ndignant severity, as of an honest advocate who is thoroughly convinced
that he is pleading the cause of a wronged man who has been ruined in
name, shipwrecked in life, and driven to an early grave, by the arts of a
bad woman,--a woman all the more horrible that her malice was disguised
under the cloak of religion.

Having made an able statement of facts, adroitly leaving out ONE, {121}
of which he could not have been ignorant had he studied the case
carefully enough to know all the others, he proceeds to sum up against
the criminal thus:--

'We would deal tenderly with the memory of Lady Byron. Few women have
been juster objects of compassion. It would seem as if Nature and
Fortune had vied with each other which should be most lavish of her
gifts, and yet that some malignant power had rendered all their bounty
of no effect. Rank, beauty, wealth, and mental powers of no common
order, were hers; yet they were of no avail to secure common
happiness. The spoilt child of seclusion, restraint, and parental
idolatry, a fate (alike evil for both) cast her into the arms of the
spoilt child of genius, passion, and the world. What real or fancied
wrongs she suffered, we may never know; but those which she inflicted
are sufficiently apparent.

'It is said that there are some poisons so subtle that they will
destroy life, and yet leave no trace of their action. The murderer
who uses them may escape the vengeance of the law; but he is not the
less guilty. So the slanderer who makes no charge; who deals in hints
and insinuations: who knows melancholy facts he would not willingly
divulge,--things too painful to state; who forbears, expresses pity,
sometimes even affection, for his victim, shrugs his shoulders, looks
with

"The significant eye,
Which learns to lie with silence,--"

is far more guilty than he who tells the bold falsehood which may be
met and answered, and who braves the punishment which must follow upon
detection.

'Lady Byron has been called

"The moral Clytemnestra of her lord."

The "moral Brinvilliers" would have been a truer designation.

'The conclusion at which we arrive is, that there is no proof whatever
that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a
separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him
rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied