A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her Leicestershire property; and not far off, she opened a girls’ school, and an infant school; and when a season of distress came, as such seasons are apt to befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers, Lady Byron fed the children for months together, till they could resume their payments.  These schools were opened in 1840.  The next year, she built a school-house on her Warwickshire property; and five years later, she set up an iron school-house on another Leicestershire estate.  By this time, her educational efforts were costing her several hundred pounds a year in the mere maintenance of existing establishments; but this is the smallest consideration in the case.  She has sent out tribes of boys and girls into life fit to do their part there with skill and credit and comfort.  Perhaps it is a still more important consideration, that scores of teachers and trainers have been led into their vocation, and duly prepared for it, by what they saw and learned in her schools.  As for the best and the worst of the Ealing boys,—­the best have, in a few cases, been received into the Battersea Training School, whence they could enter on their career as teachers to the greatest advantage; and the worst found their school a true reformatory, before reformatory schools were heard of.  At Bristol she bought a house for a reformatory for girls; and there her friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and energetically carries out her own and Lady Byron’s aims, which were one and the same.

There would be no end, if I were to catalogue the schemes of which these are a specimen.  It is of more consequence to observe that her mind was never narrowed by her own acts, as the minds of benevolent people are so apt to be.  To the last, her interest in great political movements, at home and abroad, was as vivid as ever.  She watched every step won in philosophy, every discovery in science, every token of social change and progress, in every shape.  Her mind was as liberal as her heart and hand, No diversity of opinion troubled her; she was respectful to every sort of individuality, and indulgent to all constitutional peculiarities.  It must have puzzled those who kept up the notion of her being “strait-laced,” to see how indulgent she was even to epicurean tendencies,—­the remotest of all from her own.

But I must stop; for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate into panegyric.—­Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery cause in the United States.  Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American, to assist him under any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist.

All these deeds were done under a heavy burden of ill-health.  Before she had passed middle life, her lungs were believed to be irreparably injured by partial ossification.  She was subject to attacks so serious, that each one for many years was expected to be the last.  She arranged her affairs in correspondence with her liabilities; so that the same order would have been found, whether she died suddenly or after long warning.