ng the deed, exposed herself to all its
consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment
that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea
of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more
than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.

'Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel
than Clytemnestra's poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady
Byron's silence was destined to kill the soul,--and such a
soul!--leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed
that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful
wrongs, perhaps even depravity. In vain did he, feeling his
conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination. She
refused; and the only favour she granted was to send him, one fine
day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.

'And, why, then, had she believed him mad? Because she, a methodical,
inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist
calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul, because she
could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits different to
those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life. Not to be
hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write while she was
sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to gratify the
requirements of material and intellectual life at hours different to
hers,--all that was not merely annoying for her, but it must be
madness; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could neither
submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.

'Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord
Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and
revenge of his enemies.

'She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely
organised,--the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and
proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and
fatally was it decreed that this woman alone of her species should be
Lord Byron's wife!'

In a note is added,--

'If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her
excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her
silence? Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons
which kill at once, and defy all remed