han the charges in the 'Blackwood,' because nothing fouler could
be asserted. No satyr's hoof has ever crushed this pearl deeper in the
mire than the hoof of the 'Blackwood,' but none of them have defiled it
or trodden it so deep that God cannot find it in the day 'when he maketh
up his jewels.'

I have another word, as an American, to say about the contempt shown to
our great people in thus suffering the materials of history to be
falsified to subserve the temporary purposes of family feeling in
England.

Lord Byron belongs not properly either to the Byrons or the Wentworths.
He is not one of their family jewels to be locked up in their cases. He
belongs to the world for which he wrote, to which he appealed, and before
which he dragged his reluctant, delicate wife to a publicity equal with
his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.

We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every insult
and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have heaped
upon Lady Byron. We have been betrayed into injustice and a complicity
with villainy. After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders in
England, and died full of years and honours, the 'Blackwood' takes
occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of
slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past. What was
the consequence in America? My attention was first called to the result,
not by reading the 'Blackwood' article, but by finding in a popular
monthly magazine two long articles,--the one an enthusiastic
recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over
the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.

Both articles represented Lady Byron as a cold, malignant, mean,
persecuting woman, who had been her husband's ruin. They were so full of
falsehoods and misstatements as to astonish me. Not long after, a
literary friend wrote to me, 'Will you, can you, reconcile it to your
conscience to sit still and allow that mistress so to slander that
wife,--you, perhaps, the only one knowing the real facts, and able to set
them forth?'

Upon this, I immediately began collecting and reading the various
articles and the book, and perceived that the public of this generation
were in a way of having false history created, uncontradicted, under
their own eyes.

I claim for my countrymen and women, our right to true history. For
years, the popular literature has held up pu