clergyman. After the wedding was over, in handing his bride into
the carriage which awaited them, he said to her:

"Miss Millbanke, are you ready?"

It was a strange blunder for a bridegroom, and one which many
regarded at the time as ominous for the future. In truth, no two
persons could have been more thoroughly mismated--Byron, the human
volcano, and his wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman.
Their incompatibility was evident enough from the very first, so
that when they returned from their wedding-journey, and some one
asked Byron about his honeymoon, he answered:

"Call it rather a treacle moon!"

It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their
domestic troubles. Only five weeks after their daughter's birth,
they parted. Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane;
while after trying many times to win from her something more than
a tepid affection, he gave up the task in a sort of despairing
anger. It should be mentioned here, for the benefit of those who
recall the hideous charges made many decades afterward by Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of Lady Byron, that the
latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with Augusta Leigh,
Lord Byron's sister, and that even on her death-bed she sent an
amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.

Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon
him, left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through
Switzerland, he took up his abode in Venice. His joy at leaving