lings which might be supposed to influence those in the country
and station in life where the events really happened, in order that she
might be helped by such a person's views in making up an opinion as to
her own duty.

The interview had almost the solemnity of a death-bed avowal. Lady Byron
stated the facts which have been embodied in this article, and gave to
the writer a paper containing a brief memorandum of the whole, with the
dates affixed.

We have already spoken of that singular sense of the reality of the
spiritual world which seemed to encompass Lady Byron during the last part
of her life, and which made her words and actions seem more like those of
a blessed being detached from earth than of an ordinary mortal. All her
modes of looking at things, all her motives of action, all her
involuntary exhibitions of emotion, were so high above any common level,
and so entirely regulated by the most unworldly causes, that it would
seem difficult to make the ordinary world understand exactly how the
thing seemed to lie before her mind. What impressed the writer more
strongly than anything else was Lady Byron's perfect conviction that her
husband was now a redeemed spirit; that he looked back with pain and
shame and regret on all that was unworthy in his past life; and that, if
he could speak or could act in the case, he would desire to prevent the
further circulation of base falsehoods, and of seductive poetry, which
had been made the vehicle of morbid and unworthy passions.

Lady Byron's experience had led her to apply the powers of her strong
philosophical mind to the study of mental pathology: and she had become
satisfied that the solution of the painful problem which first occurred
to her as a young wife, was, after all, the true one; namely, that Lord
Byron had been one of those unfortunately constituted persons in whom the
balance of nature is so critically hung, that it is always in danger of
dipping towards insanity; and that, in certain periods of his life, he
was so far under the influence of mental disorder as not to be fully
responsible for his actions.

She went over with a brief and clear analysis the history of his whole
life as she had thought it out during the lonely musings of her
widowhood. She dwelt on the ancestral causes that gave him a nature of
exceptional and dangerous susceptibility. She went through the
mismanagements of his childhood, the history of his school-days, the
influence o