There is equal injustice in the allusion to Lord Byron having been ever surrounded by spies. What spy was near him? The only person denounced in that odious capacity by Lord Byron himself was Mrs. Clermont; and what was the fact with regard to her? If Mrs. Clermont was a spy, surely the last person in the world to have acquitted her would have been Mrs. Leigh, the sister of Lord Byron; but I have in my possession the authentic copy of a letter from Mrs. Leigh to the same Mrs. Clermont, earnestly acquitting her of the calumny, and offering even public testimony to her (Mrs. Clermont’s) tenderness and forbearance (I copy Mrs. Leigh’s words) under circumstances that must have been trying to any friend of Lady Byron. Another unworthy expression of Mr. Moore’s is that of calling Lord Byron “a deserted husband.” Let him read Lady Byron’s remarks, and blot out this absurdity from his volume. Dr. Lushington, versed in the harshest cases of justifiable separation, and bound to admit none of a slight nature, thought that it was impossible she could live with him.

You should have paused, Mr. Moore, before you compelled any friend of Lady Byron to bring out this truth.

It is a farther mistake on Mr. Moore’s part, and I can prove it to be so, if proof be necessary, to represent Lady Byron, in the course of their courtship, as one inviting her future husband to correspondence by letters, after she had at first refused him. She never proposed a correspondence. On the contrary, he sent her a message, after that first refusal, stating that he meant to go abroad, and to travel for some years in the East; that he should depart with a heart aching, but not angry; and that he only begged a verbal assurance that she had still some interest in his happiness. Could Miss Milbank, as a well-bred woman, refuse a courteous answer to such a message? She sent him a verbal answer, which was merely kind and becoming, but which signified no encouragement that he should renew his offer of marriage. After that message, he wrote to her a most interesting letter about himself—about his views, personal, moral, and religious, to which it would have been uncharitable not to have replied. The result was an insensibly increasing correspondence, which ended in her being devotedly attached to him. About that time, I occasionally saw Lord Byron, and though I knew less of him than Mr. Moore, yet I suspect I knew as much of him as Miss Milbank then knew. At that time, he was so pleasing, that if I had had a daughter with ample fortune and beauty, I should have trusted her in marriage with Lord Byron.

Mr. Moore at that period evidently understood Lord Byron better than either his future bride, or myself; but this speaks more for Mr. Moore’s shrewdness, than for Byron’s ingenuousness of character.

It is another improper insinuation, when Mr. Moore hints at a resemblance between the first wife of Milton and the widow of Byron. The parallel is disgustingly unfair. Of Milton’s married life we know not much; but, upon the whole, it is clear that his wife could not have got two honourable men to justify her departure. She went away from him, to all appearance, in rashness, and returned, for her own convenience, in repentance. Lady Byron acted no such part. Produce on Mrs. Milton’s part a Dr. Lushington to speak for her, and we will meet you in the parallel: but beware of the ploughshare!

It is more for Lord Byron’s sake than for his widow’s, that I resort not to a more special examination of Mr. Moore’s misconceptions. The subject would lead me insensibly into hateful disclosures against poor Lord Byron, who is more unfortunate in his rash defenders, than his reluctant accusers. Happily his own candour turns our hostility from himself against his defenders. It was only in wayward and bitter remarks that he misrepresented Lady Byron. He would have defended himself irresistibly if Mr. Moore had left only his acknowledging passages. But Mr. Moore has produced a Life of him which reflects blame on Lady Byron—so dextrously that more is meant than meets the ear. The almost universal impression produced by his book is, that Lady Byron must be a precise, and a wan unwarming spirit—a blue stocking of chilblained learning, a piece of insensitive goodness. Who that knows Lady Byron, will not pronounce her to be every thing the reverse? Will it be believed that this person, so unsuitably matched to her moody Lord, has written verses that would do no discredit to Byron himself—that her sensitiveness is surpassed and bounded only by her good sense, and that she is Blest with a temper, whose unclouded ray Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day. She brought to Lord Byron, beauty, manners, fortune, meekness, romantic affection, and every thing that ought to have made her to the most transcendant man of genius—had he been what he should have been—his pride and his idol. I speak not of Lady Byron in the commonplace manner of attesting character, I appeal to the gifted Mrs. Siddons, and Joanna Baillie, to Lady Charlemont, and to other ornaments of their sex, whether I am exaggerating in the least when I say, that in their whole lives they have seen few beings so intellectual and well tempered, as Lady Byron. I wish to be as ingenuous as possible in speaking of her. Her manner, I have no hesitation to say, is cool at the first interview, but it is modestly, and not insolently cool: she contracted it, I believe, from being exposed by her beauty and large fortune in youth, to numbers of suitors, whom she could not have otherwise kept at a distance. But this manner could have had no influence with Lord Byron, for it vanishes on nearer acquaintance, and has no origin in coldness. All her friends like her frankness the better for being preceded by this reserve. This manner, however, though not the slightest apology for Lord Byron, has been inimical to Lady Byron in her misfortunes. It endears her to her friends, but it piques the indifferent. Most odiously unjust, therefore, is Mr. Moore’s assertion, that she has had the advantage of Lord Byron in public opinion. She is, comparatively speaking, unknown to the world; for though she has many friends, that is, a friend in every one who knows her, yet her pride, and purity, and misfortunes, naturally contract the circle of her acquaintance. There is something exquisitely unjust in Mr. Moore comparing her chance of popularity with Lord Byron’s: the poet who can command men of talents, putting even Mr. Moore into the livery of his service, and who has suborned the favour of almost all women by the beauty of his person and the voluptuousness of his verses. Lady Byron has nothing to oppose to these fascinations but the truth and justice of her cause.

The true way of bringing off Byron from this question of his conjugal unhappiness would be his own way, namely, to acknowledge frankly this one, and, perhaps, the only one great error of his life. Acknowledge it, and after all, what a space is still left in our minds for allowance and charity, and even for admiration of him! All men, as they are frail and fallible beings, are concerned in palliating his fault—to a certain degree they are concerned; though if you reduce the standard of duty too low, the meanest man may justly refuse to sympathize with your apology for a bad husband, and disdain to take the benefit of an insolvent act in favour of debtors to morality. But pay the due homage to moral principle, frankly own that the child of genius is, in this particular, not to be defended—abstain from absolving Byron on false grounds, and you will do him more good than by idle attempts at justification. Above all, keep off your sentimental mummeries from the hallowed precincts of his widow’s character. There, Mr. Moore, you must not fish for compliments, or poach for the pathetic.—Byron acquitted at Lady Byron’s expense, can be taken home to no honest heart’s sympathy, though there is no saying how much the heart yearns to forgive him when there is no sophistry used in his defence.

You said, Mr. Moore, that Lady Byron was unsuitable to her Lord—the word is cunningly insidious, and may mean as much or as little as may suit your convenience. But if she was unsuitable, I remark that it tells all the worse against Lord Byron. I have not read it in your book, for I hate to wade through it; but they tell me, that you have not only warily depreciated Lady Byron, but that you have described a lady that would have suited him. If this be true, it is the unkindest cut of all—to hold up a florid description of a woman suitable to Lord Byron, as if in mockery over the forlorn flower of Virtue, that was drooping in the solitude of sorrow. But I trust there is no such passage in your book. Surely you must be conscious of your woman, with her “virtue loose about her, who would have suited Lord Byron,” to be as imaginary a being as the woman without a head.—A woman to suit Lord Byron!!!—Poo! poo! I could paint to you the woman that could have matched him, if I had not bargained to say as little as possible against him.

If Lady Byron was not suitable to Lord Byron, so much the worse for his Lordship; for let me tell you, Mr. Moore, that neither your poetry, nor Lord Byron’s, nor all our poetry put together, ever delineated a more interesting being than the woman whom you have so coldly treated. This was not kicking the dead lion, but wounding the living lamb, who was already bleeding and shorn even unto the quick. I know that, collectively speaking, the world is in Lady Byron’s favour; but it is coldly favourable, and you have not warmed its breath. Time, however, cures every thing, and even your book, Mr. Moore, may be the means of Lady Byron’s character being better appreciated.