holy and the unholy in that
spirit? to prove, by the very degradation of the one, how high the
other was. A character is never done justice to by extenuating its
faults: so I do not agree to nisi bonum. It is kinder to read the
blotted page.'

These letters show that Lady Byron's idea was that, even were the whole
mournful truth about Lord Byron fully told, there was still a foundation
left for pity and mercy. She seems to have remembered, that if his sins
were peculiar, so also were his temptations; and to have schooled herself
for years to gather up, and set in order in her memory, all that yet
remained precious in this great ruin. Probably no English writer that
ever has made the attempt could have done this more perfectly. Though
Lady Byron was not a poet par excellence, yet she belonged to an order of
souls fully equal to Lord Byron. Hers was more the analytical mind of
the philosopher than the creative mind of the poet; and it was, for that
reason, the one mind in our day capable of estimating him fully both with
justice and mercy. No person in England had a more intense sensibility
to genius, in its loftier acceptation, than Lady Byron; and none more
completely sympathised with what was pure and exalted in her husband's
writings.

There is this peculiarity in Lord Byron, that the pure and the impure in
his poetry often run side by side without mixing,--as one may see at
Geneva the muddy stream of the Arve and the blue waters of the Rhone
flowing together unmingled. What, for example, can be nobler, and in a
higher and tenderer moral strain than his lines on the dying gladiator,
in 'Childe Harold'? What is more like the vigour of the old Hebrew
Scriptures than his thunderstorm in the Alps? What can more perfectly
express moral ideality of the highest kind than the exquisite
descriptions of Aurora Raby,--pure and high in thought and language,
occurring, as they do, in a work full of the most utter vileness?

Lady Byron's hopes for her husband fastened themselves on all the noble
fragments yet remaining in that shattered temple of his mind which lay
blackened and thunder-riven; and she looked forward to a sphere beyond
this earth, where infinite mercy should bring all again to symmetry and
order. If the strict theologian must regret this as an undue latitude of
charity, let it at least be remembered that it was a charity which sprang
from a Christian virtue, and which she extended to every