But it may be asked, Was there not a man in all England with delicacy enough to feel for Lady Byron, and chivalry enough to speak a bold word for her?  Yes:  there was one.  Thomas Campbell the poet, when he read Lady Byron’s statement, believed it, as did Christopher North; but it affected him differently.  It appears he did not believe it a wife’s duty to burn herself on her husband’s funeral-pile, as did Christopher North; and held the singular idea, that a wife had some rights as a human being as well as a husband.

Lady Byron’s own statement appeared in pamphlet form in 1830:  at least, such is the date at the foot of the document.  Thomas Campbell, in ’The New Monthly Magazine,’ shortly after, printed a spirited, gentlemanly defence of Lady Byron, and administered a pointed rebuke to Moore for the rudeness and indelicacy he had shown in selecting from Byron’s letters the coarsest against herself, her parents, and her old governess Mrs. Clermont, and by the indecent comparisons he had instituted between Lady Byron and Lord Byron’s last mistress.

It is refreshing to hear, at last, from somebody who is not altogether on his knees at the feet of the popular idol, and who has some chivalry for woman, and some idea of common humanity.  He says,—­

’I found my right to speak on this painful subject on its now irrevocable publicity, brought up afresh as it has been by Mr. Moore, to be the theme of discourse to millions, and, if I err not much, the cause of misconception to innumerable minds.  I claim to speak of Lady Byron in the right of a man, and of a friend to the rights of woman, and to liberty, and to natural religion.  I claim a right, more especially, as one of the many friends of Lady Byron, who, one and all, feel aggrieved by this production.  It has virtually dragged her forward from the shade of retirement, where she had hid her sorrows, and compelled her to defend the heads of her friends and her parents from being crushed under the tombstone of Byron.  Nay, in a general view, it has forced her to defend herself; though, with her true sense and her pure taste, she stands above all special pleading.  To plenary explanation she ought not—­she never shall be driven.  Mr. Moore is too much a gentleman not to shudder at the thought of that; but if other Byronists, of a far different stamp, were to force the savage ordeal, it is her enemies, and not she, that would have to dread the burning ploughshares.

’We, her friends, have no wish to prolong the discussion:  but a few words we must add, even to her admirable statement; for hers is a cause not only dear to her friends, but having become, from Mr. Moore and her misfortunes, a publicly-agitated cause, it concerns morality, and the most sacred rights of the sex, that she should (and that, too, without more special explanations) be acquitted out and out, and honourably acquitted, in this business, of all share in the blame, which is one