vastly; and I hope they will
live many happy months. Bell is in health and unvaried good-humour and
behaviour; but we are in all the agonies of packing and parting.'

Nine days after this, under date of March 17, Lord Byron says, 'We mean
to metropolize to-morrow, and you will address your next to Piccadilly.'
The inference is, that the days intermediate were spent at Colonel
Leigh's. The next letters, and all subsequent ones for six months, are
dated from Piccadilly.

As we have shown, there is every reason to believe that a warm friendship
had thus arisen between Mrs. Leigh and Lady Byron, and that, during all
this time, Lady Byron desired as much of the society of her sister-in-law
as possible. She was a married woman and a mother, her husband's nearest
relative; and Lady Byron could with more propriety ask, from her, counsel
or aid in respect to his peculiarities than she could from her own
parents. If we consider the character of Lady Byron as given by Mrs.
Mimms, that of a young person of warm but repressed feeling, without
sister or brother, longing for human sympathy, and having so far found no
relief but in talking with a faithful dependant,--we may easily see that
the acquisition of a sister through Lord Byron might have been all in all
to her, and that the feelings which he checked and rejected for himself
might have flowed out towards his sister with enthusiasm. The date of
Mrs. Leigh's visit does not appear.

The first domestic indication in Lord Byron's letters from London is the
announcement of the death of Lady Byron's uncle, Lord Wentworth, from
whom came large expectations of property. Lord Byron had mentioned him
before in his letters as so kind to Bell and himself that he could not
find it in his heart to wish him in heaven if he preferred staying here.
In his letter of April 23, he mentions going to the play immediately
after hearing this news, 'although,' as he says, 'he ought to have stayed
at home in sackcloth for "unc."'

On June 12, he writes that Lady Byron is more than three months advanced
in her progress towards maternity; and that they have been out very
little, as he wishes to keep her quiet. We are informed by Moore that
Lord Byron was at this time a member of the Drury-Lane Theatre Committee;
and that, in this unlucky connection, one of the fatalities of the first
year of trial as a husband lay. From the strain of Byron's letters, as
given in Moore, it is apparent, that, whil