separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up they are
not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will
be to open them." He goes on to state, that he repents having consented to
the separation--will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any
tribunal, to discuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that
Mr. Hobhouse (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, to
go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his ignorance of
the allegations against him, and his inability to understand for what
purpose they had been kept back, "unless it was to sanction the most
infamous calumnies by silence." Hobhouse, and others, during the four
succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured to persuade the poet to return
to England. Moore and others insist that Byron's heart was at home when
his presence was abroad, and that, with all her faults, he loved his
country still. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing
for England or its affairs. Like many men of genius, Byron was never
satisfied with what he had at the time. "Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure
Romam." At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the excitement of
the clubs; in London society he longs for a desert or island in the
Cyclades; after their separation, he begins to regret his wife; after his
exile, his country. "Where," he exclaimed to Hobhouse, "is real comfort to
be found out of England?" He frequently fell into the mood in which he
wrote the verse,--

Yet I was born where men are proud to be,
Not without cause: and should I leave behind
Th'immortal island of the sage and free,
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819), is equally sincere. "Some of
the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments