there could be no objection to arresting that pain.  Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighbouring bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes; and, in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so that the sufferer’s name need not appear at all.

’Five and thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must make up a great amount of human happiness; but this was only one of a wide variety of methods of doing good.  It was the unconcealable magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households within the four seas.  Years ago, it was said far and wide that Lady Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.

’Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her property while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by his will; yet she had, eventually, a large income at her command.  In the management of it, she showed the same wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions.  She resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed help at the moment.  Her care was for the existing generation, rather than for a future one, which would have its own friends.  She usually declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities; preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.

’It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while sorely misjudging her character.  We hear much now—­and everybody hears it with pleasure—­of the spread of education in “common things;” but long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name was found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the thing, and put it in the way of making its own name.

’She was living at Ealing, in Middlesex, in 1834; and there she opened one of the first industrial schools in England, if not the very first.  She sent out a master to Switzerland, to be instructed in De Fellenburgh’s method.  She took, on lease, five acres of land, and spent several hundred pounds in rendering the buildings upon it fit for the purposes of the school.  A liberal education was afforded to the children of artisans and labourers during the half of the day when they were not employed in the field or garden.  The allotments were rented by the boys, who raised and sold produce, which afforded them a considerable yearly profit if they were good workmen.  Those who worked in the field earned wages; their labour