fatalities of
his short year of trial, as husband, lay. From the reputation which he
had previously acquired for gallantries, and the sort of reckless and
boyish levity to which--often in very "bitterness of soul"--he gave way,
it was not difficult to bring suspicion upon some of those acquaintances
which his frequent intercourse with the green-room induced him to form,
or even (as, in one instance, was the case,) to connect with his name
injuriously that of a person to whom he had scarcely ever addressed a
single word.

Notwithstanding, however, this ill-starred concurrence of
circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper
or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded,
to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon
ended in disunion, is to be traced. "In all the marriages I have ever
seen," says Steele, "most of which have been unhappy ones, the great
cause of evil has proceeded from slight occasions;" and to this remark,
I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be found, upon
enquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at
Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a
few words, the whole pith of the mystery. An English gentleman with whom
he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to
enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the
separation, the noble poet, who had seemed much amused with their
absurdity and falsehood, said, after listening to them all,--"The
causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be easily found out."

In truth, the circumstances, so unexampled, that attended their
separation,--the last words of the parting wife to the husband being
those of the most playful affection, while the language of the deserted
husband towards the wife was in a strain, as the world knows, of
tenderest eulogy,--are in themselves a sufficient proof that, at the
time of their parting, there could have been no very deep sense of
injury on either side. It was not till afterwards that, in both bosoms,
the repulsive force came into operation,--when, to the party which had
taken the first decisive step in the strife, it became naturally a point
of pride to persevere in it with dignity, and this unbendingness
provoked, as naturally, in the haughty spirit of the other, a strong
feeling of resentment which overflowed, at last, in acrimony and scorn.
If there