was attached to another.' Her replies poured in, some addressed to him, some to Lady Oxford-now 'wild headstrong and vainly threatening herself, etc., etc.,' now full of reproaches, now propounding a number of unanswerable questions' to Lady Oxford, now demanding an interview, now 'threatening to visit Eywood in all her terrors' or to write to Lord Oxford. Now she adopted a bullying tone, 'learned in Ireland.' 'She will not,' Byron tells Lady Melbourne, 'give up my letters. I will deliver up hers nevertheless, and mine she may make the most of -the Editor of any Magazine will treat with her for them on moderate terms.' She burned him in effigy at Brocket for the amusement of local newspapers. She scratched herself with a knife at some social entertainment because he spoke of her coldly. She made a scene at a masquerade. She forged a letter from him to Mr Murray and obtained possession of his picture. She sent out her pages with a travesty of his family motto on their livery buttons. She tried to make mischief between him and Lady Melbourne, or between him and Lord Clare, Moore, and Hobhouse. She read a private letter from him to Lady Melbourne, to the latter's great disgust and annoyance. She tampered-so he suspected -with his servants, in order to obtain information as to his movements. Disguised as a page, she obtained admission to his rooms, and ransacked his papers. She told her story here, there, and everywhere.

Her ubiquitous persistence told on Byron's nerves. There is comic exasperation in such expressions as 'Good God! am I to be hunted from place to place like a Russian bear or Emperor?' or 'I am sure since the days of the Dove in the Ark, no animal has had such a time of it as I-no rest anywhere.' But there is deadly earnest in the letter of June 26, 1814:

'She may hunt me down-it is the power of any mad or bad woman to do so by any man-but snare me she shall not; torment me she may; how am I to bar myself from her! I am already almost a prisoner: she has no shame, no feeling, no one estimable quality. . If there is one human being whom I do utterly detest and abhor, it is she; and, all things considered, I feel to myself justified in so doing. She has been an adder in my path ever since my return to this country; she has often belied and sometimes betrayed me;

...

she has crossed me everywhere, and worried and grieved and been a curse to me and mine. You may show her this if you please-or to any one you please: if these were the last words I were to write upon earth, I would not revoke one letter except to make it more legible.'

Never did two lovers torture one another more cruelly. Byron was still faced by the alternative of flight or marriage. He again chose the latter.

In the case of Lady Caroline, Byron establishes some claim to sympathy and on one point to approval. Lady Melbourne and he were working together; and it was, therefore, natural that he should keep her informed of the doings of her daughter-in-law. But his circumstantial account of his affair with Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster stands on a different footing. That he should have told the story at all was bad taste; that he should have told it for the amusement of Lady Melbourne leaves an unpleasant impression of both of them. His enclosure of one of the letters received from Lady Frances is an unpardonable betrayal. The story gives minute details in a number of letters which are among the wittiest and most spirited in the new collection. Its morality has only one redeeming feature. Byron shrank from taking advantage of what he believed to be his opportunity. The self-restraint is to his credit. Lady Melbourne seems to have suspected that the affections of Lady Frances were not seriously engaged. That the young woman was amusing herself at Byron's expense is possible, and, unless her character developed with extreme rapidity, not improbable. Eighteen months later, Lady Caroline Lamb met her at Brussels, immediately after the Battle of Waterloo. Lady Caroline, writing of her to Lady Melbourne, reports that the Duke of Wellington fell so 'desperately in love with her and two others' that he did not reach the battle in time. . . . She is most affected. Perhaps a certain rivalship makes me see her less favourably: but indeed Lady F. Webster is too ridiculous.' Lady Melbourne seems to have told Lady Caroline the story in order to cure her of her infatuation. Did she drop other hints with the same object to her daughter-in-law?

In April 1816, society proclaimed Byron an outcast. His departure from England was the execution of a

previously arranged plan of an extended tour on the Continent. That he never returned was the result of subsequent circumstances. His apparent flight, combined with his acceptance of the separation, confirmed whatever scandals were afloat. In his own interest and that of others he would have been wiser to 'face the music.' He himself stated, and, so far as is known, the statement has never been disputed, that he only agreed to the separation because his wife appealed to his previous promise that, if she wanted it, he would not oppose her wish. The mischief was aggravated by his joining Shelley in Switzerland. In the days of the Regency, his association with that delicate high-souled nature was regarded as the lowest depth of his moral downfall. It is a striking commentary on the fallacies of contemporary judgments.

It is a relief, in the second volume, to return to the society of Byron's men-friends in the familiar world of the previously published correspondence. There are fresh details, but no novelties except the very valuable series of Shelley's letters-serious, earnest, and slightly formal. Once more the reiterated demands for 'Calcined Magnesia' and 'tooth-powder,' 'red only,' strike us between the shoulders like a southern sun or a boisterous friend. The new letters maintain the previous impression of mental power. They are distinguished by the same qualities of vitality, vivacity, and versatility. They are full of shrewd comments-often witty, sometimes penetrating-on men, affairs, and literature, of apt quotations, of humorous incidents humorously described, of boyish outbursts of almost buffooning fun. At one moment he endures criticism with good-humoured patience; in the next he explodes with comic rage at 'that rugged rhinoceros Murray,' or at the 'eternal dawdling' of his man of parchments, and wishes that his friends were all damned from Pylades to the present day.' Few of his friends' letters are extant. From his own it might be inferred that, with the glorious exception of Shelley, they were more lavish of criticism than of praise. If so, it is permissible to regret the tone. The bad opinions that were entertained of him by the public stimulated him to their justification

rather than to their reversal. 'Baby Byron,' as his sister called him, never outgrew many of the childlike qualities which great poets are sometimes privileged to preserve. And he was a hurt child, wounded in his affections, his pride, his vanities. Two new letters from Hobhouse, printed in the second volume, are, from this point of view, peculiarly pathetic. They came too late. Byron was dead. He was denied the pleasure of knowing how dear he was to his friends in England, how many they were, and with what pride and hope they were watching his career in Greece.

A fortnight after his arrival in Venice, Byron writes to Kinnaird (Nov. 27, 1816), 'I have fallen in love, and with a very pretty woman.' The Segati household was extraordinary enough. The interior of his own insanitary malaria-haunted palace is even stranger and more debased. Rival mistresses quarrel with Italian volubility and violence. Fletcher, 'the man of learning,' with his 'foolish face,' stands helpless. The monkeys chatter. Matz,' patient with age, sits with a biscuit on his nose. The two younger mastiffs gambol round the little Allegra. The master makes love in the salon, the Swiss valet from the hall window. It was an orgy of bitterness and despair, which nearly destroyed him physically. He was saved by the visits of his friends, by his daily rides on the Lido, and, above all, by his literary work. If he was, as he says, 'dissolute by night,' he was also 'studious by day.' Never was the duality of his personality more strikingly displayed. During these three degraded years, on which he looked back with loathing, he completed or produced the third and fourth Cantos of 'Childe Harold,' "Manfred,' 'Mazeppa,' the Lament of Tasso,' 'Beppo,' the two first Cantos of 'Don Juan.' At the time, he did more than any other writer of his age to interpret to his fellow-countrymen the scenery, art, and letters of the Continent, and in turn, exile though he was, to impress Europe through his writings with the existence of an English literature. His poetry does not attempt to soar into the higher world of the prophet or the moralist. But, in compass and in variety of style, the achievement is remarkable. At no other period of his career is it more necessary to bring this parallel revelation of himself into the account in any final estimate of

his complex character. Callous he was not. Without reading into his poetry any facts of his life, there is no more impassioned expression of the feeling of remorse than is to be found in Manfred.' It is a personal cry wrung from the depths.

The later years in Italy were regulated by the influence of the Countess Guiccioli. Their story is too familiar to be retold. The new letters confirm or settle some minor points of controversy in Byron's favour. He was, for instance, neither niggardly to Shelley nor unkind to his widow. On the contrary, he lent his brother-poet money, refused his legacy, and treated Mary Shelley with a kindness for which she repeatedly expressed her gratitude. The very serious charge of suppressing the letter which Mary Shelley entrusted to him to forward to Hoppner, is found to be incapable of proof. That he behaved harshly to Clare Clairmont appears to be true. But nothing is known of his reasons for refusing to see or write to her. It is the brutality of his expressions rather than his conduct that Shelley condemns. Both he and his wife approved of his insisting on the custody of the child. 'I feel,' writes Shelley, 'more and more strongly the wisdom of your firmness on the subject. . . . Allegra's happiness depends upon your perseverance.' The child's death was a blow which he felt acutely. He never could bear to mention her

name.

In the spring of 1823, Byron was settled at the Casa Salucci near Genoa in the company of the Countess Guiccioli, her father Count Gamba, and his family. The association had lasted four years. The tie may have been no longer cherished. It may have been worn as a fetter. Its duration may have depended more on circumstances than on affection. For Byron's sake, Teresa Guiccioli had fled from her husband's house. Partly on account of the association with Byron, Count Gamba had been exiled from Ravenna, and he and his son had been expelled from Tuscan territory. So long as these circumstances lasted, honour forbade him to seek freedom. Suddenly a change came. By the intervention of the Pope, Count Gamba was recalled from exile on the condition that he brought his daughter home with him. Her husband was willing to take her