She said that that of itself would account for many of Ockham’s eccentricities.  He had a body that required a more vigorous animal life than his station gave scope for, and this had often led him to seek it in what the world calls low society; that he had been to sea as a sailor, and was now working as a mechanic on the iron work of ’The Great Eastern.’  He had laid aside his title, and went in daily with the other workmen, requesting them to call him simply Ockham.

I said that there was something to my mind very fine about this, even though it might show some want of proper balance.

She said he had noble traits, and that she felt assured he would yet accomplish something worthy of himself.  ’The great difficulty with our nobility is apt to be, that they do not understand the working-classes, so as to feel for them properly; and Ockham is now going through an experience which may yet fit him to do great good when he comes to the peerage.  I am trying to influence him to do good among the workmen, and to interest himself in schools for their children.  I think,’ she added, ’I have great influence over Ockham,—­the greater, perhaps, that I never make any claim to authority.’

This conversation is very characteristic of Lady Byron as showing her benevolent analysis of character, and the peculiar hopefulness she always had in regard to the future of every one brought in connection with her.  Her moral hopefulness was something very singular; and in this respect she was so different from the rest of the world, that it would be difficult to make her understood.  Her tolerance of wrong-doing would have seemed to many quite latitudinarian, and impressed them as if she had lost all just horror of what was morally wrong in transgression; but it seemed her fixed habit to see faults only as diseases and immaturities, and to expect them to fall away with time.

She saw the germs of good in what others regarded as only evil.  She expected valuable results to come from what the world looked on only as eccentricities; {147} and she incessantly devoted herself to the task of guarding those whom the world condemned, and guiding them to those higher results of which she often thought that even their faults were prophetic.

Before I quit this sketch of Lady Byron as I knew her, I will give one more of her letters.  My return from that visit in Europe was met by the sudden death of the son mentioned in the foregoing account.  At the time of this sorrow, Lady Byron was too unwell to write to me.  The letter given alludes to this event, and speaks also of two coloured persons of remarkable talent, in whose career in England she had taken a deep interest.  One of them is the ‘friend’ she speaks of.

’LONDON, Feb. 6, 1859.