Byron named Miss Milbanke:  the friend objected, on the grounds of her possession of learning and supposed want of fortune; and Byron actually commissioned his adviser to propose for him to the lady he did not prefer.  She refused him; and then future proceedings were determined by his friend’s admiration of the letter he had got ready for Miss Milbanke.  It was such a pretty letter, it would be a pity not to send it.  So it was sent.

If she could have known, as she hung over that letter, what eyes had read lines that should have been her own secret property, and as what kind of alternative the letter had been prepared, what a different life might hers have been!  But she could not dream of being laid hold of as a speculation in that style, and she was happy,—­as women are for once in their lives, and as she deserved to be.  There was another alternative, besides that of two ladies to be weighed in the balance.  Byron was longing to go abroad again, and he would have preferred that to marrying; but the importunity of his friends decided him for marriage.  In a short time, and for a short time, Miss Milbanke’s influence was too strong for his wayward nature and his pernicious friends to resist.  His heart was touched, his mind was soothed, and he thought better of women, and perhaps of the whole human race, than he had ever done before.  He wrote to Moore, who owned he had “never liked her,” and who boded evil things from the marriage, that she was so good that he wished he was better,—­that he had been quite mistaken in supposing her of “a very cold disposition.”  These gentlemen had heard of her being regarded as “a pattern lady in the North”; and they had made up an image of a prude and a blue in their own minds, which Byron presently set himself to work to pull down.  He wrote against Moore’s notion of her as “strait-laced,” in a spirit of justice awakened by his new satisfactions and hopes:  but there are in the narrative no signs of love on his part,—­nothing more than an amiable complacency in the discovery of her attachment to him.

The engagement took place in September, 1814, and the marriage in the next January.  Moore saw him in the interval, and had no remaining hope, from that time, that Byron could ever make or find happiness in married life.  He was satisfied that love was, in Byron’s case, only an imagination; and he pointed to a declaration of Byron’s, that, when in the society of the woman he loved, even at the happiest period of his attachment, he found himself secretly longing to be alone.  Secretly during the courtship, but not secretly after marriage.

“Tell me, Byron,” said his wife, one day, not long after they were married, and he was moodily staring into the fire,—­“am I in your way?”

“Damnably,” was the answer.

It will be remembered by all readers that the reason he assigned for the good terms on which he remained with his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, was that they seldom or never saw each other.