he published in the First Canto of ‘Don Juan,’ that the reader may see how much reason he had for assuming the injured tone which he did in the letter to Lady Byron quoted above.  That letter never was sent to her; and the unmanly and indecent caricature of her, and the indelicate exposure of the whole story on his own side, which we are about to quote, were the only communications that could have reached her solitude.

In the following verses, Lady Byron is represented as Donna Inez, and Lord Byron as Don Jose; but the incidents and allusions were so very pointed, that nobody for a moment doubted whose history the poet was narrating.

   ’His mother was a learned lady, famed
      For every branch of every science known
   In every Christian language ever named,
      With virtues equalled by her wit alone: 
   She made the cleverest people quite ashamed;
      And even the good with inward envy groaned,
   Finding themselves so very much exceeded
   In their own way by all the things that she did.
   . . . . 
   Save that her duty both to man and God
   Required this conduct; which seemed very odd.

   She kept a journal where his faults were noted,
      And opened certain trunks of books and letters,
   (All which might, if occasion served, be quoted);
      And then she had all Seville for abettors,
   Besides her good old grandmother (who doted): 
      The hearers of her case become repeaters,
   Then advocates, inquisitors, and judges,—­
   Some for amusement, others for old grudges.

   And then this best and meekest woman bore
      With such serenity her husband’s woes! 
   Just as the Spartan ladies did of yore,
      Who saw their spouses killed, and nobly chose
   Never to say a word about them more. 
      Calmly she heard each calumny that rose,
   And saw his agonies with such sublimity,
   That all the world exclaimed, “What magnanimity!"’

This is the longest and most elaborate version of his own story that Byron ever published; but he busied himself with many others, projecting at one time a Spanish romance, in which the same story is related in the same transparent manner:  but this he was dissuaded from printing.  The booksellers, however, made a good speculation in publishing what they called his domestic poems; that is, poems bearing more or less relation to this subject.

Every person with whom he became acquainted with any degree of intimacy was made familiar with his side of the story.  Moore’s Biography is from first to last, in its representations, founded upon Byron’s communicativeness, and Lady Byron’s silence; and the world at last settled down to believing that the account so often repeated, and never contradicted, must be substantially a true one.