byron by every species of insult into exposing him. She 
 declares that he communicated this guilty secret to his 
 wife, that he strove by sophistries to justify his crime, to 
 sap her belief in Christianity and in right and wrong, and 
 to get her to accept marriage as a mere cloak for the 
 freer indulgence of the sexual passions, and that she was 
 " the only one fully understanding the deep and dreadful 
 secrets of his life ; " and yet she quotes against him a 
 letter written to Mr. Murray only a few days before Lady 
 Byron left him for ever, in which he says, " I am very 
 glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the 
 morale of the piece, but you must not trust to that, for 
 my copyist would write out anything I desired, in all the 
 ignorance of innoceiice^ The copyist was Lady Byron 
 herself; and we are therefore invited to believe that she 
 
42 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 had retained " the ignorance of innocence," in spite of 
 her having a " full understanding of the dreadful secret " 
 that he maintained an incestuous intrigue with his sister, 
 and though he was continually arguing with her that 
 there was no harm in it, and that one ought to follow out 
 the impulses of nature ! She pretends in one place that 
 he married Lady Byron as a cloak for a crime which she 
 elsewhere describes as a '' ^\\ty secret ;'' in another, that 
 he married her for money i*'" and in a third, that he did 
 not want to marry her at all, but that " he had sent the 
 letter in mere recklessness, had not really seriously 
 expected to be accepted, and that the discovery of the 
 treasure of affection which he had secured was like a 
 vision of a lost heaven to a soul in hell." She quotes 
 his words about Ada : — 
 
 " The child of love, though born in bitterness 
 And nurtured in convulsion," 
 
 and positively quotes them incorrectly, substituting con- 
 vulsioni- for convulsion, in order to fortify a story she 
 
 * Nothing can show more saliently the readiness of people to 
 believe anything against Byron than the way in which the Ti?nes, 
 for instance, when retiring from its original position of complete 
 dupe, still credited Mrs. Stowe's assertion of Byron manying Miss 
 Milbanke for money and squandering her fortune in his amours, 
 and spoke of his " despicable meanness." Nothing could be more 
 untrue. We could fill pages with testimonies of Byron's economical 
 style of living and personal generosity when abroad. ISIoreover, Lady 
 Noel did not die till 1822, nor Lady Byron come in for the family 
 
LORD BYRON. 43 
 
 tells about Byron coming suddenly into his wife's room 
 a day or two after the child's birth, and informing her, 
 with cruel and malicious untruth, that her mother was 
 dead ; utterly unable to see from her blind partisanship, 
 firstly, that if Byron had done anything of the kind he 
 would scarcely have recorded it in a poem; secondly, 
 that '' nurtured" does not describe the condition of a 
 child two days old ; and, thirdly, that if the passage is 
 good to prove, which it no doubt is, that Ada was born 
 in bitterness and nurtured in convulsion — not convulsions 
 — it is equally good to prove that she was " the child of 
 love," a fact utterly inconsistent with Mrs. Stowe's whole 
 story, and particularly with her marvellous statement as 
 to the first words addressed by Byron to his wife imme- 
 diately after the marriage ceremony. Moreover, she 
 avers, at page 383, that had the melancholy remem- 
 brance of their separation been allowed to sleep, the 
 *'True Story" would never have been published; at 
 page 394, her implied excuse for it is that cheap editions 
 of Byron's works have brought his writings into circula- 
 tion among the masses ; and at page 396, that, looking 
 anxiously to see a memoir of Lady Byron appear after 
 
 estates and her ;^7,ooo a year till that date, six years after the sepa- 
 ration, when Sir Francis Burdett arranged all financial matters 
 between them. AU the money of hers he then spent was spent on 
 Greece ; and we should have imagined that the philanthropic wor- 
 shippers of his philanthropic wife need not have begrudged the 
 use thus nobly made of ii. 
 
44 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 her death, and none such appearing, she has performed 
 the necessary task. 
 
 There still remain a few points to be considered ; and 
 I cannot quit the subject without alluding to them. 
 Mrs. Stowe, whilst constantly referring to Lord Byron's 
 terrible remorse and agony of soul, strives to make it 
 appear he was so wicked that he would probably make 
 light of incest, and asserts that he argued with his wife 
 in favour of " Continental latitude, the good-humoured 
 marriage in which complaisant couples mutually agree 
 to form the cloak for each other's infidelities." If she 
 had been acquainted with a published letter written by 
 Byron to Moore, from Venice, in March, 1817, she 
 might have read the following passage : — 
 
 " The Italian ethics are the most singular ever met with. The 
 perversion, not only of action, but of reasoning, is singular in the 
 women. It is not that they do not consider the thing itself as 
 wrong, and very -wTong ; but love (the sentiment of love) is not 
 merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is 
 disinterested, and not a caprice.''^ 
 
 Again he writes from Verona : — 
 
 "The state of morals in these parts is in some &ort lax. A 
 mother and son were pointed out at the theatre, as being pro- 
 nounced by the Milanese world to be of the Theban dynasty. The 
 narrator (one of the first men in Milan) seemed to be not sufficiently 
 scandalised by the tie." 
 
 In another place he speaks of the " misplaced and 
 amusing morality of the Italians," and adds : — 
 
LORD BYRON. 45 
 
 " There is no convincing a woman here that she is in the smallest 
 degree deviating from the rule of right or the fitness of things 
 in having an amoroso." 
 
 So much for Byron's own ethical opinions, whatever his 
 conduct may have been. Mrs, Stowe next lays stress 
 upon the fact that the letter shown by him to Lady 
 Blessington was never sent Again, had she been better 
 informed, she would have known that he wrote many 
 letters to his wife which he did not send, and others 
 which he did, according to the humour he found himself 
 in, and the estimate he formed, after he had written them, 
 of their doing any good. 
 
 With regard to Byron's insane dread of exposure by 
 Lady Byron, on which I have already dwelt, I would ask, 
 in addition, how is it possible that between them there 
 should have passed such a correspondence as did take 
 place in 1820, which may be found in the "Life," vol. iii. 
 p. 1 1 5 ? In it Byron offers, and presses upon her, a 
 perusal of his memoirs. She refuses, and throws out 
 what he calls, in reply, a mysterious menace which he 
 cannot pretend to unriddle, imploring her to " anticipate 
 the period of her intention," and speak out before he 
 dies. Does this look like dread of discovery ? It was 
 her very silence that maddened him ; and he was ever- 
 lastingly trying to provoke her into breaking it. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe asserts that Byron was consumed by a 
 devouring passion for his sister. If so, why did he leave 
 
46 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 England ? There is no shadow of pretence that Lady 
 Byron insisted on his doing so. 
 
 Such are some of the many " averments incompatible " 
 — to use Lord Byron's phrase, singularly prophetic — into 
 which Mrs. Beecher Stowe, instructed by Lady Byron, 
 has fallen, whilst endeavouring, with frantic ardour, as 
 though engaged in a task of benevolence, to fasten upon 
 one of the greatest men that ever lived, and likewise 
 upon his sister, his sweet sister, the most indelible of 
 stigmas and the most revolting of crimes. I have been 
 sparing of strong language ; but I should be shrinking 
 from my duty if I did not complete this part of my 
 subject by giving expression to the opinion that both 
 Mrs. Stowe and the editor of Macmillan's Magazine have 
 by their conduct incurred, and will continue to incur, 
 the reprobation of all right-minded people. 
 
 Do I then suppose that the "True Story " is a mere 
 concoction of Mrs. Stowe's brain? Certainly not. I 
 shall have something to say directly of Mrs. Stowe's 
 value as a witness; but it is idle to argue, as some 
 people who desire to burke the question have done,, 
 that Lady Byron told Mrs. Stowe no such terrible tale 
 as she tells us. We do not for one moment beHeve Mrs. 
 Stowe to be a wilful writer of untruths ; and though she 
 has undoubtedly added plentiful colouring of her own, 
 the story she relates is so particular and circumstantial^ 
 that it must be in the rou^h the story Lady Byron wished 
 
LORD BYRON. 
 
 her to believe. On Lady Byron's credibility we will 
 pronounce anon ; but before explaining and accounting 
 for Lady Byron's state of mind on the subject, let us first 
 glance at Mrs. Stowe's state of mind during the interview. 
 
 In several places she speaks of Lady Byron's qualities 
 as divine, and in two places she distinctly compares 
 her to Christ. She talks of her as the impersonation of 
 conscience, as a vision of heaven, as a guardian angel, 
 as possessing a supernatural power of moral divination, 
 as placing people's hands in that of the Saviour, as 
 having more divine strength of faith and love than ever 
 existed in a woman, and as more like a blessed being 
 detached from earth than an ordinary mortal. In this 
 worshipping vein she discourses of her throughout ; and 
 it is plain, therefore, that she sat raptly credulous 
 during the whole interview, listening as to the sacred 
 words of a celestial revelation, and that it is vain to 
 expect from her at the time any critical or even ordi- 
 narily cautious scrutiny of Lady Byron's manner and 
 words, or any submission of them since to the ordeal 
 of reason, consistency, or common sense. Just as little 
 is to be hoped for from the other reckless accomplices 
 in the publication of this "True Story," the conductors 
 oi Maanillan' s Magazine^ since "pure," "lofty," "divine," 
 are the only epithets which they too think properly 
 applicable to Lady Byron. 
 
 We must, therefore, fall back upon Lady Byron's 
 
48 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 statements, as presented to us by them, and ask, Did 
 Lady Byron really believe that her husband had an 
 incestuous intrigue with his sister, that he refused to 
 abandon it, and drove her from him because "she 
 personated conscience," and in order that he might 
 follow out the guilty passion that was consuming him? 
 We believe that a time did come when Lady Byron did 
 persuade herself of the truth of these horrible things; 
 that this persuasion on her part was a complete halluci- 
 nation ; and having already shown that it could not be 
 anything but hallucination, we will endeavour to explain 
 how it grew up in her mind. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe does not pretend to fix the date when 
 Lady Byron first believed it, but contents herself with 
 the melodramatic assertion that "there came an hour 
 of revelation,'' and that Lady Byron struggled convul- 
 sively for two years to cure her husband of his abominable 
 passion. We are thus left with no information whatever 
 as to when the revelation burst upon her, and are 
 notoriously misinformed as to the length of time during 
 which Lady Byron kept the revelation to herself. Yet 
 Lady Byron is Mrs. Stowe's authority both for the 
 inaccuracy, and for the vagueness as to the hour of 
 revelation. Under these circumstances we must have 
 recourse to our leading witness — Lady Byron herself — 
 and see what else she has stated on the subject to other 
 people, and on other occasions. 
 
LORD BYRON. 49 
 
 Mrs. Stowe's case really is that Lady Byron did not 
 quit her husband on account of his guilty infatuation for 
 his sister, but that he, on account of it, so treated her as 
 to compel her to leave him ; and this tallies with the 
 assertion made by Lady Byron in her written remarks on 
 Moore's " Life," that she was resolved ''^ never again to be 
 placed m his power T These words, which have been the 
 cause of, if possible, still more horrible imputations 
 against Byron even than the one brought by Mrs. Stowe, 
 conclusively prove that her reason for refusing to live 
 with him was not her beHef in the truth of the latter. 
 The question arises. Did she at that time entertain the 
 belief at all ? Had it as yet entered her head, or entered 
 it except in the form of an incipient hallucination ? We 
 have seen that, only two or three weeks previously, she had 
 christened her own child Augusta Ada, after the Hon. 
 Mrs. Leigh, and it may therefore, we think, be safely 
 assumed that she did not then so much as imagine that 
 between Mrs. Leigh and her brother there existed more 
 than a fond fraternal affection. But if the hallucination 
 had not commenced when late in December, 1815, her 
 babe was christened; nor yet in January, 181 6, a fort- 
 night or so later, when she firmly resolved, according to 
 her own language, " never again to be placed in her 
 husband's power," when did it begin ? It has been said 
 that Dr. Lushington can set this matter at rest ; but a 
 moment's reflection is enough to show that he can do 
 
50 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 nothing of the kind, any more than Mrs. Stowe can. All 
 that he can do is to inform us — and this, I think, he 
 ought to do — whether the story told by Lady Byron to 
 Mrs. Stowe in 1856 is the same story that was told by 
 her to him in 18 16. Supposing that she told him a 
 totally different story, there would then be an end of this 
 story and every other one, and of Lady Byron's credit 
 altogether. Supposing, however, that the two stories 
 agree, obviously it will prove nothing more than that Lady 
 Byron entertained the hallucination at the date of her 
 interview with Mr. Lushington, and that Mr. Lushington 
 chose to believe it as Gospel truth. But what was the 
 date of this interview ? Lady Byron quitted her husband 
 on the 1 6th of January ; but her interview with Mr. 
 Lushington did not take place till considerably after. 
 The precise date has never been stated; but a near 
 approach to it may be arrived at from a letter written by 
 Mr. Lushington, fourteen years later, at the request of 
 Lady Byron. In that letter the following passage 
 occurs : — 
 
 "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, infonned by you of facts utterly unknown, as I have no doubt, 
 to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel." 
 
 Now, here we have a not precisely stated, but clearly 
 a considerable amount of time accounted for between 
 
LORD BYRON. 51 
 
 the time that Lady Byron quitted her husband, " resolved 
 never again to be placed in his power," and the com- 
 munication, even supposing it to be in agreement with 
 the statement recorded by Mrs. Stowe, made by her to 
 Mr. Lushington. For amorg them they had first tried 
 to make out that Lord Byron was mad. Failing in that, 
 not Lady Byron, but her mother, instructed by her, 
 sought an interview with Mr. Lushington, for the avowed 
 purpose of obtaining an opinion from him that a separa- 
 tion was indispensable. He has left it on record that, 
 instructed so far, he thought a separation not at all indis- 
 pensable. Not till ahoiit a fortjiight or more later, when 
 Lady Byron, fearing to be "placed again in her husband's 
 power," as she says, herself saw Mr. Lushington, and told 
 him something fresh — in fact, something quite different 
 from what she had instructed her mother to tell him — 
 did he declare a reconciliation impossible. 
 
 Now, had the hallucination grown up in the consider- 
 able interval that elapsed between her resolving never to 
 live with her husband again, and the moment when she 
 discovered that the reasons she alleged for refusing to do 
 so were declared to be insufficient ? Had she been 
 dwelling upon what she thought her wrongs, and trying 
 to account satisfactorily to her own amour propre for 
 what she esteemed her husband's want of consideration 
 and devotion to her, and in a sense for the spr eta forma, 
 which he was bound never in any way to treat with injury 
 
52 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 or neglect? Had she, moreover, whilst herself urging 
 reasons that were declared to be insufficient, got wind of 
 one of the thousand guesses that were being made by public 
 curiosity all on fire to know what was the real sufficient 
 reason for her refusal to return to him ? Was the hallu- 
 cination first suggested to her by her desire to account 
 for his other alleged treatment of her, by nasty rumour, 
 by her resolve never to live with him again, or by all 
 these three combined? If the hallucination really 
 existed at this time, that, no doubt, must be the true 
 account of its origin. If it took its rise later on, the 
 matter becomes simpler still Rumour, fostered by 
 Lady Byron's dogged silence, attributed every crime 
 conceivable to her husband — incest, it would seem, 
 among the number; and once thus possessed of the 
 hallucination, every word and incident in Byron's past 
 and future life would but strengthen it. Mrs. Stowe 
 credits Lady Byron with a " supernatural sense of moral 
 divination," and it is quite clear that Mrs. Stowe's 
 catalogue of Lady Byron's qualities was obtained from 
 Lady Byron herself. This belief in a supernatural sense 
 of divination would naturally make her infallible in her 
 own eyes. Then came " Manfred;" then came " Cain;" 
 then came the stanzas to Augusta; and Lady Byron, 
 arguing like Mrs. Stowe — and no doubt Mrs. Stowe got 
 the argument from Lady Byron — would feel that any- 
 body who read them with the belief that Lord Byron had 
 
LORD BYRON. 53 
 
 committed incest with his sister, would see plainly that 
 he must have done so. The hallucination would grow 
 with years, until — crowning statement of all ! — Lady 
 Byron's supernatural sense of moral divination enabled 
 her to know that a child of Mrs. Leigh's — Mrs. Leigh 
 being a married woman, having other children, and living 
 with her husband the whole time — was " an unfortunate 
 child of sin, born with a curse upon her, and with 
 abnormal propensities to evil in it," and to pick it out 
 and watch over it till death took the responsibility out of 
 her hands. Here we reach the climacteric of the fabu- 
 lous. Yet it is evident, from Mrs. Stowe's own account, 
 that Lady Byron believed this part of the fable, too, and 
 cherished it more than all the rest. 
 
 It is really wonderful that all the time so much debate 
 has been held as to whether Byron was likely to commit 
 incest, nobody has dreamed of asking, Was Mrs. Leigh 
 likely to commit it ? Yet obviously this is an important 
 question, and one very different from the same inquiry 
 as applied to her brother. Nobody can point at the 
 "wild fame of her ungovemed youth;" and the only 
 record that she has left of her sentiments on morals is her 
 determination, to which we have already alluded, not to 
 read " Don Juan " because it was so much abused on that 
 score. I will print just one letter written by her, and the 
 reader can then judge for himself what sort of person 
 she probably was. To my thinking it speaks volumes. 
 
54 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 " St. J. P., Aug., 1838. 
 
 " Dear Mr. , — It is an age since I have written to you ; 
 
 the fact is, I have been ashamed to do so, or else too unhappy, and 
 if you knew how much so, I think you would forgive me. I write 
 now because I would not have you think I forgot your kindness, or 
 that I was unmindful of my outi omission. All that I can say is, 
 that it has been quite out of my power to liquidate your claims on 
 me, and very unliappy it makes me. My only hope is on some 
 arrangement I contemplate ^\^th my eldest son ; but such things 
 
 take time. Dear Mr. , it is impossible to describe to you 
 
 what I have suffered for some years. I must be composed of lead 
 to be alive ! At this moment I have more than enough of anxiety 
 to Idll a host. For three, out of six remaining children, I am in the 
 most overwhelming soHcitude, and without that which could alone 
 remedy in two instances, and mitigate in a third. There is always 
 much to be thankful for if one will seek for it, and I desire to be 
 thankful for my many blessings, and resigned and patient under the 
 dispensation of my life. I will not be so selfish as to dwell upon 
 them. This letter is indeed written in the spirit of anxiety for what 
 you must think of me. I fear you are angry, and yet I know I 
 could not possibly help the cause. Heaven grant that I may ere long. 
 I hope you and yours are as well as I wish, and if you would write 
 and tell me about you all I should be very glad, for I can never 
 cease to feel an interest on the subject or grateful for all your kind- 
 ness to yours most truly obliged, 
 
 " Aug. Leigh." 
 
 It is obvious that at this period she, at least, was not 
 benefiting by that general benevolence of Lady Byron's 
 of which we have heard so much, and which Mrs. Stowe 
 informs us that Mrs. Leigh — having repented ! — received 
 from Lady Byron in her last sickness and dying hours. 
 Yet in 1820 she was apparently in occasional commu- 
 
LORD BYRON. 55 
 
 nication with Lady Byron ; for Byron says in a letter to 
 Murray : — 
 
 ** Pray tell Mrs. Leigh to request Lady Byron to urge forward 
 the transfer from the funds. I wrote to Lady Byron on business 
 this post, addressed to the care of Mr. D. Klinnaird." 
 
 Here is an additional element of difficulty in this story, 
 for we find Lady Byron as late as 1820 in communication 
 with Mrs. Leigh, and likely to be influenced by her. In 
 1838, however, though she still has her ;^7,ooo a year, 
 and no champion of Greek independence to help her to 
 spend it, she allows Mrs. Leigh to live in poverty and 
 debt, and to be so overwhelmed with money anxieties 
 and miseries as to be compelled to say, in language 
 reminding one strongly of what her brother would have 
 used, that " she must be composed of lead to be 
 alive" ! 
 
 And this brings me to a question which, after all that 
 has been said against Lord Byron and in favour of his 
 wife, I have no intention of leaving untouched. This is 
 the real character of Lady Byron. She is supposed to 
 have been a saint. Mrs. Stowe, the editor of Macmillan, 
 and scores of other pious enthusiasts, say that she was 
 " divine." Let us see some proof of her " divinity." 
 The following facts have been contributed to the contro- 
 versy by no less well-known and trustworthy a person 
 than Mr. William Howitt, and I reproduce them 
 textually here : — 
 
56 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 " I knew her for some years, and visited her at her house in town, 
 at her summer residence at Richmond, at Esher, and met her at her 
 son-in-law, Lord Lovelace's, at Ockham. She also visited us at 
 Esher and Highgate. I am sure that Lady Byron was a woman of 
 the most honourable and conscientious intentions, but she was sub- 
 ject to a constitutional idiosyncrasy of a most peculiar kind, which 
 rendered her, when under its influence, absolutely and persistently 
 unjust. I am quite sure from my own observations of her that, 
 when seized by this peculiar condition of the nerves, she was help- 
 lessly under its control. Through this the changes in her mood 
 were sudden, and most painful to all about her. I have seen her 
 of an evening in the most amiable, cordial, and sunny humour, full 
 of interest and sympathy ; and I have seen her the next morning 
 come down as if she had lain all night not on a feather-bed, but on 
 a glacier— frozen as it were to the very soul, and no efforts on the 
 part of those around her could restore her for the day to a genial social 
 warmth. In such moments she seemed to take sudden and deep 
 impressions against persons and things, which, though the worst 
 might pass away, left a permanent effect. Let me give an instance 
 or two. 
 
 " Lady Byron was, at the period I speak of, deeply interested in 
 the establishment of working schools for the education of children 
 of the labouring classes. She induced Lord Lovelace to erect one 
 at Ockham; she built one on her estate at Kirby :Mallory, in 
 Leicestershire. On one occasion, in one of her most amiable moods, 
 she asked me to lunch with her in town, that we might discuss her 
 plans for this system of education. She promised to arrange that 
 we should not be interrupted for some hours. I went at the time 
 fixed ; but, to my consternation, found her in one of her frozen fits. 
 The touch of her hand was like that of death ; in her manner there 
 was the silence of the grave. We sat down to luncheon by our- 
 selves, and I endeavoured to break the ice by speaking of incidents 
 of the day. It was in vain. The devil of the North Pole was upon 
 her, and I could only extract icy monosyllables. When we returned 
 to the drawing-room I sought to interest her in the topic on which 
 we had met, and which she had so truly at heart. It was hopeless. 
 
LORD BYRON, 57 
 
 She said she felt unable to go into it, and I was glad to get 
 away. 
 
 "Again, she was in great difficulty as to the selection of a master 
 for her working school at Kirby Mallory. It was necessaiy for him 
 to unite the very rarely united qualities of a thoroughly practical 
 knowledge of the operations of agriculture and gardening with the 
 education and information of an accomplished schoolmaster. She 
 asked me to try and discover this rara avis for her. I knew 
 exactly such a man in Nottinghamshire, who was at the same time 
 thoroughly honourable, trustworthy, and fond of teaching. At her 
 earnest request I prevailed on him to give up his then comfortable 
 position and accept her offer. For a time he was everything in her 
 eyes that a man and a schoolmaster could be. She was continually 
 speaking of him when we met in the most cordial terms. But in the 
 course, as I remember, of two or three years, the poor fellow wrote 
 to me in the utmost distress, saying that Lady Byron, ^\^thout the 
 slightest intimation of being in any way dissatisfied with him, or 
 with his management of the school, had given him notice to quit. 
 He had entreated her to let him know what was the cause of this 
 sudden dismissal. She refused to give any, and he entreated me to 
 write to her and endeavour to remove her displeasure, or to ascer- 
 tain its cause. I felt, from what I had seen of Lady Byron before, 
 that it was useless. I wrote to him, ' Remember Lord Byron ! If 
 Lady Byron has taken into her head that you shall go, nothing will 
 turn her. Go you must, and you had better prepare for it.' And 
 the poor fellow, with a family of about five children, and his old 
 situation filled up, turned out into the world to comparative ruin." 
 
 So much for Lady Byron as painted by an impartial 
 hand. Now for a glimpse of her as painted by a partial 
 hand — her own : — 
 
 "I am a very incompetent judge of the impression which the 
 last canto of ' Childe Harold ' may produce on the minds of indif- 
 ferent readers. It contains the usual trace of a conscience restlessly 
 awake, though his object has been too long to aggravate its burden. 
 
58 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 as if it could thus be oppressed into eternal stupor. I vidll 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. Pie 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 con- 
 cerned me personally till the whole system was laid bare. He is 
 the absolute monarch of words, and uses them, as Buonaparte 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 o\vn 
 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 \dtal 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 unpenetrable 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 accom- 
 panied by some dark and vague suspicions. Nothing has contri- 
 buted 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 featm-e of this maslc of state. I know 
 no one more habitually destitute of that enthusiasm he so beauti- 
 fully 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 
 
LORD BYRON. 59 
 
 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 feeHngs which arose from them soften and 
 sadden my thoughts." 
 
 Mrs. Stowe, and folks of her calibre, may, if they like, 
 consider these the utterances of " divine love," " super- 
 natural charity," and more than human forbearance. 
 But any impartial man or woman of the world will 
 pronounce them to be the words of self-righteous and 
 unsympathising Pharisaism. Byron may have been a 
 publican and a sinner ; but his wife completes the scrip- 
 tural picture. Worse than that. In these words, written 
 by herself^ malignity is unmistakably apparent to any 
 dispassionate judge. Yet she may, as Mrs. Stowe 
 declares, have at last relented towards poor Mrs. 
 Leigh, who had committed the heinous fault of stick- 
 ing to her own flesh and blood in the agony of his 
 greatest misfortune ; and we can easily understand how, 
 impelled by that passionate fondness for piety and for 
 power which are so often found in combination, she 
 thoroughly enjoyed heaping coals of fire on the uncon- 
 scious head of such terrible sinners as poor Mrs. Leigh 
 and the child that had manifestly on its soul the curse 
 of sin ! 
 
 Mrs. Stowe sees — and Lady Byron saw — clearly enough, 
 that for the "True Stoiy" to be believed, Byron must never 
 have loved his wife either as Miss Milbanke or as Lady 
 
6o A VINDICATION OF 
 
 Byron. I could fill pages with the proofs that he unques- 
 tionably did so, both before his marriage, after his marriage, 
 and after the separation. Lady Melbourne, his friend — 
 " when I say friend," he writes, " I mean;/^/ mistress, for 
 that's the antipode " (yet his sister, his " best friend," 
 was his mistress, forsooth !) — could testify, were she yet 
 alive, to his quite boyish love for Miss Milbanke when 
 she at last accepted him. That they were unhappy to- 
 gether is certain ; and equally certain that they were much 
 better apart. But her refusal to let him return to her it 
 was that drove him into his worst excesses. The peculiarly 
 defiant tone of his letters is as apparent as is the defiant 
 course of his morality, during the time which elapsed 
 between the year he spent, immediately after the separa- 
 tion, in trying to bring about a reconciliation, and the 
 period when, restored to his better senses, he felt con- 
 vinced that the Countess Guiccioli loved him, and he 
 gave himself wholly to her. No doubt she has written a 
 not very wise book ; but she behaved nobly to Byron ; 
 she was an Italian, the victim of Italian manners and 
 morals, which are quite different from our own ; and all 
 Englishmen of right feeling abstain from harsh words 
 against her. After her influence fell upon Byron, e\nen 
 the irritating remembrances of the past could not drive 
 him to fresh excesses. " Everybody could manage my 
 lord," said Fletcher, " except my lady'' No man, more- 
 over, it may be added, ever had better or truer friends, 
 
LORD BYRON. 6i 
 
 and their testimony alone is almost conclusive against 
 Mrs. Stowe's story. Let one instance suffice. A 
 " Citizen of the United States" has given the following 
 evidence : — 
 
 " I was for many years on terms of the closest intimacy with 
 three men who knew more than ahuost any others of Byron's per- 
 sonal character and history, and who happened to be precisely the 
 men who were concerned in, or had special knowledge of, the 
 destruction of his autobiography. I speak of Moore, Rogers, and 
 Luttrell, two of whom were actually parties to the destruction of 
 the manuscript. From 1845 to 1852 (when I left England) I was 
 in constant communication with all the three, or rather with the 
 two who still survived (Luttrell died in 1851, and Moore early in 
 1852). I have repeatedly heard conversations among them as to 
 the causes of Byron's separation from his wife, and have again and 
 again heard Mr. Moore speak of the character and purport of the 
 memoir, and of the motives which induced him to permit its destruc- 
 tion. He had been so hotly censured for what was considered his 
 wealcness in the matter, that he often spoke at much length about 
 it in his own defence ; and — while he always insisted that the 
 memoir was disfigured by occasional outbreaks of petulance or 
 anger, and filled with many details which, though insignificant, 
 were calculated to cause annoyance to persons still Hving — he spoke 
 in a way to convince any hearer that tlie memoir concealed no ' dark 
 and terrible secret,' and that he, at least, had never derived, either 
 from that memoir or from his intimate knowledge of all the parties 
 and their surroundmgs, the remotest hint of any such horror as is 
 now declared to be freshly unveiled ; and I am perfectly certain 
 that the same may be said as to Rogers and Luttrell." 
 
 All this, however, Mrs. Stowe asserts, and Lady Byron 
 asserted, is but the result of Byron's extraordinary powers 
 of dissimulation. Indeed, according to them, his life 
 
62 A VINDICATION OF 
 
 was one long acted lie; and notably whenever he 
 referred to his wife, whom he hated, injured, and then 
 strove systematically to misrepresent, by simulating feel- 
 ings of which he was quite incapable. His writings 
 overflow with references to his love for her, and to her 
 implacability towards him. All these, Mrs. Stowe says, 
 were deliberate lies, set some in the most majestic, some 
 in the most pathetic verse in the language, but mere part 
 and parcel of a life of sustained hypocrisy. 
 
 Let us turn to Moore. He says he was strongly 
 inchned, on first reading the famous "Farewell," to 
 regard it rather as a work of art and fancy than any- 
 thing more real : — 
 
 " On reading, however," he continues, " Byron's own account 
 of all the circumstances in the memoranda, I found that on this 
 point, in common with a large portion of the public, I had done 
 him injustice. He there described, in a manner whose sincerity 
 there was no doubting, the swell of tender recollections under the 
 influences of which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these 
 stanzas were produced — the tears, as he said, falling fast over the 
 paper as he wrote them. The appearance of the MS. confirms 
 this account of the circumstances under which it was written. 
 Neither did it appear to have been from any wish or intention of his 
 own, but through the injudicious zeal of a friend whom he had 
 suffered to take a copy, that the verses met the pubUc eye." 
 
 Such an absolute demonstration of the sincerity of his 
 feelings cannot be expected in every instance ; but it is 
 pretty certain that, were there even no other evidence 
 than that of his writings to rebut the charge of his hating 
 
LORD BYRON, 63 
 
 his wife and labouring by brutality to get rid of her in 
 order to gratify an incestuous passion for his sister, they 
 alone would stand like impenetrable guardian spirits 
 between his grave and the abominable aspersion Mrs. 
 Stowe strains every nerve to inscribe on it. But the 
 story, as we have seen, besides brimming over with gross 
 improbabilities, is full of utterly irreconcilable incon- 
 sistencies, and is born with the stamp of death upon it 
 To the end of time Byron and his verse will be among 
 the most cherished possessions of mankind ; and if 
 posterity deigns to preserve the memory of this foul 
 fable in connection with his name, it will be only to 
 remember that it was concocted by a woman of a very 
 peculiar temperament and not gifted with a very fine 
 sense of justice, first publicly narrated by an American 
 writer of romances, pubHshed by a magazine somewhat 
 in need of notoriety, accepted for a moment by the 
 prurient and the incurable lovers of scandal, but after 
 due scrutiny and just reflection entirely repudiated by 
 the definitive voice of an offended people. 
 
 P.S. — Vide Appendix. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 A. — Lady Byron has left us some exceedingly candid, 
 
 if not very consistent, accounts of the opinion she formed 
 
 of her husband. It is only fair we should have his 
 
 opinion of her. Shortly before he died, he gave it in 
 
 the following written words : — 
 
 " Lady Byron's letters were always enigmatical, often unintel- 
 ligible. She was easily made the dupe of the designing, for 
 she thought her knowledge of mankind infallible. She had got 
 some foolish idea of Madame de Stael's into her head, that a 
 person may be better known in the first hour than in ten years. 
 She had the habit of drawing people's characters after she had 
 seen them once or twice. She wrote pages and pages on my 
 character, but it was as unlike as possible. She was governed by 
 what she called fixed rules and principles, squared mathematically. 
 It must be confessed, however, that she gave no proof of her 
 boasted consistency. First she refused me, then she accepted me, 
 then she separated herself from me — so much for consistency." 
 
 I fancy all impartial people will be disposed to think 
 that this is a view both more sensible, accurate, and 
 charitable than the one which — except, of course, in her 
 " divine " moments — she took of him. 
 
 B. — Tlie following highly valuable testimony, obtained 
 too late to insert in the body of the foregoing " Vindica- 
 tion," may figure fitly here. The writer is the Dowager 
 
66 APPENDIX. 
 
 LadyS , a lady described as "of great natural 
 
 abilities, unimpaired by advanced age (eighty-two), and 
 whose knowledge of the world — fashionable, political, 
 and literary— both of days long past and of these, is 
 unsurpassed." She says : — 
 
 *' "We have a great subject of interest in Mrs, Stowe's account 
 of Lord B}Ton. I want to knov/ the truth. I have seen a great 
 deal of Mrs. Leigh (Augusta), having passed some days with her 
 and Colonel Leigh, for my husband's shooting is near Newmarket, 
 when Lord Byron was in the house, and, as she told me, was 
 writing * The Corsair,' to my great astonishment, for it was a 
 wretched small house, full of her ill-trained children, who were 
 always running up and dowi stairs and going into ' uncle's ' bed- 
 room, where he remained all the morning. Mrs. Leigh was like 
 a mother to Byron, being so much older, and not at all an attrac- 
 tive person. l' afterwards went with her, at her request, to pay a 
 wedding visit to Lady B>Ton when she returned to town, and she 
 (Mrs. Leigh) expressed the greatest anxiety that his marriage should 
 reform him. He opened the drawing-room door himself, and re- 
 ceived my congratulations as savagely as I expected, looking 
 demon-like, as he often did. But my astonishment at the present 
 accusation is imbounded. She, a Dowdy-Goody, I being then, I 
 suppose, a young fine lady. Scrope Davis used to come to dinner, 
 and talked to me a great deal about Byron afterwards, when he 
 resided in the countiy, and I never remember a hint at this un- 
 natural and improbable liaison when all London was at Byron's 
 
 feet. I have heard from Lady A I , relative to , 
 
 and* to ISIrs. Leigh, that my recollection of her was perfecOy cor- 
 rect. She says, ' She was an amiable and devoted wife, and mother 
 of seven children. Her husband was veiy fond of her, and had a 
 high opinion of her. She must have been mairied (in 1807) when 
 Byron was quite a boy (he was 19). She had no taste for poetry. 
 She had sad misfortunes in her later years. Her excellent and 
 only surviving daughter nursed her with the tenderest affection in 
 her last illness. How any one could have been so wicked as to 
 write so horrible a story of one too long dead to have friends left 
 who could refute the story, seems beyond belief.' " 
 
APPENDik, ■ , '■''..•' : •'. ? '< * .Vf 
 
 C. — The following letter, which has reached me at the 
 last moment of going to press, confirms, in every par- 
 ticular, the view maintained by me, in the face of much 
 incredulity, from the very first moment that I sat down 
 to write the " Vindication." Taken in conjunction with 
 Mr. Howitt's letter, it would seem to be conclusive as to 
 the existence of Lady Byron's hallucinations : — 
 
 " Sir, — Lady Noel BjTon resided, on and off, many years in 
 Brighton, and her circle of friends coincided very closely with my 
 own. For most of these years I heard but of one crime of which she 
 accused her dead husband, but latterly of two, which need not be 
 named. Six or seven persons, more or less known to me, received 
 her communications, three of whom were Americans. Her com- 
 munications were not given as secrets, but, on the contrary, as 
 facts to be used for the defence of her conduct, character, or 
 memory. Some of these persons received them as Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe did — the Rev. Frederick Robertson for one ; others thought 
 * her mind was touched upon the subject of the separation.' In 
 1847 one of her best friends asked me to talk with her on the 
 liabilities to error of private judgment when deciding questions 
 involving criminal charges which can be properly investigated only 
 by public tribunals. No one, I told her, had a right to repeat 
 such charges, except as decisions of courts of law. Her stories 
 differed. Her narratives and memoranda were given away right 
 and left. The confidantes who knew her best, her peculiarities, 
 her troubles with her daughter, her elder grandson, her servants, 
 never would have repeated her stories with pens and types. They 
 thought her mind was touched. Suspicions had become delusions. 
 Three of her friends, myself being one, came separately to this con- 
 clusion. The sealed papers held by her trustees, if they contain 
 the accusations she made, can only be records of her delusions ; 
 for the charge she made most frequently is not capable of proof ; 
 and the charge Mrs. Stowe has pubhshed is comparatively recent, 
 and utterly incredible. "'John Robertson. 
 
 " 12, Norfolk Road, Sept. 12, 1869." 
 
 Perhaps the Saturday Review now understands what 
 that word means. 
 
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