I do not require these questions to be answered to me, but to your own heart * * * * Will you see me?—when and where you please-in whose presence you please **** It is torture to correspond thus **** You are much changed within these twenty days, or you would never have thus poisoned your own better feelings and trampled on mine.

'Ever yours most truly and affect'.'

And yet again, on the 15th of February, he wrote:

'I know not what to say, every step taken appears to bear you further from me, and to widen the gulf between thee and me. I have invited your return; it has been refused. I have requested to know with what I am charged, it is refused. . . And now, Bell, dearest Bell, I can only say in the truth of affliction . . . that I love you. and shall do, to the dregs of my memory and existence.'

...

Through all his correspondence at that time with his wife and her father, of which we have given but imperfect extracts, he had the concurrence and support of his sister. May we not ask whether the most case-hardened villain would have dared to indite such appeals, if guilty, when he knew that he laid himself open to a direct and crushing retort? And, however far the man might have dared to go, would the woman in such a case have encouraged or allowed him to run the risk?

It is impossible here to follow minutely the course of the ensuing negotiations. During their progress rumours reached Byron and his friends which made them insist upon knowing whether this infamous insinuation formed any part of his wife's charges against him; and it was not until it had been formally disavowed in a document dated March 9, 1816, signed by Lady Byron and witnessed by Mr Wilmot, her relative and representative, that Byron consented to the principle of a separation.

In the meantime every line written by Lady Byron gives directly or indirectly the lie to her subsequent affectation of belief. By way of illustration, we take some extracts from letters written by her to Augusta during January and February 1816, the italics being again ours.

'KIRKBY MALLORY.

'MY DEAREST A.,-It is my greatest comfort that you are in Piccadilly.'

'KIRKBY MALLORY.

'Jan. 23, 1816.

'DEAREST A.,-I know you feel for me, as I do for you, and perhaps I am better understood than I think. You have been, ever since I knew you, my best comforter, and will so remain, unless you grow tired of the Office, which may well be.'

'January 25, 1816.

'MY DEAREST AUGUSTA,-Shall I still be your sister? I must resign my rights to be so considered; but I don't think that will make any difference in the kindness I have so uniformly experienced from you.'

It is necessary to give the following letter in full; it is dated February 3, 1816:

'MY DEAREST Augusta,—You are desired by your brother to ask if my father has acted with my concurrence in proposing a separation. He has. It cannot be supposed that in my present distressing situation I am capable of stating in a detailed manner the reasons which not only justify this measure, but compel me to take it; and it can never be my wish to remember unnecessarily those injuries for which, however deep, I feel no resentment. I will now only recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and insurmountable aversion to the married state, and the desire and determination he has expressed ever since its commencement to free himself from that bondage, as finding it quite insupportable-though candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or affection has been wanting on my part. He has too painfully convinced me that all those attempts to contribute towards his happiness were wholly useless and most unwelcome to him. 'Ever yours most affectionately,

'A. J. BYRON.'

She followed up this, next day, with a request that Augusta would show it to her brother, as it was very important that, in view of a letter which he had written to her, he should know its contents. Three days afterwards, in answer to one of the loving and imploring letters from Byron to which we have already referred, she writes referring him to this last letter to Augusta for 'fuller particulars.' She upbraids him for his persistent ill-treatment, and adds,

'After seriously and dispassionately reviewing the misery I have experienced, almost without an interval, from the day

of my marriage, I have finally determined on the measure of a separation.'

These italics are once more our own. Will any sane person dream that if incest had been the moving cause she would have written a string of other reasons to the supposed partner of her husband's guilt? Would she have referred her husband to that person and to that letter for fuller particulars? Moreover, is incest, if only seriously suspected-we do not say proved-a cause which demands 'serious and dispassionate review' before acting on it? On the other hand, such words are applicable to the string of reasons in the letter to Augusta. In this connexion it is also worth while to quote a phrase in a letter she wrote to Hobhouse declining an interview for which he had asked:

'You must be ignorant of the long series of circumstances which have necessitated this afflicting step.'

Hitherto we have used Lord Broughton's 'Recollections' and Mr Edgcumbe's book indiscriminately for materials in support of Mrs Leigh's innocence. But Mr Edgcumbe is not content with her acquittal. He is persuaded that she sacrificed her own reputation to shield her brother and Mary Anne Chaworth from the consequences of a criminal intrigue. His theory may be stated thus. Miss Chaworth in 1805 married Mr Musters, and became Mrs Chaworth-Musters, having rejected her boy lover in favour of his more mature and by no means ineligible rival. Byron and she did not meet again until late in the year 1808. Mr Musters had shown some jealousy of Byron even before the marriage, and resented all approach to intimacy in 1808. In 1811 there was something like a recrudescence of friendship, which once more Mr Musters cut short. In 1813, however, the position of both had become dangerous, Byron's moral character had degenerated, and was perhaps additionally disturbed by the rejection of his first proposal to Miss Milbanke. As to Mary, the infidelities of her husband had become so intolerable that she had left him. She was living alone at Annesley, an estate of her own, close by Newstead. Byron too, during the early summer, was alone at Newstead, and Mary wrote asking him to go and see her. A lingering sense of

honour towards the companion of his boyhood prompted him to hesitate. He wrote to Augusta and asked her advice, which she gave in behalf of rectitude and prudence. There seems no doubt, however, that he went, and not much that events followed the course which in such circumstances may almost be called natural. He practically admitted the result to Medwin, who thus records his avowal :

'She was the beau ideal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her I say "created," for I found her, like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.'

In August 1813 Byron wrote to Moore from Newstead: 'I am at this moment in a far more serious and entirely new scrape, than any (sic) of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal.'

A week later he wrote again :

'I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow-that is, I would a month ago, but at present.

In his journal, upon November 24, we find this:

'I am tremendously in arrear with my letters except to * * * * and to her my thoughts overpower me; my words never compass them.'

It is not difficult to find four letters for these four asterisks; especially as four days later we find this even more tell-tale entry :

'I believe with Clym o' the Clow or Robin Hood,

"By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both Mother and May; I think it never was a man's lot to die before his day."' On November the 8th, after a solitary month at Newstead, he wrote the letter to Augusta, already quoted, containing the words:

'You do not know what mischief your being with me might have prevented.'

On November 30 he writes to Moore, who had been living that autumn in Nottinghamshire:

'We were very near neighbours this autumn, and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me.'

In his journal, on November 14, there is this entry: 'Last night I finished "Zuleika." . . . I believe the composition of it kept me alive-for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of **** [again the four asterisks]. Dear sacred name, rest for ever unrevealed! At least even here my hand would tremble to write it. . . .

Again he makes his journal speak :

more distant still, till

*** is distant and will be at *** the spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me. And again, on December 10, he writes:

'I would commit suicide, if it would not annoy Augusta, and perhaps

Is this, then, not clear that during 1813 he enacted a great moral tragedy, that the locale of it was in the neighbourhood of Newstead, and that its heroine was not Augusta but 'some one else'? Who else could it have been, if not Mary?

About this time he feared that a letter of his to Mary had miscarried. He writes to Moore on the 6th of January to tell him this, and to warn him that he may have to fight a duel with her husband. But the next day he had heard from Mary; the letter was safe, and he accordingly wrote Moore to reassure him :

'My last epistle would probably put you in a fidget. But the devil, who ought to be civil on such occasions, proved so, and took my letter to the right place.'

Here is Mary's letter, undated, but obviously in answer to the one which he feared had been lost :

...

'Your kind letter, my dear friend, relieved me much, and came yesterday when I was by no means well, and was a most agreeable remedy, for I fancied a thousand things. . . . I shall set great value by your seal, and see no reason why you should not call on us and bring it. . . . We [herself and Miss Radford, her companion] return to Annesley to-morrow. We are very anxious to see you, and yet know not how we shall feel on the occasion-formal I dare say at the first, but our meeting must be confined to our trio, and then I think we shall be more at our ease. Do write me, and make a sacrifice to friendship, which I shall consider your visit; you may always address your letters to Annesley perfectly safe. Your sincere friend,

'MARY