graphies of Cowper,
Burns, Byron, Johnson, Pope, and Haydon establish that the most
exalted intellectual conditions do not escape unscathed.

'In early childhood, this form of mental disturbance may, in many
cases, be detected. To its existence is often to be traced the
motiveless crimes of the young.'

No one can compare this passage of Dr. Forbes Winslow with the incidents
we have already cited as occurring in that fatal period before the
separation of Lord and Lady Byron, and not feel that the hapless young
wife was indeed struggling with those inflexible natural laws, which, at
some stages of retribution, involve in their awful sweep the guilty with
the innocent. She longed to save; but he was gone past redemption.
Alcoholic stimulants and licentious excesses, without doubt, had produced
those unseen changes in the brain, of which Dr. Forbes Winslow speaks;
and the results were terrible in proportion to the peculiar fineness and
delicacy of the organism deranged.

Alas! the history of Lady Byron is the history of too many women in every
rank of life who are called, in agonies of perplexity and fear, to watch
that gradual process by which physical excesses change the organism of
the brain, till slow, creeping, moral insanity comes on. The woman who
is the helpless victim of cruelties which only unnatural states of the
brain could invent, who is heart-sick to-day and dreads to-morrow,--looks
in hopeless horror on the fatal process by which a lover and a protector
changes under her eyes, from day to day, to a brute and a fiend.

Lady Byron's married life--alas! it is lived over in many a cottage and
tenement-house, with no understanding on either side of the cause of the
woeful misery.

Dr. Winslow truly says, 'The science of these brain-affections is yet in
its infancy in England.' At that time, it had not even begun to be.
Madness was a fixed point; and the inquiries into it had no nicety. Its
treatment, if established, had no redeeming power. Insanity simply
locked a man up as a dangerous being; and the very suggestion of it,
therefore, was resented as an injury.

A most peculiar and affecting feature of that form of brain disease which
hurries its victim, as by an overpowering mania, into crime, is, that
often the moral faculties and the affections remain to a degree
unimpaired, and protest with all their strength against the outrage.
Hence come conflicts and agonies of remorse proportion