tried to stab herself with a pair of
scissors. Still later, she offered her favors to any one who would kill
him. Byron himself wrote of her:

You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things that she has
said and done.

Her story has been utilized by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her novel, "The
Marriage of William Ashe."

Perhaps this trying experience led Byron to end his life of
dissipation. At any rate, in 1813, he proposed marriage to Miss Anne
Millbanke, who at first refused him; but he persisted, and in 1815 the
two were married. Byron seems to have had a premonition that he was
making a terrible mistake. During the wedding ceremony he trembled like
a leaf, and made the wrong responses to the clergyman. After the
wedding was over, in handing his bride into the carriage which awaited
them, he said to her:

"Miss Millbanke, are you ready?"

It was a strange blunder for a bridegroom, and one which many regarded
at the time as ominous for the future. In truth, no two persons could
have been more thoroughly mismated--Byron, the human volcano, and his
wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman. Their incompatibility
was evident enough from the very first, so that when they returned from
their wedding-journey, and some one asked Byron about his honeymoon, he
answered:

"Call it rather a treacle moon!"

It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their domestic
troubles. Only five weeks after their daughter's birth, they parted.
Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane; while after trying
many times to win from her something more than a tepid affection, he
gave up the task in a sort of despairing anger. It should be mentioned
here, for the benefit of those who recall the hideous charges made many
decades afterward by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of
Lady Byron, that the latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with
Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron's sister, and that even on her death-bed she
sent an amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.

Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon him,
left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through Switzerland,
he took up his abode in Venice. His joy at leaving England and ridding
himself of the annoyances which had clustered thick about him, he
expressed in these lines:

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!

Meanwhil