IN common with most of our countrymen, we have long

had a meat, vegetables, and cheese, without fish, soup, or sweets, you very genuine admiration of the peculiar genius of Mrs. Harriet pay two shillings to half-a-crown more ; and a pint of the least Beecher Stowe. She spoke the slave's parable, and perhaps did costly wine comes to a shilling or eighteenpence. Thus, as a more, by " Uncle Tom's Cabin," to precipitate the final victory common rule, the cheapest dinner you can order at a club of the Abolitionists than could be assigned to the single agency of any other individual. When, accordingly, the gifted authoress you get plenty to eat ; you have a very fair dinner, fairly well visited this country, she was welcomed by many friends of the waiting, clean linen, and all the appurtenances of the table you spokeswoman of a holy cause. By none, probably, was a more miss at lodgings, or even at a restaurant ; but then you pay for loyal and sympathizing reception accorded to her than by Lady it. And, moreover, if you are an habitual diner at the club, it Byron, who—in this respect at least at one with her husband is not easy to keep your dinner-bill down to the minimum price. —had from her earliest years cherished a profound antipathy to oppression in its varied forms, whether of a caste or of a creed. The men you know, and whom you like to dine with, have It would appear, however, from the " appalling" article—we use

the adjective of the editor of Macmillan—which has just been

not join them, and may cat your slice of mutton alone ; but if published in that magazine by Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe, that she was not only honoured by Lady Byron as the representative of a must eat and drink as your neighbours do ; and if you do this, sacred mission which lay very close to her ladyship's heart, but

you will find your dinner-bill runs from seven to ten shillings. was made the depositary of those secrets of her married life con- It is continually urged by Club reformers that a good dinner cerning which she maintained towards the outer world so inexor- with fish and soups and sweets might be provided on table d'hote able a silence. With Mrs. IL Beecher Stowe the present writer principles for three to four shillings a head, and every now and has no acquaintance whatever, but to judge from what she has written in this month's Macmillan, we are obliged, however pain-

to fully ourselves, to conclude that she is just the last person in do this, it may be thought that Clubs, which have no profit to make, the world to whom we could commit the custody of a confidential could do it much more easily. But in practice the experiment is communication. invariably a failure. Many reasons may be assigned for this. Whether the paper in question is, or is not, the true Firstly, the management of a club is necessarily very wasteful. story of Lady Byron's life, the world can only learn autho- The Committee, however active, can only exercise a general super- ritatively, and we hope at no distant day will learn, from vision, and the direct interest of every employe and servant in the Lady Byron's own manuscripts; but it seems to us that a club is to swell the tradesmen's bills. Either they receive corn- lady of ordinary courtesy, and possessed with but a common mission on the amount, or if not, they like to be on good terms sense of literary decorum, would have made it her first duty to with the purveyors of food, and they have no conceivable induce-

consult with Lady Byron's literary executors, and with her meat to exercise economy for the benefit of a corporate body, two surviving grandchildren, whom Mrs. Stowe calls "some of the best and noblest of mankind" (sic), before scattering broad- which has none of the ties such as exist between a private

cast over the planet the "painful details "—as they are well which she has put her name. Again—and we write the sentence after most careful reperusals of Mrs. Stowe's article—she has not only failed in courtesy and decorum and in proper con- sideration for the feelings of those who are surely far more their places ; and after a short experience he is able to tell with deeply interested in the fame of Lady Byron than a mere casual to acquaintance can possibly be, but her statements are made without tolerable accuracy how many dinners he will have to provide each the least shadow of sanction from y competent source. And to this fact we beg very emphatically to call the attention of our readers on both sides of the Atlantic, because it is one which Mrs.

between seven and eight one day, and twelve dining at the same Stowe has wrapped up, apparently, rather carefully, in words say the least, a very equivocal significance.

comes a loss which completely eats up the profit on a large number Mrs. Stowe writes as follows :—" It has been thought by some f riends [friends of Lady Byron in this country ?] who have read the proof sheets of the above, that the author should state more

almost worthless. A tavern-keeper can, if he thinks fit, lay in a Now, clearly the only possible authority which would justify come in

stock, but a provider for clubs cannot. Members rs Mrs. Stowe in writing and publishing what she calls the true s story of Lady Byron's life would be, first, either a written at any hour and expect to be served at once from the "menu ,, of the day, and if any article mentioned therein is not forthcoming, statement, in Lady Byron's handwriting, instructing her or if the programme is a scanty one, the steward and cook are after a certain time to make known to the world certain facts; or, second, a similar statement, issuing from Lady Byron's grandchildren or her literary executors. Mrs. Stowe and are anxious that all the kitchen arrangements should be does not possess any such instruction. But her language might cause the hasty reader to imagine that she did. She thus speaks, for instance, on p. 383, "By a singular concur-

rence of circumstances, all the facts of the case [i.e., of the separa-

tion of Lord and Lady Byron] in the most undeniable and

support of the constituted authorities, authentic form were at one time placed in the hands of the writer an association of

In fact, to resume our argument, a Club is of this sketch, leaving to her judgment the use which should be made of them." On first reading the words, we own to having been misled by them, as if their meaning had been that Lady income, be it small or great, upon their personal comfort and Byron bad left a discretionary power with Mrs. Beecher Stowe the use she, Mrs. Stowe, might make of a certain we urge is that men who want to study economy should not belong document which, she asserts, had been "placed. in her hands." to Clubs, or, at any rate, should not use them as their domiciles. Nay, more, Mrs. Stowe's phraseology is so careful as to warrant If you can afford to live at the rate of ten to twelve pounds a week, the inference that the materials at one time placed in her hands w that is, to spend ten to twelve shillings a day upon your eating, were still in her possession. In the very next sentence, however, not pretend to have

access to any written evidence for her assertions. She lays claim

to merely "this knowledge," of which, she says, she would have made no public use but for the appearance of the work of Lord London Club. Byron's "mistress," the Countess Guiccioli. Still, the impres- sion might remain that Mrs. Stowe was in reality not merely drawing upon her memory or fancy, but copying from an "unde- niable and authentic form" before her. But, in the first place, she is probably aware, and the editor of Macmillan is still more likely to be aware, that not a single line of any manuscript of Lady Byron's could be printed in this country without the direct sanction of her representatives ; and secondly, Mrs. Stowe's own statement at the close of her article, though lacking in explicitness, places the matter beyond all doubt. She will not, in so many words, avow that "the paper" which Lady Byron, in the sacredness of confidence, permitted her to see was returned by her, but she, in her own peculiar manner, reports that after two or three days' deliberation she wrote to Lady Byron that her ladyship would be "entirely justifiable in leaving the truth to be disclosed after her death, and recommended that all the facts necessary should be put in the hands of some persons, to be so published."

Now, we venture to submit that the inevitable deductions to be drawn from all this circumlocution are none other than these :—(1) That Mrs. Stowe writes without authority ; (2) that for her story she has no written testimony ; (3) that in publishing this article she has departed from the letter of her own recommendation, which was that "the necessary facts should be placed in the hands of some persons, to be so published ;" (4) that she has either written a narrative as fictitious as it is sensational, or she has been guilty of a breach of confidence.

We may add here what was stated in the Times of Thursday last by the solicitors of the representatives of Lady Byron, that, by her latest will, Lady Byron left all her papers in the hands of three literary executors, assigning to them exclusive and absolute control over all her manuscripts, suggesting, however, that in any use they might make of the documents entrusted to them, a primary regard was to be paid to the feelings of her grand- -children; but Mrs. Stowe is not one of these executors, and by her heedless rushing into print this authoress has acted in opposition to the dying injunctions of the person whom yet she affects to reverence as almost more than mortal.

And what is Mrs. Beecher Stowe's excuse, for justification there is none, for exhibiting to the world a statement which she might be sure would shock the moral sense of thousands of readers, and in certain cases Inflict not a little pain ? The only excuse alleged is that "the mistress of Lord Byron has the ear of the public " ! We beg entirely to dissent from Mrs. Stowe's estimate of the influence of the work which bears, in its English edition, the name of the Countess Guiccioli. What does Mrs. Stowe imagine to be the moral worth of the hysterical screams of the mistress against the wife ? We must confess that we scarcely ever found it so hard a task to keep our gravity as we did when reviewing the so-called Recollections of the Guiccioli ' in this journal. But even if it were true, which we do not for an instant allow, that this Italian countess has the ear of the public, would the fact vindicate Mrs. Stowe from the charge of a public endeavour —we use her own words—to "violate the sanctuary of a silence where Lady Byron so long abode " ? Indeed, Mrs. Stowe's assumed championship of outraged virtue reminds us of nothing so much as of the old Arabian legend which tells us how Abraham, in the night-watches, was rebuked by the great God for turning the unbeliever out of his tent in the words, "If I have borne with him for seventy years, couldst thou not tolerate him for a few brief hours?" For thirty-six years of widowhood, for eight of wifehood, Lady Byron kept her seeret from the world ; but poor 31rs. Stowe so burns to blurt out her "knowledge," that nine years after Lady Byron's death she becomes utterly incontinent.

Mrs. Stowe is curiously inconsistent in the presentment of her -own defence. First of all, she writes, though still in a hesitating way, that "no person in England, we think, would, as yet, take the responsibility of relating the true history which is to clear Lady Byron's memory." Of course, no reliable individuals in England, who were in the confidence of Lady Byron—and there are a few such persons known to us—would take the responsibility .either of publicly revealing that they were unworthy of the trust reposed in them, or of acting in disregard of the express terms of Lady Byron's will, or of the feelings of those for whose -sakes, as well as from consideration of the dead, she maintained what the editor of Macmillan designates very properly a "religious silence." But Mrs. Stowe, in spite of her " thinking " that no one in England would as yet rise up to tell Lady Byron's history, all the same informs us that "alter Lady Byron's death, she .looked anxiously hoping to see a memoir of the person whom she considered the most remarkable woman that England had pro- duced in this century." We must leave it to Mrs. Stowe to recon- cile, as best she can, these contradictory modes of thinking and expectation, but we would suggest to her that if Lady Byron's English friends could keep silence and bide their time, it would have been a good thing if she had followed their example.

In conclusion, we cannot but reckon it as an assumption of authority, when the editor of Macmillan endorses this paper as a " complete and authentic account" of Lady Byron's married life. It is neither the one nor the other. It is at most the recollections of what Mrs. Stowe alleges was told her or read by her thirteen years ago, the recollections, moreover, of a writer who speaks of the few years of Lady Byron's widowhood, who makes her live with her husband for two years, instead of thirteen months, and who cannot even spell properly Lady Byron's maiden surname.

Mrs. Stowe affirms of the interview with Lady Byron from which she professes to have learned what she now makes public, that it had almost the solemnity of a death-bed avowal. Did it not occur to Mrs. Stowe, as she wrote this sentence, that the only accordant conduct on her part with the death-bed avowal of Lady Byron would have been a silence like that of the grave ?