ng spring, and reciting the verses that had
been inspired by her vanished charms:--

'Lorsque les yeux chercheront sous vos rides
Les traits charmants qui m'auront inspire,
Des doux recits les jeunes gens avides,
Diront: Quel fut cet ami tant pleure?
De men amour peignez, s'il est possible,
Vardeur, l'ivresse, et meme les soupcons,
Et bonne vieille, an coin d'un feu paisible
De votre ami repetez les chansons.
"On vous dira: Savait-il etre aimable?
Et sans rougir vous direz: Je l'aimais.
D'un trait mechant se montra-t-il capable?
Avec orgueil vous repondrez: Jamais!'"

'This charming picture,' 'Blackwood' goes on to say, 'has been
realised in the case of a poet greater than Beranger, and by a
mistress more famous than Lisette. The Countess Guiccioli has at
length given to the world her "Recollections of Lord Byron." The book
first appeared in France under the title of "Lord Byron juge par les
Temoins de sa Vie," without the name of the countess. A more
unfortunate designation could hardly have been selected. The
"witnesses of his life" told us nothing but what had been told before
over and over again; and the uniform and exaggerated tone of eulogy
which pervaded the whole book was fatal to any claim on the part of
the writer to be considered an impartial judge of the wonderfully
mixed character of Byron.

'When, however, the book is regarded as the avowed production of the
Countess Guiccioli, it derives value and interest from its very
faults. {113} There is something inexpressibly touching in the
picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago;
not faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous
as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty,
first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul
up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her
heart.

'To her there has been no change, no decay. The god whom she
worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is
still the "Pythian of the age" to her at seventy. To try such a book
by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign
the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of
indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.'

This, then, is the introduction which one of