Macmillan's Magazine for September contains a paper so re- markable
that we notice it here. It is Lady Byron's own ac- count of her differences with the poet, given by herself to Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who was on intimate terms with her, and was selected for her confidence as free from all national or sectional partialities. Lady Byron's statement is, in brief, that Lord Byron married her to conceal an adulterous intercourse with one to near him in blood, that he refused to abandon this connection, arguing with her in its defence, and that, finally, after two years of incessant effort on her part to reclaim him, and after she had paid off ten executions put into the house, he drove her, by his brutality, to abandon him. She never ceased to love him, and never abandoned her firm belief in his ultimate repentance. "There was the angel in him," she said. Of the truth of this frightful story, which has been long whispered about—so far at least as that this was Lady Byron's motive,—there can, it would seem, be little doubt ; but of the necessity for publishing it at this distance of time we are not so clear. It will hurt the living, and it does not clear the dead, for nobody ever really believed that Lady Byron was in fault.
