making him happy in the right way.  I had many fears.  Thank God that they do not appear likely to be realized.  In short, there seems to me to be but one drawback to all our felicity, and that, alas, is the disposal of dear Newstead.  I never shall feel reconciled to the loss of that sacred revered Abbey.  The thought makes me more melancholy than perhaps the loss of an inanimate object ought to do.  Did you ever hear that landed property, the GIFT OF THE CROWN, could not be sold?  Lady B. writes me word that she never saw her father and mother so happy; that she believes the latter would go to the bottom of the sea herself to find fish for B.’s dinner, &c.”  Augusta Ada was born in London on the 10th of December, 1815.  During the next months a few cynical mutterings are the only interruptions to an ominous silence; but these could be easily explained by the increasing embarrassment of the poet’s affairs, and the importunity of creditors, who in the course of the last half-year had served seven or eight executions on his house and furniture.  Their expectations were raised by exaggerated reports of his having married money; and by a curious pertinacity of pride he still declined, even when he had to sell his books, to accept advances from his publisher.  In January the storm which had been secretly gathering suddenly broke.  On the 15th, i.e. five weeks after her daughter’s birth, Lady Byron left home with the infant to pay a visit, as had been agreed, to her own family at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire.  On the way she despatched to her husband a tenderly playful letter, which has been often quoted.  Shortly afterwards he was informed—­first by her father, and then by herself—­that she did not intend ever to return to him.  The accounts of their last interview, as in the whole evidence bearing on the affair, not only differ but flatly contradict one another.  On behalf of Lord Byron it is asserted, that his wife, infuriated by his offering some innocent hospitality on occasion of bad weather to a respectable actress, Mrs. Mardyn, who had called on him about Drury Lane business, rushed into the room exclaiming, “I leave you for ever”—­and did so.  According to another story, Lady Byron, finding him with a friend, and observing him to be annoyed at her entrance, said, “Am I in your way, Byron?” whereupon he answered, “Damnably.”  Mrs. Leigh, Hodgson, Moore, and others, did everything that mutual friends could do to bring about the reconciliation for which Byron himself professed to be eager, but in vain; and in vain the effort was renewed in later years.  The wife was inveterately bent on a separation, of the causes of which the husband alleged he was never informed, and with regard to which as long as he lived she preserved a rigid silence.