he intervals between masquerades
and balls, etc. It is with the physical results of such unnatural
efforts that we have now chiefly to do. Every physiologist would say
that the demands of such poems on a healthy brain, in that given space,
must have been exhausting; but when we consider that they were cheques
drawn on a bank broken by early extravagance, and that the subject was
prodigally spending vital forces in every other direction at the same
time, one can scarcely estimate the physiological madness of such a
course as Lord Byron's.

It is evident from his Journal, and Moore's account, that any amount of
physical force which was for the time restored by his first foreign
travel was recklessly spent in this period, when he threw himself with a
mad recklessness into London society in the time just preceding his
marriage. The revelations made in Moore's Memoir of this period are sad
enough: those to Medwin are so appalling as to the state of contemporary
society in England, as to require, at least, the benefit of the doubt for
which Lord Byron's habitual carelessness of truth gave scope. His
adventures with ladies of the highest rank in England are there paraded
with a freedom of detail that respect for womanhood must lead every woman
to question. The only thing that is unquestionable is, that Lord Byron
made these assertions to Medwin, not as remorseful confessions, but as
relations of his bonnes fortunes, and that Medwin published them in the
very face of the society to which they related.

When Lord Byron says, 'I have seen a great deal of Italian society, and
swum in a gondola; but nothing could equal the profligacy of high life in
England . . . when I knew it,' he makes certainly strong assertions, if
we remember what Mr. Moore reveals of the harem kept in Venice.

But when Lord Byron intimates that three married women in his own rank in
life, who had once held illicit relations with him, made wedding-visits
to his wife at one time, we must hope that he drew on his active
imagination, as he often did, in his statements in regard to women.

When he relates at large his amour with Lord Melbourne's wife, and
represents her as pursuing him with an insane passion, to which he with
difficulty responded; and when he says that she tracked a rival lady to
his lodgings, and came into them herself, disguised as a carman--one
hopes that he exaggerates. And what are we to make of passages like
this?--

'There w