for let me tell you, Mr. Moore, that neither your poetry, nor Lord Byron’s, nor all our poetry put together, ever delineated a more interesting being than the woman whom you have so coldly treated.  This was not kicking the dead lion, but wounding the living lamb, who was already bleeding and shorn, even unto the quick.  I know, that, collectively speaking, the world is in Lady Byron’s favour; but it is coldly favourable, and you have not warmed its breath.  Time, however, cures everything; and even your book, Mr. Moore, may be the means of Lady Byron’s character being better appreciated.

‘THOMAS CAMPBELL.’

Here is what seems to be a gentlemanly, high-spirited, chivalric man, throwing down his glove in the lists for a pure woman.

What was the consequence?  Campbell was crowded back, thrust down, overwhelmed, his eyes filled with dust, his mouth with ashes.

There was a general confusion and outcry, which reacted both on him and on Lady Byron.  Her friends were angry with him for having caused this re-action upon her; and he found himself at once attacked by Lady Byron’s enemies, and deserted by her friends.  All the literary authorities of his day took up against him with energy.  Christopher North, professor of moral philosophy in the Edinburgh University, in a fatherly talk in ’The Noctes,’ condemns Campbell, and justifies Moore, and heartily recommends his ‘Biography,’ as containing nothing materially objectionable on the score either of manners or morals.  Thus we have it in ‘The Noctes’ of May 1830:—­

   ’Mr. Moore’s biographical book I admired; and I said so to my little
   world, in two somewhat lengthy articles, which many approved, and
   some, I am sorry to know, condemned.’

On the point in question between Moore and Campbell, North goes on to justify Moore altogether, only admitting that ’it would have been better had he not printed any coarse expression of Byron’s about the old people;’ and, finally, he closes by saying,—­

’I do not think that, under the circumstances, Mr. Campbell himself, had he written Byron’s “Life,” could have spoken, with the sentiments he then held, in a better, more manly, and more gentlemanly spirit, in so far as regards Lady Byron, than Mr. Moore did:  and I am sorry he has been deterred from “swimming” through Mr. Moore’s work by the fear of “wading;” for the waters are clear and deep; nor is there any mud, either at the bottom or round the margin.’

Of the conduct of Lady Byron’s so-called friends on this occasion it is more difficult to speak.

There has always been in England, as John Stuart Mill says, a class of women who glory in the utter self-abnegation of the wife to the husband, as the special crown of womanhood.  Their patron saint is the Griselda of Chaucer, who, when her husband humiliates her, and treats her as a brute, still accepts all with meek, unquestioning, uncomplaining devotion.  He tears her from her children; he treats her with personal abuse; he repudiates her,—­sends her out to nakedness and poverty; he installs another mistress in his house, and sends for the first to be her handmaid and his own:  and all this the meek saint accepts in the words of Milton,—­