On the 15th of the following September the letter containing his second proposal to Miss Milbanke was on its way to the lady, on the 2nd, of January 1815 they were married, and but little more than a year had passed since their engagement, than she had probably strong reasons for suspecting him of infidelity.

Moore writes, "It is, at the same time, very far from my intention to allege that, in the course of the noble poet's intercourse with the theatre, he was not sometimes led into a line of acquaintance and converse unbefitting, if not dangerous to, the steadiness of married life. But the imputations against him on this head were (as far as affected, his conjugal character) not the less unfounded, as the sole case in which he afforded anything like real grounds for an accusation did not take place till after the period of the separation." 1

Moore was probably relying on the information he obtained from Byron's memoirs in making this assertion, but it is doubtful if Byron positively knew of his wife's chief reasons for repudiating him. Lady Byron persistently refused to inform him of her principal grounds for action, with which only the counsellors on both sides, Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly, Mrs. Leigh, and the other individual named in the 'Quarterly Review' for January 1870 were acquainted; and had sworn complete secrecy as regards her chief motives for action to some interested person or persons, unless the case should go into court. 2

1 'Moore's Life' etc., p. 297 (one volume ed.).

2 See her statements in Campbell's article on Moore's Life of Byron in 'The New Monthly' 1830, I, p. 379. Extract: "It is not true that pecuniary embarrassments were the cause of the disturbed state of Lord Byron's mind, or formed the chief reason for the arrangements made by him at that time (to go abroad?). But is it reasonable for me believe this, unless I show

to expect that you, or anyone else, should
what were the causes in question? and this I cannot do,"

I am, &c. &c.
E. (sic) Noel Byron.

In the British Museum are preserved in one of the open collections of Byronic writings, some verses in the handwriting of Lady Byron entitled "The Magpie',' and bearing the postmark September 28th 1815,2 in which the so-called committee. of 'mismanagement of Drury Lane Theatre is ridiculed as a whole, after which Byron comes in for his share as a member:

"Then there's Byron ashamed to appear like a Poet,

He talkes of finances for fear he should show it

And makes all the envious Dandys despair;

By the cut of his shirt, and the curl of his hair?"

Under these verses Lady Byron wrote her husband's half-sister, "I have not got the others down get - I believe Bwill go to the Theatre to night but you seem to have mistaken!-for the mischief has not lately taken place there but after his return when alone I grow more unable to sit up late."3

4

In Byron's last letter to his wife before leaving England, he writes, that when he made the will in favour of Mrs. Leigh and her children (July 29th 1815) he and his wife "had not then differed," In Lady Byron's letter of February 23rd 1816, to her husband, she wrote that she had "warned him," before thinking him mad, "earnestly and affectionately of the irreparable consequenses which must issue" from his conduct both to himself and her and that "to those representations" he had replied "by a determination to be wicked" though it should break her heart. She continues, "I cannot attribute your 'State of mind' to any

1 See Byron's letter of September 25th 1815 to Murray as regards this poem (Moore's Life' etc., one volume ed. p. 285).

2 Add. MS. 31037, p. 21, British Museum.

3 Add. MS. 31037, p. 21, British Museum.

Letter No. 19 in the appendix to the standard edition of 'The Real Lord Byron';- also in the 'Athenæum' for August 18th 1883.

5 Letter No. 18 of the appendix to the standard edition of "The Real Lord Byron';- also in the Athenæum' for August 18th 1883.

cause so much as to the total dereliction of principle, which since our marriage you have professed and gloried in" On what subject besides respect for marriage vows did Byron lack principle? Was he not an honest man according to the 'code of honour' of the world of fashion of his day? And yet Jeaffreson writes in his work on Byron, which, on most points is teeming with sagacity and penetration, that"It is certain that Lady Byron and her husband separated on account of reasons covered by the familiar and elastic phrase 'incompatibility of temper'." 1 Why is it certain? Because Lady Lovelace thought so? Unless Jeaffreson can publish documents to verify his assertion, it is of course impossible to accept it as true in the face of so much published evidence to the contrary.

VI.

Byron's Relationship to Mary Jane Clairmont.

2

Whether Mary Jane Clairmont, daughter of William Godwin's second wife by a former husband and mother of Byron's natural child 'Allegra', was the cause of the poet's being led astray from the path of conjugal duty as early as the lines written by his wife under the verses entitled 'The Magpie' suggest, I am unable to decide, not having been able to obtain sufficient information on the subject for any positive conclusion. The substance of the lines written by Lady Byron to Mrs. Leigh, agrees with the account which a gentleman of literary eminence in London (who claims to

1 The Real Lord Byron', standard edition, p. 188.

2 Generally called 'Claire' by Shelleyan and Byronic biographers, she was called 'Claire' by Shelley, by her sister-by-affinity Mary Godwin (afterwards the second Mrs. Shelley), Leigh Hunt, Mrs. Hunt, and other from the spring of 1814 on. By her mother, brother, father-in-law and Fanny Imlay she was invariably called 'Jane'.

to have had the story from an intimate friend of Byron, who had obtained his information from the poet] gave me of the manner in which Byron first became intimate with Miss Clairmont. The second Mrs. Shelley however writes to 'Claire' herself of the 'spring when she [Claire] became acquainted with Lord Byron; and Medwin, Shelley's cousin, who might well have obtained some information on the subject from Shelley or Shelley's second wife, writes,-"She was not altogether a stranger to Byron when they met at Sécheron; for as he was about to quit London for the continent in the spring of that year [1816], after his mysterious repudiation by Lady Byron, she had an interview with him for the purpose of obtaining an engagement at Drury Lane.....; but which object, his recent resignation of office as chairman of the committee of management, precluded him as he explained to her from forwarding."2

Mrs. Marshall, in her well known work on Shelley's second wife, writes "Nothing in Clara's [Claire's] letters to him (Byron) (which unfortunately may not be published) goes to prove that she was very deeply in love with him."3 That Claire was far from having an affectionate remembrance of Byron after his death, may be seen from one of her letters to Mrs. Shelley, in which, in referring to the latter's novel 'Lodore' (published in 1835) she writes, "Mrs.-admired 'Lodore' amazingly, so do I, or should I, if it were not for that modification of the beastly character of Lord Byron of which you have composed Lodore, *** Good God! to think a person of your genius, whose moral tact ought to be proportionately exalted, should think it a task befitting its powers, to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human being! As I do not want to be severe

1 Dowden's 'Life of Shelley'. vol. 2, p. 489.

2 Medwin's Life of Shelley. vol. 1, p. 280 (London 1847).

3 The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley' by Mrs.

Julian Marshall. London, 1889, vol. 1, p. 125.

on the poor man, because he is dead and cannot defend himself, I have only taken the lighter defects of his character, or else I might say that never was a nature more profoundly corrupt than his became, or more radically vulgar than his was from the very outset. Never was there an individual less adapted, except perhaps Alcibiades, for being held up as anything but an object of commiseration, or as an example of how contemptible is even intellectual greatness when not joined with moral greatness."

"1

Byron certainly cared very little for this girl, whose behaviour, to say the least, must have been very irritating to a man of his temperament. With what outbursts of passion. she assailed him at Geneva, we are not informed, but to judge from the few of her letters to him which have been published, and which are by no means as restrained as good policy required, she must have overwhelmed him with sarcasm when in anger in his presence. Possibly also the similarity of her name to that of the 'mischief maker' Mrs. Clermont,3 whom Byron considered in February 1816, as "very much the occult cause of his domestic discrepancies," and whom he poured his wrath upon in the verses called 'A Sketch', influenced him to some degree in disliking Claire. 5

The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley'. vol. 2, pp. 265, 66.

2 Besides many of Claire's letters to Byron, those which Shelley wrote him announcing the birth of Allegra and others in behalf of the child and mother, and Byron's letters in reply, if he wrote any, have as yet not been published.

3 Mary Shelley spelt this woman's name 'Claremont', see her letter to Trelawny, vol. 2, pp. 118, 19, 20; of Mrs. Marshall's work.

4 'Moore's Life' etc., letter 233.

5 Jeaftreson confounds Mrs. Clermont the 'Mischief-maker' and former governess of Lady Byron whom he attacked in his poem called "The Sketch' with Mrs. Clairmont Godwin's second wife and mother of Claire. He writes: "Several motives are conceivable, any, one of which would dispose the 'Mischief-maker' to find her former pupil to withhold the informations from her father and mother. Care for Jane's welfare and