from you a fair hearing. Now, as I have done you this
justice, will you also do me the justice to hear me seriously and
candidly?

What interest have you or I, my brother and my sister, in this short life
of ours, to utter anything but the truth? Is not truth between man and
man and between man and woman the foundation on which all things rest?
Have you not, every individual of you, who must hereafter give an account
yourself alone to God, an interest to know the exact truth in this
matter, and a duty to perform as respects that truth? Hear me, then,
while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my course in
relation to it.

A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the 'Blackwood'
of July 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of criminals, and
recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public as interesting from
the very fact that it was the avowed production of Lord Byron's mistress.
No efficient protest was made against this outrage in England, and
Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the 'Blackwood' article, and the
Harpers, the largest publishing house in America, perhaps in the world,
re-published the book.

Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and
other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the young
reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them advertised in
dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and thus the generation
of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron but by these fables of
her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The friends who knew her
personally were a small select circle in England, whom death is every day
reducing. They were few in number compared with the great world, and
were _silent_. I saw these foul slanders crystallising into history
uncontradicted by friends who knew her personally, who, firm in their own
knowledge of her virtues and limited in view as aristocratic circles
generally are, had no idea of the width of the world they were living in,
and the exigency of the crisis. When time passed on and no voice was
raised, I spoke. I gave at first a simple story, for I knew
instinctively that whoever put the first steel point of truth into this
dark cloud of slander must wait for the storm to spend itself. I must
say the storm exceeded my expectations, and has raged loud and long. But
now that there is a comparative stillness I shall proceed, first, to
prove what I ha