ourney, which bore no marks of the trouble which existed between them.
These letters were afterwards used, even circulated, to create a belief
that Lady Byron had been suddenly persuaded to desert her husband,
though he at least was well aware that the fact was not so. It soon
appeared that he was not insane. Such was the decision of physicians,
relatives, and presently of Lady Byron herself. While there was any
room for supposing disease to be the cause of his conduct, she and
her parents were anxious to use all tenderness with him, and devote
themselves to his welfare; but when it became necessary to consider him
sane, his wife declared that she could not return to him.

It is not necessary to dwell on the imputations Lord Byron spread abroad
at the time, and his biographer afterwards, against the parents of his
wife, and everybody belonging to them who could be supposed to have
the slightest influence over Lady Byron's views or feelings. Those
allegations were publicly shown by her to be false, nearly thirty years
ago. I refer to them now solely because they were the occasion of the
only public disclosure Lady Byron ever voluntarily made on any part of
the subject of her married life. It is needless to exhibit how different
in this respect was the conduct of her husband and his friends.

It became known by that statement, after some years, that, when Lady
Noel went to London, to see what could and ought to be done, she
obtained good legal opinions on the case, so far as she knew it. Those
opinions declared Lady Byron fully justified in refusing to rejoin her
husband. The parents, however, never knew the whole; and it was on yet
more substantial grounds that Lady Byron formed her resolution. The
facts were submitted, as the world has since known, as an A.B. case, to
Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly; and those able lawyers and good
men peremptorily decided, that the wife, whoever she might be, must
never see her husband again. When they learned whose case it was, they
not only gave their full sanction to her refusal to return, but
declared that they would never countenance in any way a change in that
resolution. Dr. Lushington's statement to this effect appears in the
Appendix to Moore's "Life," as a part of Lady Byron's vindication of her
parents.

It was very hard on her to be compelled to speak at all. For six years
she had kept silence utterly, bearing all imputations without reply. But
when it was brought t