f the ordinary school-course of classical reading on such a
mind as his. She sketched boldly and clearly the internal life of the
young men of the time, as she, with her purer eyes, had looked through
it; and showed how habits, which, with less susceptible fibre, and
coarser strength of nature, were tolerable for his companions, were
deadly to him, unhinging his nervous system, and intensifying the dangers
of ancestral proclivities. Lady Byron expressed the feeling too, that
the Calvinistic theology, as heard in Scotland, had proved in his case,
as it often does in certain minds, a subtle poison. He never could
either disbelieve or become reconciled to it; and the sore problems it
proposes embittered his spirit against Christianity.

'The worst of it is, I do believe,' he would often say with violence,
when he had been employing all his powers of reason, wit, and ridicule
upon these subjects.

Through all this sorrowful history was to be seen, not the care of a
slandered woman to make her story good, but the pathetic anxiety of a
mother, who treasures every particle of hope, every intimation of good,
in the son whom she cannot cease to love. With indescribable
resignation, she dwelt on those last hours, those words addressed to her,
never to be understood till repeated in eternity.

But all this she looked upon as for ever past; believing, that, with the
dropping of the earthly life, these morbid impulses and influences
ceased, and that higher nature which he often so beautifully expressed in
his poems became the triumphant one.

While speaking on this subject, her pale ethereal face became luminous
with a heavenly radiance; there was something so sublime in her belief in
the victory of love over evil, that faith with her seemed to have become
sight. She seemed so clearly to perceive the divine ideal of the man she
had loved, and for whose salvation she had been called to suffer and
labour and pray, that all memories of his past unworthiness fell away,
and were lost.

Her love was never the doting fondness of weak women; it was the
appreciative and discriminating love by which a higher nature recognised
god-like capabilities under all the dust and defilement of misuse and
passion: and she never doubted that the love which in her was so strong,
that no injury or insult could shake it, was yet stronger in the God who
made her capable of such a devotion, and that in him it was accompanied
by power to subdue all t