“Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
    With spur and bridle undefiled—­
    ’Twas but a day he had been caught,”

should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the bit.

Even had the new condition of life into which he passed been one of prosperity and smoothness, some time, as well as tolerance, must still have been allowed for the subsiding of so excited a spirit into rest.  But, on the contrary, his marriage (from the reputation, no doubt, of the lady, as an heiress,) was, at once, a signal for all the arrears and claims of a long-accumulating state of embarrassment to explode upon him;—­his door was almost daily beset by duns, and his house nine times during that year in possession of bailiffs[95]; while, in addition to these anxieties and—­what he felt still more—­indignities of poverty, he had also the pain of fancying, whether rightly or wrongly, that the eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most perverting light.

As, from the state of their means, his lady and he saw but little society, his only relief from the thoughts which a life of such embarrassment brought with it was in those avocations which his duty, as a member of the Drury Lane Committee, imposed upon him.  And here,—­in this most unlucky connection with the theatre,—­one of the fatalities of his short year of trial, as husband, lay.  From the reputation which he had previously acquired for gallantries, and the sort of reckless and boyish levity to which—­often in very “bitterness of soul”—­he gave way, it was not difficult to bring suspicion upon some of those acquaintances which his frequent intercourse with the green-room induced him to form, or even (as, in one instance, was the case,) to connect with his name injuriously that of a person to whom he had scarcely ever addressed a single word.

Notwithstanding, however, this ill-starred concurrence of circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded, to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon ended in disunion, is to be traced.  “In all the marriages I have ever seen,” says Steele, “most of which have been unhappy ones, the great cause of evil has proceeded from slight occasions;” and to this remark, I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be found, upon enquiry, to be an exception.  Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a few words, the whole pith of the mystery.  An English gentleman with whom he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the separation, the noble poet, who had seemed much amused with their absurdity and falsehood, said, after listening to them all,—­“The causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be easily found out.”