Lady Byron, under the severest temptations and the
bitterest insults and injuries, withheld every word by which Lord Byron
could be criminated, so long as he and his sister were living, is strong
evidence, that, when she did speak, it was not under the influence of ill-
will, but of pure conscientious convictions; and the fullest weight
ought, therefore, to be given to her testimony.

We are asked now why she ever spoke at all. The fact that her story is
known to several persons in England is brought up as if it were a crime.
To this we answer, Lady Byron had an undoubted moral right to have
exposed the whole story in a public court in 1816, and thus cut herself
loose from her husband by a divorce. For the sake of saving her husband
and sister from destruction, she waived this right to self-justification,
and stood for years a silent sufferer under calumny and
misrepresentation. She desired nothing but to retire from the whole
subject; to be permitted to enjoy with her child the peace and seclusion
that belong to her sex. Her husband made her, through his life and after
his death, a subject of such constant discussion, that she must either
abandon the current literature of her day, or run the risk of reading
more or less about herself in almost every magazine of her time.
Conversations with Lord Byron, notes of interviews with Lord Byron,
journals of time spent with Lord Byron, were constantly spread before the
public. Leigh Hunt, Galt, Medwin, Trelawney, Lady Blessington, Dr.
Kennedy, and Thomas Moore, all poured forth their memorials; and in all
she figured prominently. All these had their tribes of reviewers and
critics, who also discussed her. The profound mystery of her silence
seemed constantly to provoke inquiry. People could not forgive her for
not speaking. Her privacy, retirement, and silence were set down as
coldness, haughtiness, and contempt of human sympathy. She was
constantly challenged to say something: as, for example, in the 'Noctes'
of November 1825, six months after Byron's death, Christopher North says,
speaking of the burning of the Autobiography,--

'I think, since the Memoir was burned by these people, these people
are bound to put us in possession of the best evidence they still have
the power of producing, in order that we may come to a just conclusion
as to a subject upon which, by their act, at least, as much as by any
other people's act, we are compelled to conside