when he was going to leave off writing verses; to be told he had no real enthusiasm; or to have his desk broken open, and its compromising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least intended.  The smouldering elements of discontent may have been fanned by the gossip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, and kindled into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for others beyond the circle of his home.  Lady Byron doubtless believed some story which, when communicated to her legal advisers, led them to the conclusion that the mere fact of her believing it made reconciliation impossible; and the inveterate obstinacy which lurked beneath her gracious exterior, made her cling through life to the substance—­not always to the form, whatever that may have been—­of her first impressions.  Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh, as that called forth by Moore’s Life, are certainly as open to the charge of self-righteousness, as those of her husband’s are to self-disparagement.

    [Footnote 3:  Captain Trelawney, however, doubts if he ever read them.]

Byron himself somewhere says, “Strength of endurance is worth all the talent in the world.”  “I love the virtues that I cannot share.”  His own courage was all active; he had no power of sustained endurance.  At a time when his proper refuge was silence, and his prevailing sentiment—­for he admits he was somehow to blame—­should have been remorse, he foolishly vented his anger and his grief in verses, most of them either peevish or vindictive, and some of which he certainly permitted to be published.  “Woe to him,” exclaims Voltaire, “who says all he could on any subject!” Woe to him, he might have added, who says anything at all on the subject of his domestic troubles!  The poet’s want of reticence at this crisis started a host of conjectures, accusations, and calumnies, the outcome, in some degree at least, of the rancorous jealousy of men of whose adulation he was weary.  Then began that burst of British virtue on which Macaulay has expatiated, and at which the social critics of the continent have laughed.  Cottle, Cato, Oxoniensis, Delia, and Styles, were let loose, and they anticipated the Saturday and the Spectator of 1869, so that the latter might well have exclaimed, “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”  Byron was accused of every possible and impossible vice, he was compared to Sardanapalus, Nero, Tiberius, the Duke of Orleans, Heliogabalus, and Satan—­all the most disreputable persons mentioned in sacred and profane history; his benevolences were maligned, his most disinterested actions perverted.  Mrs. Mardyn, the actress, was on his account, on one occasion, driven off the public stage.  He was advised not to go to the theatres, lest he should be hissed; nor to Parliament, lest he should be insulted.  On the very day of his departure a friend told him that he feared violence from mobs assembling at the door of his carriage.  “Upon what grounds,”