Now there was no nearer relative than Mrs. Leigh; and the personal attendant was Fletcher.  It was therefore presumably Mrs. Leigh who convinced Lady Byron of her husband’s insanity.

Lady Byron says, ’It was even represented to me that he was in danger of destroying himself.

’With the concurrence of his family, I had consulted with Dr. Baillie, as a friend, on Jan. 8, as to his supposed malady.’  Now, Lord Byron’s written order for her to leave came on Jan. 6.  It appears, then, that Lady Byron, acting in concurrence with Mrs. Leigh and others of her husband’s family, consulted Dr. Baillie, on Jan. 8, as to what she should do; the symptoms presented to Dr. Baillie being, evidently, insane hatred of his wife on the part of Lord Byron, and a determination to get her out of the house.  Lady Byron goes on:—­

’On acquainting him with the state of the case, and with Lord Byron’s desire that I should leave London, Dr. Baillie thought my absence might be advisable as an experiment, assuming the fact of mental derangement; for Dr. Baillie, not having had access to Lord Byron, could not pronounce an opinion on that point.  He enjoined, that, in correspondence with Lord Byron, I should avoid all but light and soothing topics.  Under these impressions, I left London, determined to follow the advice given me by Dr. Baillie.  Whatever might have been the nature of Lord Byron’s treatment of me from the time of my marriage, yet, supposing him to have been in a state of mental alienation, it was not for me, nor for any person of common humanity, to manifest at that moment a sense of injury.’

It appears, then, that the domestic situation in Byron’s house at the time of his wife’s expulsion was one so grave as to call for family counsel; for Lady Byron, generally accurate, speaks in the plural number.  ‘His nearest relatives’ certainly includes Mrs. Leigh.  ‘His family’ includes more.  That some of Lord Byron’s own relatives were cognisant of facts at this time, and that they took Lady Byron’s side, is shown by one of his own chance admissions.  In vol. vi. p.394, in a letter on Bowles, he says, speaking of this time, ’All my relations, save one, fell from me like leaves from a tree in autumn.’  And in Medwin’s Conversations he says, ’Even my cousin George Byron, who had been brought up with me, and whom I loved as a brother, took my wife’s part.’  The conduct must have been marked in the extreme that led to this result.

We cannot help stopping here to say that Lady Byron’s situation at this time has been discussed in our days with a want of ordinary human feeling that is surprising.  Let any father and mother, reading this, look on their own daughter, and try to make the case their own.

After a few short months of married life,—­months full of patient endurance of the strangest and most unaccountable treatment,—­she comes to them, expelled from her husband’s house, an object of hatred and aversion to him, and having to settle for herself the awful question, whether he is a dangerous madman or a determined villain.