however, I have been led into by my intense anxiety to acquit you of any thing like a capricious abandonment of such a woman[93]; and, totally in the dark as I am with respect to all but the fact of your separation, you cannot conceive the solicitude, the fearful solicitude, with which I look forward to a history of the transaction from your own lips when we meet,—­a history in which I am sure of, at least, one virtue—­manly candour.”

[Footnote 93:  It will be perceived from this that I was as yet unacquainted with the true circumstances of the transaction.]

* * * * *

With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this separation, it seems needless, with the characters of both parties before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons to account for it.  I have already, in some observations on the general character of men of genius, endeavoured to point out those peculiarities, both in disposition and habitudes, by which, in the far greater number of instances, they have been found unfitted for domestic happiness.  Of these defects, (which are, as it were, the shadow that genius casts, and too generally, it is to be feared, in proportion to its stature,) Lord Byron could not, of course, fail to have inherited his share, in common with all the painfully-gifted class to which he belonged.  How thoroughly, with respect to one attribute of this temperament which he possessed,—­one, that “sicklies o’er” the face of happiness itself,—­he was understood by the person most interested in observing him, will appear from the following anecdote, as related by himself.[94]

“People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings.  Others have wondered at my personal gaiety.  But I recollect once, after an hour in which I had been sincerely and particularly gay and rather brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits), ’And yet, Bell, I have been called and miscalled melancholy—­you must have seen how falsely, frequently?’—­’No, Byron,’ she answered, ’it is not so:  at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind; and often when apparently gayest.’”

To these faults and sources of faults inherent, in his own sensitive nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will generates,—­the least compatible, of all others, (if not softened down, as they were in him, by good nature,) with that system of mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is maintained.  When we look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which this marriage was meant to be the goal,—­to the rapid and restless course in which his life had run along, like a burning train, through a series of wanderings, adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of all which was still upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness, he rushed into this marriage,—­it can but little surprise us that, in the space of one short year, he should not have been able to recover all at once from his bewilderment, or to settle down into that tame level of conduct which the close observers of his every action required.  As well might it be expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa’s,