econd. But it was painful to others
to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings which attends
poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting that pain.
Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighboring bank the sum of
one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes; and in order to
preclude all outside speculation, she had made the money payable to the
order of the intermediate person, so that the sufferer's name need not
appear at all. Five-and-thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like
this must make up a great amount of human happiness: but this was only
one of a wide variety of methods of doing good. It was the unconcealable
magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a
second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households
within the four seas. Years ago, it was said far and wide, that Lady
Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was
difficult to imagine how anybody could do more. Lord Byron spent every
shilling that the law allowed him out of her property, while he lived,
and left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by
his will; yet she had eventually a large income at her command. In the
management of it she showed the same wise consideration that marked all
her practical decisions. She resolved to spend her whole income, seeing
how much the world needed help at the moment. Her care was for the
existing generation, rather than for a future one, which would have
its own friends. She usually declined trammelling herself with annual
subscriptions to charities, preferring to keep her freedom from year to
year, and to achieve definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to
extend partial help over a large surface which she could not herself
superintend.

It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of the
public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while sorely
misjudging her character. We hear much now--and everybody hears it with
pleasure--of the spread of education in "common things." But, long
before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name was found
for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the thing, and
put it in the way of making its own name. She was living at Ealing, in
Middlesex, in 1834; and there she opened one of the first industrial
schools in England, if not the very first. She sent out a master to
Switzerland, to be instruct