impressions. I trust you understand my wishes, which never were to
injure Lord Byron in any way: for, though he would not suffer me to
remain his wife, he cannot prevent me from continuing his friend; and it
was from considering myself as such that I silenced the accusations by
which my own conduct might have been more fully justified. It is not
necessary to speak ill of his heart in general: it is sufficient that to
me it was hard and impenetrable; that my own must have been broken before
his could have been touched. I would rather represent this as my
misfortune than as his guilt; but surely that misfortune is not to be
made my crime! Such are my feelings: you will judge how to act. His
allusions to me in 'Childe Harold' are cruel and cold, but with such a
semblance as to make me appear so, and to attract all sympathy to
himself. It is said in this poem that hatred of him will be taught as a
lesson to his child. I might appeal to all who have ever heard me speak
of him, and still more to my own heart, to witness that there has been no
moment when I have remembered injury otherwise than affectionately and
sorrowfully. It is not my duty to give way to hopeless and wholly
unrequited affection; but, so long as I live, my chief struggle will
probably be not to remember him too kindly. I do not seek the sympathy
of the world; but I wish to be known by those whose opinion is valuable,
and whose kindness is clear to me. Among such, my dear Lady Anne, you
will ever be remembered by your truly affectionate,

'"A. BYRON."'

It is the province of your readers, and of the world at large, to judge
between the two testimonies now before them,--Lady Byron's in 1816 and
1818, and that put forward in 1869 by Mrs. B. Stowe, as communicated by
Lady Byron thirteen years ago. In the face of the evidence now given,
positive, negative, and circumstantial, there can be but two alternatives
in the case: either Mrs. B. Stowe must have entirely misunderstood Lady
Byron, and been thus led into error and misstatement; or we must conclude
that, under the pressure of a lifelong and secret sorrow, Lady Byron's
mind had become clouded with an hallucination in respect of the
particular point in question.

The reader will admire the noble but severe character displayed in Lady
Byron's letter; but those who keep in view what her first impressions
were, as above recorded, may probably place a more lenient in