than by most attacks. We must however, bear in mind his own admission in a
parallel case. "I say I am perfectly calm; I am, nevertheless, in a fury."
Over the sad vista of the remaining years of the unhappy lady's life we
need not linger. During a considerable part of it she appears hovering
about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from
madness; writing more novels, burning her hero's effigy and letters, and
then clamouring for a lock of his hair, or a sight of his portrait;
separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous
forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing
herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and
yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize, the man whom she regarded as her
betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to
overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit up here
and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the
12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral. On hearing that the
remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked, and
fainted. Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock;
but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm
letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet's miniature to her friend,
Lady Morgan.

"I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others," Byron writes to
Moore, on September 15th, 1814; "but I have a few thousand pounds which I
can't spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the
south. I want to see Venice and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look
at the coast of Greece from Italy. All this however depends upon an event
which may or may not happen. Whether it will I shall probably know
tomorrow, and if it does I can't well go abroad at present." "A wife," he
had written, in the January of the same year, "would be my salvation;" but
a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could, scarcely