words he is stated in Lady Anne Barnard's diary to have used when first
he looked on his little girl,--'What an instrument of torture I have
gained in you!'

In a letter to Lord Blessington, April 6, 1823, he says, speaking of Dr.
Parr:-- {22a}

'He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great
friend of the _other branch of the house of Atreus_, and the Greek
teacher, I believe, of my _moral_ Clytemnestra. I say _moral_ because
it is true, and is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to
do anything without the aid of an AEgistheus.'

If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen, why
were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his allusions to
it? and why was it preserved in Murray's hands? and why published after
his death? That Byron was in the habit of reposing documents in the
hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is evident from a part
of a note written by him to Murray respecting some verses so intrusted:
'Pray let not these _versiculi_ go forth with my name except _to the
initiated_.' {22b}

Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron's death,
showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a
woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy of
treatment. At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most
deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself from
such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted, worthy
Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these lines to
her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world. Nothing can show more