have been other than disastrous. In the autumn of the year we are told
that a friend,[2] observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind
and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he
consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser
objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his
embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc.
Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another
lady, which was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting
together. "'You see,' said Lord Byron, 'that after all Miss Milbanke is to
be the person,' and wrote on the moment. His friend, still remonstrating
against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed,
'Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not
go.' 'Then it _shall_ go,' said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and
sent off this fiat of his fate." The incident seems cut from a French
novel; but so does the whole strange story--one apparently insoluble
enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life. On the arrival of the
lady's answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in, and
presented him with his mother's wedding-ring, lost many years before, and
which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. Almost
at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, "If it
contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring."
He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her "talents,
and excellent qualities;" and saying, "she is so good a person that I wish
I was a better." About the same date he writes to various friends in the
good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge
undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate
House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.

[Footnote 2: Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the story.]