The appearance of these poems gave additional violence to the angry and inquisitorial feeling now abroad against him; and the title under which both pieces were immediately announced by various publishers, as “Poems by Lord Byron on his domestic Circumstances,” carried with it a sufficient exposure of the utter unfitness of such themes for rhyme.  It is, indeed, only in those emotions and passions, of which imagination forms a predominant ingredient,—­such as love, in its first dreams, before reality has come to embody or dispel them, or sorrow, in its wane, when beginning to pass away from the heart into the fancy,—­that poetry ought ever to be employed as an interpreter of feeling.  For the expression of all those immediate affections and disquietudes that have their root in the actual realities of life, the art of the poet, from the very circumstance of its being an art, as well as from the coloured form in which it is accustomed to transmit impressions, cannot be otherwise than a medium as false as it is feeble.

To so very low an ebb had the industry of his assailants now succeeded in reducing his private character, that it required no small degree of courage, even among that class who are supposed to be the most tolerant of domestic irregularities, to invite him into their society.  One distinguished lady of fashion, however, ventured so far as, on the eve of his departure from England, to make a party for him expressly; and nothing short, perhaps, of that high station in society which a life as blameless as it is brilliant has secured to her, could have placed beyond all reach of misrepresentation, at that moment, such a compliment to one marked with the world’s censure so deeply.  At this assembly of Lady J * ’s he made his last appearance, publicly, in England; and the amusing account given of some of the company in his Memoranda,—­of the various and characteristic ways in which the temperature of their manner towards him was affected by the cloud under which he now appeared,—­was one of the passages of that Memoir it would have been most desirable, perhaps, to have preserved; though, from being a gallery of sketches, all personal and many satirical, but a small portion of it, if any, could have been presented to the public till a time when the originals had long left the scene, and any interest they might once have excited was gone with themselves.  Besides the noble hostess herself, whose kindness to him, on this occasion, he never forgot, there was also one other person (then Miss M *, now Lady K * *,) whose frank and fearless cordiality to him on that evening he most gratefully commemorated,—­adding, in acknowledgment of a still more generous service, “She is a high-minded woman, and showed me more friendship than I deserved from her.  I heard also of her having defended me in a large company, which at that time required more courage and firmness than most women possess.”

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