, still Miss Milbanke must have believed it a perilous
thing to be the wife of Lord Byron. . . . But still, by joining her
life to his in marriage, she pledged her troth and her faith and her
love, under probabilities of severe, disturbing, perhaps fearful
trials, in the future. . . .

'But I think Lady Byron ought not to have printed that Narrative.
Death abrogates not the rights of a husband to his wife's silence when
speech is fatal. . . to his character as a man. Has she not flung
suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of
a--monster? . . . If Byron's sins or crimes--for we are driven to use
terrible terms--were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the
Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted
that confession from his widow's breast? . . . But there was no such
pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm. Self-
collected, and gathering up all her faculties and feelings into
unshrinking strength, she denounced before all the world--and
throughout all space and all time--her husband, as excommunicated by
his vices from woman's bosom.

. . . .

''Twas to vindicate the character of her parents that Lady Byron
wrote,--a holy purpose and devout, nor do I doubt sincere. But filial
affection and reverence, sacred as they are, may be blamelessly, nay,
righteously, subordinate to conjugal duties, which die not with the
dead, are extinguished not even by the sins of the dead, were they as
foul as the grave's corruption.'

Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for woman,
in length and breadth; and, that all women may understand the doctrine,
the Shepherd now takes up his parable, and expounds the true position of
the wife. We render his Scotch into English:--

'Not a few such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage
husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,--as good, as bright,
as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There they
sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy
instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless
misery is least given to complaint.'

Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting
for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only
drink, to si