nfected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with a
degree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy.
I urged this my conviction upon her, as rendering less necessary than
she imagined the antidote she was anxious to append to the poison of the
new edition of her husband's works. But to this she replied that she had
derived her impression of the probable mischief to a class peculiarly
interesting to him, from Frederick Robertson, and of course his opinion
was more than an overweight for mine.

Lady Byron did not, however, fulfill her purpose of prefacing the
contemplated edition of Byron's poems with a notice of him by herself,
which I think very likely to have been a suggestion of Mr. Robertson's
to her.

My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house in
James Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdened
with care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which were
rapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment. My father toiled
incessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had set
steadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder and
more hopeless. I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details of
this dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror I
experienced when one day my father said at dinner, "I have had a new
experience to-day: I have been arrested for the first time in my life."
I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; he
said he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never was
afterward. Through all the severe labor of his professional life, and
his strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brothers
like gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he never
incurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he went
along, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully,
"owing no man any thing." But the suit in question was brought against
him as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which the
theater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriended
and helped forward, and who had always professed the most sincere
gratitude and attachment to him. The constantly darkening prospects of
that unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father used
to speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it
(and Heaven knows it was not