ging all the best feelings of female
honour, affection, and confidence, how small a part of chivalry is that
which remains to the descendant of the Byrons!--a gloomy visor and a
deadly weapon!

'Those who are acquainted (and who is not?) with the main incidents in
the private life of Lord Byron, and who have not seen this production,
will scarcely believe that malignity should have carried him so far as to
make him commence a filthy and impious poem with an elaborate satire on
the character and manners of his wife, from whom, even by his own
confession, he has been separated only in consequence of his own cruel
and heartless misconduct. It is in vain for Lord Byron to attempt in any
way to justify his own behaviour in that affair; and, now that he has so
openly and audaciously invited inquiry and reproach, we do not see any
good reason why he should not be plainly told so by the general voice of
his countrymen. It would not be an easy matter to persuade any man who
has any knowledge of the nature of woman, that a female such as Lord
Byron has himself described his wife to be would rashly or hastily or
lightly separate herself from the love with which she had once been
inspired for such a man as he is or was. Had he not heaped insult upon
insult, and scorn upon scorn, had he not forced the iron of his contempt
into her very soul, there is no woman of delicacy and virtue, as he
admitted Lady Byron to be, who would not have hoped all things, and
suffered all things, from one, her love of whom must have been inwoven
with so many exalting elements of delicious pride, and more delicious
humility. To offend the love of such a woman was wrong, but it might be
forgiven; to desert her was unmanly, but he might have returned, and
wiped for ever from her eyes the tears of her desertion: but to injure
and to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widowed privacy with
unhallowed strains of cold-blooded mockery, was brutally, fiendishly,
inexpiably mean. For impurities there might be some possibility of
pardon, were they supposed to spring only from the reckless buoyancy of
young blood and fiery passions; for impiety there might at least be pity,
were it visible that the misery of the impious soul equalled its
darkness: but for offences such as this, which cannot proceed either from
the madness of sudden impulse or the bewildered agonies of doubt, but
which speak the wilful and determined spite of an unrepenting,
unsoftened,