Certain it is, however, that the noble poet’s glorious chanting of much inglorious matter did me no good, and so I resolved to read that grand poetry no more.  It was a severe struggle, but I persevered in it for more than two years, and had my reward; I broke through the thraldom of that powerful spell, and all the noble beauty of those poems remained to me thenceforth divested of the power of wild excitement they had exercised over me.  A great many years after this girlish effort and sacrifice, Lady Byron, who was a highly esteemed friend of mine, spoke to me upon the subject of a new and cheap edition of her husband’s works about to be published, and likely to be widely disseminated among the young clerk and shopkeeper class of readers, for whom she deprecated extremely the pernicious influence it was calculated to produce.  She consulted me on the expediency of appending to it some notice of Lord Byron written by herself, which she thought might modify or lessen the injurious effect of his poetry upon young minds.  “Nobody,” she said, “knew him as I did” (this certainly was not the general impression upon the subject); “nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the injury he might do to others, in some of his writings.”  I was strongly impressed by the earnestness of her expression, which seemed to me one of affectionate compassion for Byron and profound solicitude lest, even in his grave, he should incur the responsibility of yet further evil influence, especially on the minds of the young.  I could not help wondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a new generation and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule and condemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathy for suffering or relenting toward repentance.  I had always admired the reticent dignity of her silence with reference to her short and disastrous union with Lord Byron, and I felt sorry, therefore, that she contemplated departing from the course she had thus far steadfastly pursued, though I appreciated the motive by which she was actuated.  I could not but think, however, that she overestimated the mischief Byron’s poetry was likely to do the young men of 1850, highly prejudicial as it undoubtedly was to those of his day, illustrated, so to speak, by the bad notoriety of his own character and career.  But the generation of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me little likely to be infected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with a degree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy.  I urged this my conviction upon her, as rendering less necessary than she imagined the antidote she was anxious to append to the poison of the new edition of her husband’s works.  But to this she replied that she had derived her impression of the probable mischief to a class peculiarly interesting to him, from Frederick Robertson, and of course his opinion was more than an overweight for mine.