st two
years in refusing five or six of his acquaintance; that he had no idea
she loved him, admitting that it was an old attachment on his part. He
dwells on her virtues with a sort of pride of ownership. There is a sort
of childish levity about the frankness of these letters, very
characteristic of the man who skimmed over the deepest abysses with the
lightest jests. Before the world, and to his intimates, he was acting
the part of the successful fiance, conscious all the while of the deadly
secret that lay cold at the bottom of his heart.

When he went to visit Miss Milbanke's parents as her accepted lover, she
was struck with his manner and appearance: she saw him moody and gloomy,
evidently wrestling with dark and desperate thoughts, and anything but
what a happy and accepted lover should be. She sought an interview with
him alone, and told him that she had observed that he was not happy in
the engagement; and magnanimously added, that, if on review, he found he
had been mistaken in the nature of his feelings, she would immediately
release him, and they should remain only friends.

Overcome with the conflict of his feelings, Lord Byron fainted away. Miss
Milbanke was convinced that his heart must really be deeply involved in
an attachment with reference to which he showed such strength of emotion,
and she spoke no more of a dissolution of the engagement.

There is no reason to doubt that Byron was, as he relates in his 'Dream,'
profoundly agonized and agitated when he stood before God's altar with
the trusting young creature whom he was leading to a fate so awfully
tragic; yet it was not the memory of Mary Chaworth, but another guiltier
and more damning memory, that overshadowed that hour.

The moment the carriage-doors were shut upon the bridegroom and the
bride, the paroxysm of remorse and despair--unrepentant remorse and angry
despair--broke forth upon her gentle head:--

'You might have saved me from this, madam! You had all in your own power
when I offered myself to you first. Then you might have made me what you
pleased; but now you will find that you have married a devil!'

In Miss Martineau's Sketches, recently published, is an account of the
termination of this wedding-journey, which brought them to one of Lady
Byron's ancestral country seats, where they were to spend the honeymoon.

Miss Martineau says,--

'At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice; but before
sunset of that wi