rse of action. Her playful letter on leaving she
seems to defend on the ground of the fear of personal violence. Till Lord
Byron's death the intimacy between his wife and sister remained unbroken;
through the latter he continued to send numerous messages to the former,
and to his child, who became a ward in Chancery; but at a later date it
began to cool. On the appearance of Lady Byron's letter, in answer to
Moore's first volume, Augusta speaks of it as "a despicable tirade," feels
"disgusted at such unfeeling conduct," and thinks "nothing can justify any
one in defaming the dead." Soon after 1830 they had an open rupture on a
matter of business, which was never really healed, though the then
Puritanic precisian sent a message of relenting to Mrs. Leigh on her
death-bed (1851).

The charge or charges which, during her husband's life, Lady Byron from
magnanimity or other motive reserved, she is ascertained after his death
to have delivered with important modifications to various persons, with
little regard to their capacity for reading evidence or to their
discretion. On one occasion her choice of a confidante was singularly
unfortunate. "These," wrote Lord Byron in his youth, "these are the first
tidings that have ever sounded like fame in my ears--to be redde on the
banks of the Ohio." Strangely enough, it is from the country of
Washington, whom the poet was wont to reverence as the purest patriot of
the modern world, that in 1869 there emanated the hideous story which
scandalized both continents, and ultimately recoiled on the retailer of
the scandal. The grounds of the reckless charge have been weighed by those
who have wished it to prove false, and by those who have wished it to
prove true, and found wanting. The chaff has been beaten in every way and
on all sides, without yielding an ounce of grain; and it were ill-advised
to rake up the noxious dust that alone remains. From nothing left on
record by either of the two persons most intimately concerned can we
derive any reliable information. It is plain that Lady Byron was during
the later years of her life the victim of hallucinations, and that if
Byron knew the secret, which he denies, he did not choose to tell it,
putting off Captain Medwin and others with absurdities, as that "He did
not like to see women eat," or with commonplaces, as "The causes, my dear
sir, were too simple to be found out."

Thomas Moore, who had the Memoirs[3] supposed to have thrown light