When her husband described to her the Continental latitude (the good-humoured marriage, in which complaisant couples mutually agreed to form the cloak for each other’s infidelities), and gave her to understand that in this way alone she could have a peaceful and friendly life with him, she answered him simply, ‘I am too truly your friend to do this.’

When Lord Byron found that he had to do with one who would not yield, who knew him fully, who could not be blinded and could not be deceived, he determined to rid himself of her altogether.

It was when the state of affairs between herself and her husband seemed darkest and most hopeless, that the only child of this union was born.  Lord Byron’s treatment of his wife during the sensitive period that preceded the birth of this child, and during her confinement, was marked by paroxysms of unmanly brutality, for which the only possible charity on her part was the supposition of insanity.  Moore sheds a significant light on this period, by telling us that, about this time, Byron was often drunk, day after day, with Sheridan.  There had been insanity in the family; and this was the plea which Lady Byron’s love put in for him.  She regarded him as, if not insane, at least so nearly approaching the boundaries of insanity as to be a subject of forbearance and tender pity; and she loved him with that love resembling a mother’s, which good wives often feel when they have lost all faith in their husband’s principles, and all hopes of their affections.  Still, she was in heart and soul his best friend; true to him with a truth which he himself could not shake.

In the verses addressed to his daughter, Lord Byron speaks of her as

   ’The child of love, though born in bitterness,
   And nurtured in convulsion.’

A day or two after the birth of this child, Lord Byron came suddenly into Lady Byron’s room, and told her that her mother was dead.  It was an utter falsehood; but it was only one of the many nameless injuries and cruelties by which he expressed his hatred of her.  A short time after her confinement, she was informed by him, in a note, that, as soon as she was able to travel, she must go; that he could not and would not longer have her about him; and, when her child was only five weeks old, he carried this threat of expulsion into effect.

Here we will insert briefly Lady Byron’s own account (the only one she ever gave to the public) of this separation.  The circumstances under which this brief story was written are affecting.

Lord Byron was dead.  The whole account between him and her was closed for ever in this world.  Moore’s ‘Life’ had been prepared, containing simply and solely Lord Byron’s own version of their story.  Moore sent this version to Lady Byron, and requested to know if she had any remarks to make upon it.  In reply, she sent a brief statement to him,—­the first and only one that had come from her during all the years of the separation, and which appears to have mainly for its object the exculpation of her father and mother from the charge, made by the poet, of being the instigators of the separation.