happiness as in the lady in question. Combining beauty of the highest
order with a mind intelligent and ingenuous,--having just learning
enough to give refinement to her taste, and far too much taste to make
pretensions to learning,--with a patrician spirit proud as his own, but
showing it only in a delicate generosity of spirit, a feminine
high-mindedness, which would have led her to tolerate his defects in
consideration of his noble qualities and his glory, and even to
sacrifice silently some of her own happiness rather than violate the
responsibility in which she stood pledged to the world for his;--such
was, from long experience, my impression of the character of this lady;
and perceiving Lord Byron to be attracted by her more obvious claims to
admiration, I felt a pleasure no less in rendering justice to the still
rarer qualities which she possessed, than in endeavouring to raise my
noble friend's mind to the contemplation of a higher model of female
character than he had, unluckily for himself, been much in the habit of
studying.

To this extent do I confess myself to have been influenced by the sort
of feeling which he attributes to me. But in taking for granted (as it
will appear he did from one of his letters) that I entertained any very
decided or definite wishes on the subject, he gave me more credit for
seriousness in my suggestions than I deserved. If even the lady herself,
the unconscious object of these speculations, by whom he was regarded in
no other light than that of a distinguished acquaintance, could have
consented to undertake the perilous,--but still possible and
glorious,--achievement of attaching Byron to virtue, I own that,
sanguinely as, in theory, I might have looked to the result, I should
have seen, not without trembling, the happiness of one whom I had known
and valued from her childhood risked in the experiment.