You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things that she has said and done.

Her story has been utilized by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her novel, “The Marriage of William Ashe.”

Perhaps this trying experience led Byron to end his life of dissipation.  At any rate, in 1813, he proposed marriage to Miss Anne Millbanke, who at first refused him; but he persisted, and in 1815 the two were married.  Byron seems to have had a premonition that he was making a terrible mistake.  During the wedding ceremony he trembled like a leaf, and made the wrong responses to the clergyman.  After the wedding was over, in handing his bride into the carriage which awaited them, he said to her: 

“Miss Millbanke, are you ready?”

It was a strange blunder for a bridegroom, and one which many regarded at the time as ominous for the future.  In truth, no two persons could have been more thoroughly mismated—­Byron, the human volcano, and his wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman.  Their incompatibility was evident enough from the very first, so that when they returned from their wedding-journey, and some one asked Byron about his honeymoon, he answered: 

“Call it rather a treacle moon!”

It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their domestic troubles.  Only five weeks after their daughter’s birth, they parted.  Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane; while after trying many times to win from her something more than a tepid affection, he gave up the task in a sort of despairing anger.  It should be mentioned here, for the benefit of those who recall the hideous charges made many decades afterward by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of Lady Byron, that the latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron’s sister, and that even on her death-bed she sent an amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.

Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon him, left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through Switzerland, he took up his abode in Venice.  His joy at leaving England and ridding himself of the annoyances which had clustered thick about him, he expressed in these lines: 

    Once more upon the waters! yet once more! 
    And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
    That knows his rider.  Welcome to the roar!

Meanwhile he enjoyed himself in reckless fashion.  Money poured in upon him from his English publisher.  For two cantos of “Childe Harold” and “Manfred,” Murray paid him twenty thousand dollars.  For the fourth canto, Byron demanded and received more than twelve thousand dollars.  In Italy he lived on friendly terms with Shelley and Thomas Moore; but eventually he parted from them both, for he was about to enter upon a new phase of his curious career.

He was no longer the Byron of 1815.  Four years of high living and much brandy-and-water had robbed his features of their refinement.  His look was no longer spiritual.  He was beginning to grow stout.  Yet the change had not been altogether unfortunate.  He had lost something of his wild impetuosity, and his sense of humor had developed.  In his thirtieth year, in fact, he had at last become a man.