aps more easily than nearer
connections. For my own part, I am violent, but not malignant; for only
fresh provocations can awaken my resentments. To you, who are colder and
more concentrated, I would just hint, that you may sometimes mistake the
depth of a cold anger for dignity, and a worse feeling for duty. I
assure you that I bear you now (whatever I may have done) no resentment
whatever. Remember, that, if you have injured me in aught, this
forgiveness is something; and that, if I have injured you, it is
something more still, if it be true, as the moralists say, that the most
offending are the least forgiving.

'Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on
yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things; viz.,
that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again.
I think, if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference
to myself, it will be better for all three.

'Yours ever,

'NOEL BYRON.'

The artless Thomas Moore introduces this letter in the 'Life,' with the
remark,--

'There are few, I should think, of my readers, who will not agree with me
in pronouncing, that, if the author of the following letter had not right
on his side, he had at least most of those good feelings which are found
in general to accompany it.'

The reader is requested to take notice of the important admission; that
the letter was never sent to Lady Byron at all. It was, in fact, never
intended for her, but was a nice little dramatic performance, composed
simply with the view of acting on the sympathies of Lady Blessington and
Byron's numerous female admirers; and the reader will agree with us, we
think, that, in this point of view, it was very neatly done, and deserves
immortality as a work of high art. For six years he had been plunged
into every kind of vice and excess, pleading his shattered domestic joys,
and his wife's obdurate heart, as the apology and the impelling cause;
filling the air with his shrieks and complaints concerning the slander
which pursued him, while he filled letters to his confidential
correspondents with records of new mistresses. During all these years,
the silence of Lady Byron was unbroken; though Lord Byron not only drew
in private on the sympathies of his female admirers, but employed his
talents and position as an author in holding her up to contempt