le British public. They rebelled at the immorality of
his conduct and the obscenity of his writings; and he resolved that they
should accept both. And he made them do it. At first, they execrated
'Don Juan.' Murray was afraid to publish it. Women were determined not
to read it. In 1819, Dr. William Maginn of the Noctes wrote a song
against it in the following virtuous strain:--

'Be "Juan," then, unseen, unknown;
It must, or we shall rue it.
We may have virtue of our own:
Ah! why should we undo it?
The treasured faith of days long past
We still would prize o'er any,
And grieve to hear the ribald jeer
Of scamps like Don Giovanni.'

Lord Byron determined to conquer the virtuous scruples of the Noctes
Club; and so we find this same Dr. William Maginn, who in 1819 wrote so
valiantly, in 1822 declaring that he would rather have written a page of
'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe Harold.' All English morals were, in
like manner, formally surrendered to Lord Byron. Moore details his
adulteries in Venice with unabashed particularity: artists send for
pictures of his principal mistresses; the literary world call for
biographical sketches of their points; Moore compares his wife and his
last mistress in a neatly-turned sentence; and yet the professor of
morals in Edinburgh University recommends the biography as pure, and
having no mud in it. The mistress is lionized in London; and in 1869 is
introduced to the world of letters by 'Blackwood,' and bid, 'without a
blush, to say she loved'--

This much being done to all England, it is quite possible that a woman
like Lady Byron, standing silently aside and surveying the course of
things, may have thought that Mrs. Leigh was no more seduced than all the
rest of the world, and have said as we feel disposed to say of that
generation, and of a good many in this, 'Let him that is without sin
among you cast the first stone.'

The peculiar bitterness of remorse expressed in his works by Lord Byron
is a further evidence that he had committed an unusual crime. We are
aware that evidence cannot be drawn in this manner from an author's works
merely, if unsupported by any external probability. For example, the
subject most frequently and powerfully treated by Hawthorne is the
influence of a secret, unconfessed crime on the soul: nevertheless, as
Hawthorne is well known to have always lived a pure and regular life,
nobody has ever suspected him