the power to
testify against him. If we admit this solution, Byron's conduct is at
least that of a man who is acting as men ordinarily would act under such
circumstances: if we do not, he is acting like a fiend. Let us look at
admitted facts. He married his wife without love, in a gloomy,
melancholy, morose state of mind. The servants testify to strange,
unaccountable treatment of her immediately after marriage; such that her
confidential maid advises her return to her parents. In Lady Byron's
letter to Mrs. Leigh, she reminds Lord Byron that he always expressed a
desire and determination to free himself from the marriage. Lord Byron
himself admits to Madame de Stael that his behaviour was such, that his
wife must have thought him insane. Now we are asked to believe, that
simply because, under these circumstances, Lady Byron wished to live
separate from her husband, he hated and feared her so that he could never
let her alone afterwards; that he charged her with malice, slander,
deceit, and deadly intentions against himself, merely out of spite,
because she preferred not to live with him. This last view of the case
certainly makes Lord Byron more unaccountably wicked than the other.

The first supposition shows him to us as a man in an agony of
self-preservation; the second as a fiend, delighting in gratuitous deceit
and cruelty.

Again: a presumption of this crime appears in Lord Byron's admission, in
a letter to Moore, that he had an illegitimate child born before he left
England, and still living at the time.

In letter 307, to Mr. Moore, under date Venice, Feb. 2, 1818, Byron says,
speaking of Moore's loss of a child,--

'I know how to feel with you, because I am quite wrapped up in my own
children. Besides my little legitimate, I have made unto myself an
illegitimate since [since Ada's birth] to say nothing of one before;
and I look forward to one of these as the pillar of my old age,
supposing that I ever reach, as I hope I never shall, that desolating
period.'

The illegitimate child that he had made to himself since Ada's birth was
Allegra, born about nine or ten months after the separation. The other
illegitimate alluded to was born before, and, as the reader sees, was
spoken of as still living.

Moore appears to be puzzled to know who this child can be, and
conjectures that it may possibly be the child referred to in an early
poem, written, while a schoolboy of nineteen, at H