For some time after the event Byron spoke of his wife with at least apparent generosity.  Rightly or wrongly, he blamed her parents, and her maid—­Mrs. Clermont, the theme of his scathing but not always dignified “Sketch;” but of herself he wrote (March 8, 1816), “I do not believe that there ever was a brighter, and a kinder, or a more amiable or agreeable being than Lady Byron.  I never had nor can have any reproach to make to her, when with me.”  Elsewhere he adds, that he would willingly, if he had the chance, “renew his marriage on a lease of twenty years.”  But as time passed and his overtures were rejected, his patience gave way, and in some of his later satires he even broke the bounds of courtesy.  Lady Byron’s letters at the time of the separation, especially those first published in the Academy of July 19, 1879, are to Mrs. Leigh always affectionate and confidential, often pathetic, asking her advice “in this critical moment,” and protesting that, “independent of malady, she does not think of the past with any spirit of resentment, and scarcely with the sense of injury.”  In her communications to Mr. Hodgson, on the other hand—­the first of almost the same date, the second a few weeks later—­she writes with intense bitterness, stating that her action was due to offences which she could only condone on the supposition of her husband’s insanity, and distinctly implying that she was in danger of her life.  This supposition having been by her medical advisers pronounced erroneous, she felt, in the words only too pungently recalled in Don Juan, that her duty both to man and God prescribed her course of action.  Her playful letter on leaving she seems to defend on the ground of the fear of personal violence.  Till Lord Byron’s death the intimacy between his wife and sister remained unbroken; through the latter he continued to send numerous messages to the former, and to his child, who became a ward in Chancery; but at a later date it began to cool.  On the appearance of Lady Byron’s letter, in answer to Moore’s first volume, Augusta speaks of it as “a despicable tirade,” feels “disgusted at such unfeeling conduct,” and thinks “nothing can justify any one in defaming the dead.”  Soon after 1830 they had an open rupture on a matter of business, which was never really healed, though the then Puritanic precisian sent a message of relenting to Mrs. Leigh on her death-bed (1851).

The charge or charges which, during her husband’s life, Lady Byron from magnanimity or other motive reserved, she is ascertained after his death to have delivered with important modifications to various persons, with little regard to their capacity for reading evidence or to their discretion.  On one occasion her choice of a confidante was singularly unfortunate.  “These,” wrote Lord Byron in his youth, “these are the first tidings that have ever sounded like fame in my ears—­to be redde on the banks of the Ohio.”  Strangely enough, it is from the