Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently with the poet’s relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in this regard the same excessive stretch of charity.  “Dear Childe Harold,” exclaims the German professor, “was positively besieged by women.  They have, in truth, no right to complain of him:  from his childhood he had seen them on their worst side.”  It is the casuistry of hero-worship to deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his prevailing views of their character and claims.  “I regard them,” he says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant petulance, “as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers.  The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers.  I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them.  The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content.”

In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley.  The class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during “the day of his destiny,” bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of their worship.  His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and bewilder them.  The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge.  Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with.  He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and “beguiled too long;” by the other, “betrayed too late.”  The recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the process of passing from one extreme to the other.  She dwells on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and tells how she “fastened on the book with a grip like steel,” and carried it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her “like an evil potion,” and stirred her whole being with a tempest of excitement, till finally she, with equal weakness, flung it aside, “resolved to read that grand poetry no more, and broke through the thraldom of that powerful spell.”  The confession brings before us a type of the transitions of the century, on its way from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which later state Mrs. Norton and Miss Martineau are among the most pronounced representatives.