, not only
in England but in France and Germany, wherever Byron's poetry appeared in
translation.

Lady Byron's obdurate cold-heartedness in refusing even to listen to his
prayers, or to have any intercourse with him which might lead to
reconciliation, was the one point conceded on all sides.

The stricter moralists defended her; but gentler hearts throughout all
the world regarded her as a marble-hearted monster of correctness and
morality, a personification of the law unmitigated by the gospel.

Literature in its highest walks busied itself with Lady Byron. Hogg, in
the character of the Ettrick Shepherd, devotes several eloquent passages
to expatiating on the conjugal fidelity of a poor Highland shepherd's
wife, who, by patience and prayer and forgiveness, succeeds in reclaiming
her drunken husband, and making a good man of him; and then points his
moral by contrasting with this touching picture the cold-hearted
pharisaical correctness of Lady Byron.

Moore, in his 'Life of Lord Byron,' when beginning the recital of the
series of disgraceful amours which formed the staple of his life in
Venice, has this passage:--

'Highly censurable in point of morality and decorum as was his course of
life while under the roof of Madame ----, it was (with pain I am forced
to confess) venial in comparison with the strange, headlong career of
licence to which, when weaned from that connection, he so unrestrainedly,
and, it may be added, defyingly abandoned himself. Of the state of his
mind on leaving England, I have already endeavoured to convey some idea;
and among the feelings that went to make up that self-centred spirit of
resistance which he then opposed to his fate was an indignant scorn for
his own countrymen for the wrongs he thought they had done him. For a
time, the kindly sentiments which he still harboured toward Lady Byron,
and a sort of vague hope, perhaps, that all would yet come right again,
kept his mind in a mood somewhat more softened and docile, as well as
sufficiently under the influence of English opinions to prevent his
breaking out into open rebellion against it, as he unluckily did
afterward.

'By the failure of the attempted mediation with Lady Byron, his last link
with home was severed: while, notwithstanding the quiet and unobtrusive
life which he led at Geneva, there was as yet, he found, no cessation of
the slanderous warfare against his character; the same busy and
misrepresenting spirit which