To the last she was a clear and precise observer, and expressed her thoughts with lucidity, coherence, and vigor. To the last she had a subtle and logical mind. By no definition of insanity, that would be entertained seriously by a Lunacy Commissioner, was she an insane person. How then did it come about that, being unquestionably sane, she could take so mad and absolutely wrong a view of her husband, whom she regarded affectionately after his death, and of the woman who had been her close and beloved friend for nearly fifteen years? It is not difficult to answer this ques

tion.

The answer, or what is expected to pass for one, runs thus:

Lady Byron was one of the very few who could penetrate all the mysteries, solve all the riddles, and explain all the perplexities, of "" "poetical disclosure: every one of the very few who could seize the real Byron under any disguise, and never mistook for a piece of the real man anything of specious show which he had used for the sake of its misleading effectiveness on the uninitiated vulgar. Reading Byron's works in this way in the second year of her separation from him, Lady Byron continued to read them in the same spirit and with the same confidence in her sagacity, in the fifth year of her widowhood-and afterwards, when animosity against Augusta, impairing her critical perceptivity and disturbing her judgment, disposed her to believe any evil thing of her dead husband, provided her sister-in-law showed (sic) as the companion and sharer of his guilt. In these later stages of her career, the Byron, who rose to Lady Byron's view out of the misread and miserably mis-brooded-over pages of "Manfred" and " Cain," was indeed "an object of wonder and curiosity;" but instead of being the real Lord Byron, he was a fictitious monster, begotten of the reader's "dark and vague suspicions."

The peculiar construction of this paragraph somewhat obscures the meaning, but if it be that Lady Byron's "critical perceptivity" was impaired and her judgment disturbed after the fifth year of her widowhood, how does this agree with the immediately preceding assertion that she

had a subtle, logical, and thoroughly sane mind to the last? If this writer could be coherent through three consecutive pages, it would be a relief.

In the British Museum are letters from

Lady Byron, showing that twenty years after the rupture (May, 1851), when she was residing at Brighton and Mrs. Leigh at St. James's Palace, a meeting was ar ranged between the two ladies at the of her life drawing near. They met at request of Mrs. Leigh, who felt the end Reigate, where Lady Byron came accompanied by the Rev. Frederic Robertson. The only authentic account of what took place is contained in a letter from him to Mrs. Leigh, dated May 21, 1851, in which he says:

In the meeting at Reigate Lady Byron expressed her conviction that your influence on Lord Byron's mind had been unfavorable to his coming to just conclusions respecting herself. This you denied strongly and distinctly.

He adds that Mrs. Leigh repeated some expressions of Lord Broughton's which violently agitated Lady Byron. The upshot was that Lady Byron turned a deaf ear to all her sister-in-law's assurances, thereby confirming a general belief that she was already subject to illusions; for she herself had haughtily repelled every overture towards a reconciliation with Lord Byron; and she had the best proof of Mrs. Leigh's loyalty in the fact that all Lord Byron's letters to his sister were handed over to be copied by the wife. The copies (which we have seen) in her handwriting are in the possession of her family. She would seem, however, to have undergone a sudden revulsion of feeling on hearing that Mrs. Leigh was dangerously ill, for she writes (October 4, 1851) to Miss Emily Leigh, the daughter:

66

Whisper to her from me, 'Dearest Augusta.' I can't think these words would hurt her." On hearing, after Mrs. Leigh's death, that they had acted as a restorative, she writes (October 4, 1851) to Miss Leigh to assure her that, despite of temporary estrangements, she had never ceased to regard "dearest Augusta" with affection and esteem.*

In a complacent summary of his performance, entitled "A Parting Note," the. author sets forth the general result:

His [Lord Byron's] passions and pettinesses, his follies and foibles, his sins against himself and others have been recorded. The evil of him has been told in every particular, told with

The letters are in the British Museum.

dark matter has been brought out to the light of heaven. And this has been done, so that on closing these volumes the reader may be confident that he knows all the worst, though by no means all the good, of the poet's cruelly misrepresented life.

In addition to what he knew already, the reader is told by this scrupulously candid biographer that the poet was "an inspired maniac," "a sublime coxcomb," a superlative person in his own esteem," a coarse debauchee, a deliberate seducer, intensely selfish, habitually false, animated by "unabated vindictiveness" and " malicious phrenzy," especially prone to lies of vanity, and capable of garbling a diary to mislead some future and unknown biog. rapher. It is to be hoped that this mode of clearing a reputation will not become general, for the process is simple. Fling plenty of mud, and enough of it will stick to show that the object of your kind of fices cannot be dirtier than you have made him, and that henceforth his enemies may be safely defied to do their worst. Then there is the consolatory, not very original, reflection that, "if it could be shown that all the evil things said of Byron fell short of the truth, his writings would be no less delightful," with the plea in mitigation that, "if he was a libertine, it must be remembered that he lived in times when libertinism was general."

Of all the differences between the England of to-day and the England of seventy years since, none is more noteworthy than the present reprobation of certain kinds of domestic immorality that were regarded in Byron's day with a leniency which is remembered in this year of grace with astonishment. The abolition of duelling is largely accountable for this remarkable change of social sentiment and manners. So long as every father, husband, brother, was free to avenge with the pistol the wrongs done him by libertinism, society troubled itself little about the offences of lib

ertines.

Granting what (space permitting) we might be tempted to dispute, that, in reliance on duelling, Lord Byron's contemporaries were comparatively tolerant of domestic immorality, this weakens his case instead of strengthening it. Why, the uncharitable may ask, did this lax generation drive him from England and exclude him from Westminster Abbey? People may reason like Mackintosh, who, on hearing that Madame was not received in the Parisian society of 1802, exclaimed: "I wonder what her offence could be." There is a fatality about this

ALL the hope of ice had long vanished, to the sorrow of some, but the unmiti

gated satisfaction of the hunting men.

Lady Jane kept only two or three riding-horses, but her friends, Sir Thomas Grey among others, were in the habit of sending their hunters to her stables.

In former days Holliwell had been a great hunting-house, and poor, patient Gwendoline owed her sad invalid life to a hunting accident.

Most of the men appeared at breakfast in pink. Mollie thought her cousin far the best-looking among them, even though he did not go in for that becoming color.

Lady Jane offered Meta a mount, but in spite of the brilliant look of delight in her eyes, Sir Tom took it upon himself at once to refuse.

"She does not ride to hounds now, Aunt Jane," he said. "I think it is not really safe for women, and they are always awfully in the way."

"Tom has never got over the fact that he lost the run of the season, the day he proposed to me in a very muddy lane. It is ungenerous not that I complain," she said, laughing and following her aunt up-stairs to dress for the meet. "When one has such an enormous family as I

"So Tom says when I wear all this fur. Give me a kiss, Mollie. Ah! you must wear that on the 18th."

"I can't indeed," said Mollie. "I am not going to waste my very best on Charles; he never knows what we have got on our backs."

"How odd! and yet to judge by the trouble Mr. Poole must have taken with the exquisite fit of his garments to-day, I should have thought he had a good eye." | "I was alluding to our brother Charles, Mettie, you know perfectly well. I shall be in the home of our forefathers. Oh, dear! how stuffy it will be."

"It is stuffy," said Meta. "I don't know why, but the moral atmosphere is stuffy. Charles himself is stuffy, and as for the children, they are the stuffiest of all."

"And yet to think how mamma is pining to get rid of me, and go and live there, and take charge of Charles and his bereaved ones."

"You lazy child, when you know I need not begin to dress for ten minutes after the bell. My heroine is insensible in the arms of her father, with a slow stream of blood oozing rapidly from her parted lips; my hero has gone off with homicidal intentions; the bad woman reigns supreme, and in short, Mollie, if you won't go, must, and that last, decency forbids."

I

For Lady Grey had her hair down, and her little white fur slippers on, without stockings.

"After that," said Mollie, "I dare not refuse,” and she rose slowly out of her very snug low chair, and went down-stairs.

The drawing-room was empty, the fire burning low. Mollie could not find the third volume of her sister's book; it certainly was not on the green table by the fire, nor on the red table, nor anywhere else in the room. Mollie wandered on, looking for it among all the scattered Mudie books in vain. Suddenly she bethought her of continuing her search in the library. She crossed the morningroom, and opened one of the big library doors.

It was dark, no light whatever except from the fire, which, though a large one, was black and fitful.

Mollie made her way up to it, and was just taking a cedar match from the chimneypiece with which to light a candle, when she suddenly perceived that she was not alone in the room.