At first, while her influence left its impression on his mind, Lord Byron did her some sort of justice,—­fitful and partial, but very precious to her then, no doubt,—­and almost as precious now to the friends who understood her.  It was not till he was convinced that she would never return, not till he began to quail under the world’s ill opinion, and especially, not till he felt secure that he might rely on his wife’s fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, that he changed his tone to one of aspersion and contempt, and his mode of attack to that of charming, amusing, or inflaming the public with verses against her and her friends.  We have his own testimony to her domestic merits in the interval between the parting and his lapse into a state of malignant feeling.  In March, 1816, within two months after her leaving him, Byron wrote thus to Moore:—­

“I must set you right in one point, however.  The fault was not—­no, nor even the misfortune—­in my ‘choice’ (unless in choosing at all); for I do not believe—­and I must say it, in the very dregs of all this bitter business—­that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady B. I never had, nor can have, any reproach to make her, while with me.  Where there is blame, it belongs to myself; and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it.”

To us, this is enough; and nothing that he wrote afterwards, in angry and spiteful moods, can have the slightest effect on our impression of her:  but the case was otherwise at the time.  Lord Byron’s praise of her to Moore was not known till the “Life” appeared; whereas pieces like “The Chanty Ball,” coming out from time to time, made the world suppose that Lady Byron was one of those people, satirized in all literatures, who violate domestic duty, and make up for it by philanthropic effort and display.  It is the prevalence of this impression to this day which makes it necessary to present the reality of the case after the lapse of many years.  During Lady Byron’s life, no one had a right to speak, if she chose to be silent; but the more modest and shrinking she was in regard to her own vindication, the stronger is the appeal to the fidelity of her friends to see that her reputation does not suffer through her magnanimity.  We have guidance here in her own course in the case of her parents.  Abhorrent as all publicity was to her, she felt and avowed the obligation to publish those facts of her life in which their reputation was concerned.  The duty is far more easy, but not less imperative, to practise the same fidelity in regard to her, now that the truth can be told of her without shocking her modesty.  We may hear some commonplaces about the feelings of the dead and the sensibilities of survivors, as always happens in such cases:  but the sensibilities of survivors ought to relate, in the first place, to the fair fame of the dead; and the feelings of the dead, having been duly respected