have from all sides similar
testimony to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees
to exclaim, "That pale face is my fate!"

Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently
with the poet's relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in
this regard the same excessive stretch of charity. "Dear Childe Harold,"
exclaims the German professor, "was positively besieged by women. They
have, in truth, no right to complain of him: from his childhood he had
seen them on their worst side." It is the casuistry of hero-worship to
deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but
in his prevailing views of their character and claims. "I regard them," he
says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant
petulance, "as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in
their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The
whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of
the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as
grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of
one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a
woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content."

In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of
Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the
shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the
above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or
Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however,
during "the day of his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the
blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of
his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and
affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence
to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as
prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who
had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing
books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales,
often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and
spoilt, and "beguiled too long;" by the other, "betrayed too late." The
recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the
process o