d to
sustain it; both which, as we understand, are now in the hands of her
trustees.

CHAPTER VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT.

The credibility of the accusation of the unnatural crime charged to Lord
Byron is greater than if charged to most men. He was born of parents
both of whom were remarkable for perfectly ungoverned passions. There
appears to be historical evidence that he was speaking literal truth when
he says to Medwin of his father,--

'He would have made a bad hero for Hannah More. He ran out three
fortunes, and married or ran away with three women . . . He seemed
born for his own ruin and that of the other sex. He began by seducing
Lady Carmarthen, and spent her four thousand pounds; and, not content
with one adventure of this kind, afterwards eloped with Miss
Gordon.'--Medwin's Conversations, p.31.

Lady Carmarthen here spoken of was the mother of Mrs. Leigh. Miss Gordon
became Lord Byron's mother.

By his own account, and that of Moore, she was a passionate, ungoverned,
though affectionate woman. Lord Byron says to Medwin,--

'I lost my father when I was only six years of age. My mother, when
she was in a passion with me (and I gave her cause enough), used to
say, "O you little dog! you are a Byron all over; you are as bad as
your father!"'--Ibid., p.37.

By all the accounts of his childhood and early youth, it is made apparent
that ancestral causes had sent him into the world with a most perilous
and exceptional sensitiveness of brain and nervous system, which it would
have required the most judicious course of education to direct safely and
happily.

Lord Byron often speaks as if he deemed himself subject to tendencies
which might terminate in insanity. The idea is so often mentioned and
dwelt upon in his letters, journals, and conversations, that we cannot
but ascribe it to some very peculiar experience, and not to mere
affectation.

But, in the history of his early childhood and youth, we see no evidence
of any original malformation of nature. We see only evidence of one of
those organisations, full of hope and full of peril, which adverse
influences might easily drive to insanity, but wise physiological
training and judicious moral culture might have guided to the most
splendid results. But of these he had neither. He was alternately the
pet and victim of his mother's tumultuous nature, and equally injured
both by her love and her anger. A S