whom she regarded as her betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to overthrow her mental balance.  After eight years of this life, lit up here and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the 12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral.  On hearing that the remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked, and fainted.  Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock; but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet’s miniature to her friend, Lady Morgan.

“I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others,” Byron writes to Moore, on September 15th, 1814; “but I have a few thousand pounds which I can’t spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the south.  I want to see Venice and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look at the coast of Greece from Italy.  All this however depends upon an event which may or may not happen.  Whether it will I shall probably know tomorrow, and if it does I can’t well go abroad at present.”  “A wife,” he had written, in the January of the same year, “would be my salvation;” but a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could, scarcely have been other than disastrous.  In the autumn of the year we are told that a friend,[2] observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke.  To this his adviser objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc.  Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another lady, which was done.  A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting together. “‘You see,’ said Lord Byron, ’that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person,’ and wrote on the moment.  His friend, still remonstrating against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed, ’Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not go.’  ‘Then it shall go,’ said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and sent off this fiat of his fate.”  The incident seems cut from a French novel; but so does the whole strange story—­one apparently insoluble enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life.  On the arrival of the lady’s answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in, and presented him with his mother’s wedding-ring, lost many years before, and which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window.  Almost at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, “If it contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring.”  He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her “talents, and excellent qualities;” and saying, “she is so good a person that I wish I was a better.”  About the same date he writes to various friends in the good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.