country of Washington, whom the poet was wont to reverence as the purest patriot of the modern world, that in 1869 there emanated the hideous story which scandalized both continents, and ultimately recoiled on the retailer of the scandal.  The grounds of the reckless charge have been weighed by those who have wished it to prove false, and by those who have wished it to prove true, and found wanting.  The chaff has been beaten in every way and on all sides, without yielding an ounce of grain; and it were ill-advised to rake up the noxious dust that alone remains.  From nothing left on record by either of the two persons most intimately concerned can we derive any reliable information.  It is plain that Lady Byron was during the later years of her life the victim of hallucinations, and that if Byron knew the secret, which he denies, he did not choose to tell it, putting off Captain Medwin and others with absurdities, as that “He did not like to see women eat,” or with commonplaces, as “The causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be found out.”

Thomas Moore, who had the Memoirs[3] supposed to have thrown light on the mystery, in the full knowledge of Dr. Lushington’s judgment and all the gossip of the day, professes to believe that “the causes of disunion did not differ from those that loosen the links of most such marriages,” and writes several pages on the trite theme that great genius is incompatible with domestic happiness.  Negative instances abound to modify this sweeping generalization; but there is a kind of genius, closely associated with intense irritability, which it is difficult to subject to the most reasonable yoke; and of this sort was Byron’s.  His valet, Fletcher, is reported to have said that “Any woman could manage my lord, except my lady;” and Madame De Stael, on reading the Farewell, that “She would have been glad to have been in Lady Byron’s place.”  But it may be doubted if Byron would have made a good husband to any woman; his wife and he were even more than usually ill-assorted.  A model of the proprieties, and a pattern of the learned philanthropy of which in her sex he was wont to make a constant butt, she was no fit consort for that “mens insana in corpore insano.”  What could her stolid temperament conjecture of a man whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favourite watch under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker?  Or how could her conscious virtue tolerate the recurring irregularities which he was accustomed, not only to permit himself, but to parade?  The harassment of his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was inclined to suspect him to be mad.  Some of her recently printed letters—­as that to Lady Anne Barnard, and the reports of later observers of her character—­as William Howitt, tend to detract from the earlier tributes to her consistent amiability, and confirm our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair.  It must have been trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his late hours,