It is scarcely possible at our time of day to make sufficient allowance for such a woman having entered upon such a marriage, in spite of the notoriety of the risks.  Byron was then the idol of much more than the literary world.  His poetry was known by heart by multitudes of men and women who read very little else; and one meets, at this day, elderly men, who live quite outside of the regions of literature, who believe that there never could have been such a poet before, and would say, if they dared, that there will never be such another again.  He appeared at the moment when society was restless and miserable, and discontented with the Fates and the universe and all that it contained.  The general sensibility had not for long found any expression in poetry.  Literature seemed something quite apart from experience, and with which none but a particular class had any concern.  At such a time, when Europe lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French Empire,—­when England had an insane King, a profligate Regent, an atrocious Ministry, and a corrupt Parliament,—­when the war drained the kingdom of its youth, and every class of its resources,—­when there was chronic discontent in the manufacturing districts, and hunger among the rural population, with a perpetual extension of pauperism, swallowing up the working and even the middle classes,—­when everybody was full of anxiety, dread, or a reactionary recklessness,—­there suddenly appeared a new strain of poetry which seemed to express every man’s mood.  Every man took up the song.  Byron’s musical woe resounded through the land.  People who had not known exactly what was the matter with them now found that life was what Byron said it was, and that they were sick of it.  I can well remember the enthusiasm,—­the better, perhaps, for never having shared it.  At first I was too young, and afterwards I found too much of moods and too little of matter to create any lasting attachment to his poetry.  But the music of it rang in all ears, and the rush of its popularity could not be resisted by any but downright churlish persons.  I remember how ladies, in morning calls, recited passages of Byron to each other,—­and how gentlemen, in water-parties, whispered his short poems to their next neighbor.  If a man was seen walking with his head down and his lips moving, he was revolving Byron’s last romance; and children who began, to keep albums wrote, in double lines on the first page, some stanza which caught them by its sound, if they were not up to its sense.  On some pane in every inn-window there was a scrap of Byron; and in young ladies’ portfolios there were portraits of the poet, recognizable, through all bad drawing and distortion, by the cast of the beautiful features and the Corsair style.  Where a popularity like this sprang up, there must be sufficient reason for it to cause it to involve more or less all orders of minds; and the wisest and most experienced men, and the most thoroughly trained scholars, fell into