as a lady at that time, double my own age, the mother of
several children who were perfect angels, with whom I formed a liaison
that continued without interruption for eight months. She told me she
was never in love till she was thirty, and I thought myself so with
her when she was forty. I never felt a stronger passion, which she
returned with equal ardour . . . . . . .

'Strange as it may seem, she gained, as all women do, an influence
over me so strong that I had great difficulty in breaking with her.'

Unfortunately, these statements, though probably exaggerated, are, for
substance, borne out in the history of the times. With every possible
abatement for exaggeration in these statements, there remains still
undoubted evidence from other sources that Lord Byron exercised a most
peculiar and fatal power over the moral sense of the women with whom he
was brought in relation; and that love for him, in many women, became a
sort of insanity, depriving them of the just use of their faculties. All
this makes his fatal history both possible and probable.

Even the article in 'Blackwood,' written in 1825 for the express purpose
of vindicating his character, admits that his name had been coupled with
those of three, four, or more women of rank, whom it speaks of as
'licentious, unprincipled, characterless women.'

That such a course, in connection with alternate extremes of excess and
abstinence in eating and drinking, and the immense draughts on the brain-
power of rapid and brilliant composition, should have ended in that
abnormal state in which cravings for unnatural vice give indications of
approaching brain-disease, seems only too probable.

This symptom of exhausted vitality becomes often a frequent type in
periods of very corrupt society. The dregs of the old Greek and Roman
civilisation were foul with it; and the apostle speaks of the turning of
the use of the natural into that which is against nature, as the last
step in abandonment.

The very literature of such periods marks their want of physical and
moral soundness. Having lost all sense of what is simple and natural and
pure, the mind delights to dwell on horrible ideas, which give a
shuddering sense of guilt and crime. All the writings of this fatal
period of Lord Byron's life are more or less intense histories of
unrepentant guilt and remorse or of unnatural crime. A recent writer in
'Temple Bar' brings to light the fact, that '