“I wonder,” said I to myself, as I passed on, “I wonder if M. Cesar Prevost’s account of his remarkable invention of the First Atlantic Telegraph have not some subtile connection with his desire to find as speedy and remunerative a sale as possible for his pretty baskets!”

LADY BYRON.

It is seldom that a woman becomes the world’s talk but by some great merit or fault of her own, or some rare qualification so bestowed by Nature as to be incapable of being hidden.  Great genius, rare beauty, a fitness for noble enterprise, the venturous madness of passion, account for ninety-nine cases in the hundred of a woman becoming the subject of general conversation and interest.  Lady Byron’s was the hundredth case.  There was a time when it is probable that she was spoken of every day in every house in England where the family could read; and for years the general anxiety to hear anything that could be told of her was almost as striking in Continental society and in the United States as in her own country.  Yet she had neither genius, nor conspicuous beauty, nor “a mission,” nor any quality of egotism which could induce her to brave the observation of the world for any personal aim.  She had good abilities, well cultivated for the time when she was young; she was rather pretty, and her countenance was engaging from its expression of mingled thoughtfulness and brightness; she was as lady-like as became her birth and training; and her strength of character was so tempered with modesty and good taste that she was about the last woman that could have been supposed likely to become celebrated in any way, or, yet more, to be passionately disputed about and censured, in regard to her temper and manners:  yet such was her lot.  No breath of suspicion ever dimmed her good repute, in the ordinary sense of the expression:  but to this day she is misapprehended, wherever her husband’s genius is adored; and she is charged with precisely the faults which it was most impossible for her to commit.  For the original notoriety she was not answerable; but for the protracted misapprehension of her character she was.  She early decided that it was not necessary or desirable to call the world into council on her domestic affairs; her husband’s doing it was no reason why she should; and for nearly forty years she preserved a silence, neither haughty nor sullen, but merely natural, on matters in which women usually consider silence appropriate.  She never inquired what effect this silence had on public opinion in regard to her, nor countenanced the idea that public opinion bore any relation whatever to her private affairs and domestic conduct.  Such independence and such reticence naturally quicken the interest and curiosity of survivors; and they also stimulate those who knew her as she was to explain her characteristics to as many as wish to understand them, after disputing about them for the lifetime of a whole generation.