Now, does anyone claim, that, because a woman has sacrificed for twenty years all cravings for human sympathy, and all possibility of perfectly free and unconstrained intercourse with her friends, that she is obliged to go on bearing this same lonely burden to the end of her days?

Let anyone imagine the frightful constraint and solitude implied in this sentence.  Let anyone, too, think of its painful complications in life.  The roots of a falsehood are far-reaching.  Conduct that can only be explained by criminating another must often seem unreasonable and unaccountable; and the most truthful person, who feels bound to keep silence regarding a radical lie of another, must often be placed in positions most trying to conscientiousness.  The great merit of ’Caleb Williams’ as a novel consists in its philosophical analysis of the utter helplessness of an innocent person who agrees to keep the secret of a guilty one.  One sees there how that necessity of silence produces all the effect of falsehood on his part, and deprives him of the confidence and sympathy of those with whom he would take refuge.

For years, this unnatural life was forced on Lady Byron, involving her as in a network, even in her dearest family relations.

That, when all the parties were dead, Lady Byron should allow herself the sympathy of a circle of intimate friends, is something so perfectly proper and natural, that we cannot but wonder that her conduct in this respect has ever been called in question.  If it was her right to have had a public expose in 1816, it was certainly her right to show to her own intimate circle the secret of her life when all the principal actors were passed from earth.

The ‘Quarterly’ speaks as if, by thus waiting, she deprived Lord Byron of the testimony of living witnesses.  But there were as many witnesses and partisans dead on her side as on his.  Lady Milbanke and Sir Ralph, Sir Samuel Romilly and Lady Anne Barnard were as much dead as Hobhouse, Moore, and others of Byron’s partisans.

The ‘Quarterly’ speaks of Lady Byron as ’running round, and repeating her story to people mostly below her own rank in life.’

To those who know the personal dignity of Lady Byron’s manners, represented and dwelt on by her husband in his conversations with Lady Blessington, this coarse and vulgar attack only proves the poverty of a cause which can defend itself by no better weapons.

Lord Byron speaks of his wife as ‘highly cultivated;’ as having ’a degree of self-control I never saw equalled.’

‘I am certain,’ he says, ’that Lady Byron’s first idea is what is due to herself:  I mean that it is the undeviating rule of her conduct . . . .  Now, my besetting sin is a want of that self-respect which she has in excess . . . .  But, though I accuse Lady Byron of an excess of self-respect, I must, in candour, admit, that, if any person ever had excuse for an extraordinary portion of it, she has; as, in all