beside him, and continued silent for hours, with the most ferocious
expression possible on his countenance.

'For God's sake, my dear B.,' said W----at last, 'what are you
thinking of? Are you about to commit murder? or what other dreadful
thing are you meditating?'

To which Byron answered that he always had a sort of presentiment that
his own life would be attacked some time or other; and that this was
the reason of his always going armed, as it was also the subject of
his thoughts at that moment."

Moore also adds ('ibid'., p. 292),

"W. W. owes Lord Byron, he says, L1000, and does not seem to have the
slightest intention of paying him."

Lady Frances was the lady to whom Byron seriously devoted himself in
1813-4. Subsequently she was practically separated from her husband, and
Byron, in 1823, endeavoured to reconcile them. Moore ('Memoirs,
Journals, etc'., vol. ii. p. 249) writes,

"To the Devizes ball in the evening; Lady Frances W. there; introduced
to her, and had much conversation, chiefly about our friend Lord B.
Several of those beautiful things, published (if I remember right)
with the 'Bride', were addressed to her. She must have been very
pretty when she had more of the freshness of youth, though she is
still but five or six and twenty; but she looks faded already" (1819).

In the Court of Common Pleas, February 16, 1816, the libel action of