canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.’

This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book, simply because it was written by Lord Byron’s mistress.  That fact, we are assured, lends grace even to its faults.

Having brought the authoress upon the stage, the review now goes on to define her position, and assure the Christian world that

’The Countess Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble.  At the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate.  A fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage.  A short time afterwards, she accidentally met Lord Byron.  Outraged and rebellious nature vindicated itself in the deep and devoted passion with which he inspired her.  With the full assent of husband, father, and brother, and in compliance with the usages of Italian society, he was shortly afterwards installed in the office, and invested with all the privileges, of her “Cavalier Servente."’

It has been asserted that the Marquis de Boissy, the late husband of this Guiccioli lady, was in the habit of introducing her in fashionable circles as ’the Marquise de Boissy, my wife, formerly mistress to Lord Byron’!  We do not give the story as a verity; yet, in the review of this whole history, we may be pardoned for thinking it quite possible.

The mistress, being thus vouched for and presented as worthy of sympathy and attention by one of the oldest and most classic organs of English literature, may now proceed in her work of glorifying the popular idol, and casting abuse on the grave of the dead wife.

Her attacks on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit than those of Lord Byron.  They want his literary polish and tact; but what of that?  ‘Blackwood’ assures us that even the faults of manner derive a peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron’s mistress; and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in things like this:—­

’She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of her husband.  Such a surname is severe:  but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than ever