n it for
more than two years, and had my reward; I broke through the thraldom of
that powerful spell, and all the noble beauty of those poems remained to
me thenceforth divested of the power of wild excitement they had
exercised over me. A great many years after this girlish effort and
sacrifice, Lady Byron, who was a highly esteemed friend of mine, spoke
to me upon the subject of a new and cheap edition of her husband's works
about to be published, and likely to be widely disseminated among the
young clerk and shopkeeper class of readers, for whom she deprecated
extremely the pernicious influence it was calculated to produce. She
consulted me on the expediency of appending to it some notice of Lord
Byron written by herself, which she thought might modify or lessen the
injurious effect of his poetry upon young minds. "Nobody," she said,
"knew him as I did" (this certainly was not the general impression upon
the subject); "nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him
what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and
therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the
injury he might do to others, in some of his writings." I was strongly
impressed by the earnestness of her expression, which seemed to me one
of affectionate compassion for Byron and profound solicitude lest, even
in his grave, he should incur the responsibility of yet further evil
influence, especially on the minds of the young. I could not help
wondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a new
generation and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule and
condemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathy
for suffering or relenting toward repentance. I had always admired the
reticent dignity of her silence with reference to her short and
disastrous union with Lord Byron, and I felt sorry, therefore, that she
contemplated departing from the course she had thus far steadfastly
pursued, though I appreciated the motive by which she was actuated. I
could not but think, however, that she overestimated the mischief
Byron's poetry was likely to do the young men of 1850, highly
prejudicial as it undoubtedly was to those of his day, illustrated, so
to speak, by the bad notoriety of his own character and career. But the
generation of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens,
and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me little
likely to be i