during life, merge after death into the general beauty of the self-sacrificing character which would not utter the word by which the adverse judgment of the world might have been reversed in a moment.  While, at this day, she is regarded as the cause of her husband’s sins, by her coldness, formality, and what not,—­fidelity and love to her memory absolutely require, not fresh disclosures of a private character, but a new presentment of the evidence long ago given to the world by herself and by her husband’s very partial biographer.  This is what I have done, after thirty years more of life have proved the quality of her mind and heart.

As she loved early, she loved steadily and forever.  It was through that love that her magnanimity was so transcendent.  When Lord Byron was dying, he said to his confidential servant, Fletcher, “Go to Lady Byron,—­you will see her, and say”——­and here his voice faltered, and for nearly twenty minutes he muttered words which it was impossible to catch.  The man was obliged to tell him that he had not understood a syllable.  Byron’s distress was great; but, as he said, it was too late.  Fletcher, on his return to England, did “go to Lady Byron,” and did see her:  but she could only pace the room in uncontrollable agitation, striving to obtain voice to ask the questions which were surging in her heart.  She could not speak, and he was obliged to leave her.  To those with whom she conversed freely, and to whom she wrote familiarly, it was strangely interesting to hear, or to read, lines and phrases from Byron’s poems dropped, like native speech, from her tongue or her pen.  Those well-remembered lines or phrases seemed new, and were wonderfully moving, when coming from her to whom they must have been so much more than to any one else.  How she surmounted such acts as the publication of “Fare thee well!” and certain others of his safe appeals to the public, no one could exactly understand.  That she forgave them, and loved him to the end, is enough for us to know; for our interest is in the greatness of her heart, and not in the littleness of his.

Her life thenceforth was one of unremitting bounty to society, administered with as much skill and prudence as benevolence.  As we have seen, her parents died a few years after her return to them for protection.  She lived in retirement, changing her abode frequently, partly for the benefit of her child’s education and the promotion of her benevolent schemes, and partly from a restlessness which was one of the few signs of injury received from the spoiling of associations with home. She felt a satisfaction which her friends rejoiced in, when her daughter married Lord King, at present the Earl of Lovelace, in 1835; and when grief upon grief followed in the appearance of mortal disease in her only child, her quiet patience stood her in good stead, as before.  She even found strength to appropriate the blessings of the occasion, and took comfort, as did her dying daughter,