Lady Byron Vindicated

to most men. He was born of parents both of whom were remarkable for perfectly ungoverned passions. There

e seemed born for his own ruin and that of the other sex. He began by seducing Lady Carmarthen, and spent her four thousand

s the mother of Mrs. Leigh. Miss

was a passionate, ungoverned, though affe

n a passion with me (and I gave her cause enough), used to say, "O you little

sent him into the world with a most perilous and exceptional sensitiveness of brain and nervous syst

nsanity. The idea is so often mentioned and dwelt upon in his letters, journals, and conversatio

ily drive to insanity, but wise physiological training and judicious moral culture might have guided to the most splendid results. But of these he had neither. He was alternately the pet and victim of his mother's tumultuous nature

he soul, of the power of brain and nerve over moral development, had then not even entered the general thought of society. The school and college

s strikingly exemplified ev

father while a schoolboy at Harrow; and go into particulars in relation to a certain infant, the claim to which lay between Lord Byron and another schoolfellow. It is not the nature of the event itself, so much as the cool, unembarrassed manner in which it i

cious development of the passions. Alcoholic and narcotic stimulants, in the case of such a person, would be regarded as little less than suicidal, and an early course of combined drinking and licentiousness as tending dir

ect physiological knowledge, nor held in check by any p

faculty of moral ideality in a high degree; and he had not, in the earlier part of his life, an attraction towards mere brutal vice. His physical sensitiveness was so remarkable that he says of himself, 'A dose of salts has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like light champagne, upon me.' Yet this exceptionally delicately-organised boy and youth was

cted upon with great vigour. He never could have lived so long as he did, under the exhaustive process of every kind of excess, if he had not re-en

uely to retrieve himself from dissipation, and to

s the very conservative power which Nature has of adapting herself to any settled course was lost. The extreme sensitiveness produced by long periods of utter abstinence made the succeeding debauch more maddening

fish. Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet. I wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged to cool by abstinence, in lieu of it. I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh: my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the Devil always

e times, therefore, we have reason to believe that Lor

with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commence

ss to temptation which comes from utter exhaustion, was his condition, accordin

upon each other, in a space of less than three years, and those the three most critical years of his life. 'The Bride of Abydos' came out in the autumn of 1813, and was written in a week; and 'The Corsair' was composed in thirteen days. A few months more than a year before his marriage, and the brief space of his married life, was the period in which all this literary labour was performed, while yet he was running the wild career of intrigue and fashionable folly. He speaks of 'Lara' as being tossed off in the intervals b

emoir of this period are sad enough: those to Medwin are so appalling as to the state of contemporary society in England, as to require, at least, the benefit of the doubt for which Lord Byron's habitual carelessness of truth gave scope. His adventures with ladies of the highest rank in England are there paraded with a fre

t nothing could equal the profligacy of high life in England . . . when I knew it,' he makes

held illicit relations with him, made wedding-visits to his wife at one time, we must hope

ion, to which he with difficulty responded; and when he says that she tracked a rival lady to his lodgings, and came

liaison that continued without interruption for eight months. She told me she was never in love till she was thirty, and I tho

omen do, an influence over me so strong that

nts, there remains still undoubted evidence from other sources that Lord Byron exercised a most peculiar and fatal power over the moral sense of the women with whom he was brought in r

g his character, admits that his name had been coupled with those of three, four, or m

he immense draughts on the brain-power of rapid and brilliant composition, should have ended in that abnormal st

The dregs of the old Greek and Roman civilisation were foul with it; and the apostle speaks of the

ife are more or less intense histories of unrepentant guilt and remorse or of unnatural crime. A recent writer in 'Temple Bar' brings to light the fact, that 'The Bride of Abydos,' the first of the brilliant and rapid series of poems which began in the period immediately preceding his marriage, was

d fearlessly to confide to his friends immoralities which would be looked upon as damning, there was now a secret to which he could not help alluding in his letters, but which he told Moore he could not tell now, but 'some day or other when we are veterans.' He s

the sound, there is

the well-pleased air with which he relates to Medwin his common intrigues and adulteries. He speaks of himself generally as

ed,' all written or conceived about this period of his life, give one picture of a

religion or reason. In this unnatural literature, the stimulus of crime is represented as intensifying love. Medora, Gulnare, the Page in 'Lara,' Parisina, and

he case of Lord Byron, that it might seem to have been written for it. The sixth chapter of his work, on 'Anomalous and Masked

justify legal interference; neither do these affections always incapacitate the party from engaging in the ordinary business of life . . . . The change may have progressed insidiously and stealthily, having slowly and almost imperce

s suffering from latent insanity often affect singularity of dress, gait, conversation, and phraseology. The most trifling circumstances stimulate their excitability. They are martyrs to ungovernable paroxysms of passion, are inflamed to a state of demoniacal fury by th

ts to this latter symptom, which was stri

rom the mind, so effectually does the principle of thought in th

. . . . Modifications of the malady are seen allied with genius. The biographies of Cowper, Burns, Byron,

may, in many cases, be detected. To its existence is

d struggling with those inflexible natural laws, which, at some stages of retribution, involve in their awful sweep the guilty with the innocent. She longed to save; but he was gone past redemption. Alcoholic stimulants and l

sses change the organism of the brain, till slow, creeping, moral insanity comes on. The woman who is the helpless victim of cruelties which only unnatural states of the brain could invent,

many a cottage and tenement-house, with no understan

begun to be. Madness was a fixed point; and the inquiries into it had no nicety. Its treatment, if established, had no redeeming

affections remain to a degree unimpaired, and protest with all their strength against the outrage. Hence come conflicts and agonies of remorse proportioned to the strength of t

war, a chaos

elements conv

arring with pe

with impeni

fiend, who nev

ned thee!" when t

we give to a powerful nature in a state of danger and ruin; and it may be hoped that this feeling, which tempers the stern justice of huma