But Lord Byron’s strategy was always of the bold kind.  It was the plan of the fugitive, who, instead of running away, stations himself so near to danger, that nobody would ever think of looking for him there.  He published passionate verses to his sister on this principle.  He imitated the security of an innocent man in every thing but the unconscious energy of the agony which seized him when he gave vent to his nature in poetry.  The boldness of his strategy is evident through all his life.  He began by charging his wife with the very cruelty and deception which he was himself practising.  He had spread a net for her feet, and he accused her of spreading a net for his.  He had placed her in a position where she could not speak, and then leisurely shot arrows at her; and he represented her as having done the same by him.  When he attacked her in ‘Don Juan,’ and strove to take from her the very protection {227}of womanly sacredness by putting her name into the mouth of every ribald, he did a bold thing, and he knew it.  He meant to do a bold thing.  There was a general outcry against it; and he fought it down, and gained his point.  By sheer boldness and perseverance, he turned the public from his wife, and to himself, in the face of their very groans and protests.  His ‘Manfred’ and his ‘Cain’ were parts of the same game.  But the involuntary cry of remorse and despair pierced even through his own artifices, in a manner that produced a conviction of reality.

His evident fear and hatred of his wife were other symptoms of crime.  There was no apparent occasion for him to hate her.  He admitted that she had been bright, amiable, good, agreeable; that her marriage had been a very uncomfortable one; and he said to Madame de Stael, that he did not doubt she thought him deranged.  Why, then, did he hate her for wanting to live peaceably by herself?  Why did he so fear her, that not one year of his life passed without his concocting and circulating some public or private accusation against her?  She, by his own showing, published none against him.  It is remarkable, that, in all his zeal to represent himself injured, he nowhere quotes a single remark from Lady Byron, nor a story coming either directly or indirectly from her or her family.  He is in a fever in Venice, not from what she has spoken, but because she has sealed the lips of her counsel, and because she and her family do not speak:  so that he professes himself utterly ignorant what form her allegations against him may take.  He had heard from Shelley that his wife silenced the most important calumny by going to make Mrs. Leigh a visit; and yet he is afraid of her,—­so afraid, that he tells Moore he expects she will attack him after death, and charges him to defend his grave.