r it our duty to make
up our deliberate opinion,--deliberate and decisive. Woe be to those
who provoke this curiosity, and will not allay it! Woe be to them!
say I. Woe to them! says the world.'

When Lady Byron published her statement, which certainly seemed called
for by this language, Christopher North blamed her for doing it, and then
again said that she ought to go on and tell the whole story. If she was
thus adjured to speak, blamed for speaking, and adjured to speak further,
all in one breath, by public prints, there is reason to think that there
could not have come less solicitation from private sources,--from friends
who had access to her at all hours, whom she loved, by whom she was
beloved, and to whom her refusal to explain might seem a breach of
friendship. Yet there is no evidence on record, that we have seen, that
she ever had other confidant than her legal counsel, till after all the
actors in the events were in their graves, and the daughter, for whose
sake largely the secret was guarded, had followed them.

Now, does anyone claim, that, because a woman has sacrificed for twenty
years all cravings for human sympathy, and all possibility of perfectly
free and unconstrained intercourse with her friends, that she is obliged
to go on bearing this same lonely burden to the end of her days?

Let anyone imagine the frightful constraint and solitude implied in this
sentence. Let anyone, too, think of its painful complications in life.
The roots of a falsehood are far-reaching. Conduct that can only be
explained by criminating another must often seem unreasonable and
unaccountable; and the most truthful person, who feels bound to keep
silence regarding a radical lie of another, must often be placed in
positions most trying to conscientiousness. The great merit of 'Caleb
Williams' as a novel consists in its philosophical analysis of the utter
helplessness of an innocent person who agrees to keep the secret of a
guilty one. One sees there how that necessity of silence produces all
the effect of falsehood on his part, and deprives him of the confidence
and sympathy of those with whom he would take refuge.

For years, this unnatural life was forced on Lady Byron, involving her as
in a network, even in her dearest family relations.

That, when all the parties were dead, Lady Byron should allow herself the
sympathy of a circle of intimate friends, is something so perfectly
proper and natural, tha