Now, if Lord Byron knew that his wife had a deadly secret that she could tell, all this conduct is explicable:  it is in the ordinary course of human nature.  Men always distrust those who hold facts by which they can be ruined.  They fear them; they are antagonistic to them; they cannot trust them.  The feeling of Falkland to Caleb Williams, as portrayed in Godwin’s masterly sketch, is perfectly natural, and it is exactly illustrative of what Byron felt for his wife.  He hated her for having his secret; and, so far as a human being could do it, he tried to destroy her character before the world, that she might not have the power to testify against him.  If we admit this solution, Byron’s conduct is at least that of a man who is acting as men ordinarily would act under such circumstances:  if we do not, he is acting like a fiend.  Let us look at admitted facts.  He married his wife without love, in a gloomy, melancholy, morose state of mind.  The servants testify to strange, unaccountable treatment of her immediately after marriage; such that her confidential maid advises her return to her parents.  In Lady Byron’s letter to Mrs. Leigh, she reminds Lord Byron that he always expressed a desire and determination to free himself from the marriage.  Lord Byron himself admits to Madame de Stael that his behaviour was such, that his wife must have thought him insane.  Now we are asked to believe, that simply because, under these circumstances, Lady Byron wished to live separate from her husband, he hated and feared her so that he could never let her alone afterwards; that he charged her with malice, slander, deceit, and deadly intentions against himself, merely out of spite, because she preferred not to live with him.  This last view of the case certainly makes Lord Byron more unaccountably wicked than the other.

The first supposition shows him to us as a man in an agony of self-preservation; the second as a fiend, delighting in gratuitous deceit and cruelty.

Again:  a presumption of this crime appears in Lord Byron’s admission, in a letter to Moore, that he had an illegitimate child born before he left England, and still living at the time.

In letter 307, to Mr. Moore, under date Venice, Feb. 2, 1818, Byron says, speaking of Moore’s loss of a child,—­

’I know how to feel with you, because I am quite wrapped up in my own children.  Besides my little legitimate, I have made unto myself an illegitimate since [since Ada’s birth] to say nothing of one before; and I look forward to one of these as the pillar of my old age, supposing that I ever reach, as I hope I never shall, that desolating period.’

The illegitimate child that he had made to himself since Ada’s birth was Allegra, born about nine or ten months after the separation.  The other illegitimate alluded to was born before, and, as the reader sees, was spoken of as still living.

Moore appears to be puzzled to know who this child can be, and conjectures that it may possibly be the child referred to in an early poem, written, while a schoolboy of nineteen, at Harrow.