." The date of publication was Sunday, April 14, and it is to
be noted that the _Ode from the French_ ("We do not curse thee,
Waterloo") had been published in the _Morning Chronicle_ on March 15,
and that on the preceding Sunday, April 7, the brilliant but unpatriotic
apostrophe to the _Star of the Legion of Honour_ had appeared in the
_Examiner_. "We notice it [this strain of his Lordship's harp]," writes
the editor, "because we think it would not be doing justice to the
merits of such political tenets, if they were not coupled with their
corresponding practice in regard to moral and domestic obligations.
There is generally a due proportion kept in 'the music of men's lives.'
... Of many of the _facts_ of this distressing case we are not ignorant;
but God knows they are not for a newspaper. Fortunately they fall within
very general knowledge, in London at least; if they had not they would
never have found their way to us. But there is a respect due to certain
wrongs and sufferings that would be outraged by uncovering them." It was
all very mysterious, very terrible; but what wonder that the laureate of
the ex-emperor, the contemner of the Bourbons, the paeanist of the "star
of the brave," "the rainbow of the free," should make good his political
heresy by personal depravity--by unmanly vice, unmanly whining, unmanly
vituperation?

Wordsworth, to whom Scott forwarded the _Champion_ of April 14, "outdid"
the journalist in virtuous fury: "Let me say only one word of Lord B.
The man is insane. The verses on his private affairs excite in me less
indignation than pity. The latter copy is the Billingsgate of Bedlam.
... You yourself seem to labour under some delusion as to the merits of
Lord B.'s poetry, and treat the wretched verses, the _Fare Well_, with
far too much respect. They are disgusting in sentiment, and in execution
contemptible. 'Though my many faults deface me,' etc. Can worse doggerel
than such a stanza be written? One verse is commendable: 'All my madness
none can know.'" The criticism, as criticism, confutes itself, and is
worth quoting solely because it displays the feeling of a sane and
honourable man towards a member of the "opposition," who had tripped and
fallen, and now lay within reach of his lash (see _Life of William
Wordsworth_, 1889, ii. 267, etc.).

It was not only, as Macaulay put it, that Byron was "singled out as an
expiatory sacrifice" by the British public in a periodical fit of
morality, bu