hter, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, to believe "that the duchess was the
author of the published poem."

I will deal with the external evidence first. Practically it amounts to
this: (1) that Lady Granville knew that her mother, the Duchess of
Devonshire, dramatized Miss Lee's _Kruitzner_; and (2) that Lady
Georgiana Fullerton believed that the duchess gave the MS. of her play
to Lady Caroline Ponsonby, and that, many years after, Lady Caroline
handed it over to Byron.

The external evidence establishes the fact that the Duchess of
Devonshire dramatized _Kruitzner_, but it does not prove that Byron
purloined her adaptation. It records an unverified impression on the
part of the duchess's granddaughter, that the MS. of a play written
between the years 1801-1806, passed into Byron's hands about the year
1813; that he took a copy of the MS.; and that in 1821-22 he caused his
copy to be retranscribed and published under his own name.

But Mr. Leveson Gower appeals to internal as well as external evidence,
(1) He regards the great inferiority of _Werner_ to Byron's published
plays, and to the genuine (hitherto) unpublished first act, together
with the wholesale plagiarisms from Miss Lee's story, as an additional
proof that the work was none of his. (2) He notes, as a suspicious
circumstance, that "while the rough copies of his other poems have been
preserved, no rough copy of _Werner_ is to be found."

In conclusion, he deals with two possible objections which may be
brought against his theory: (1) that Byron would not have incurred the
risk of detection at the hands of the owners of the duchess's MS.; and
(2) that a great poet of assured fame and reputation could have had no
possible motive for perpetrating a literary fraud. The first objection
he answers by assuming that Byron would have counted on the reluctance
of the "Ponsonby family and the daughters of the Duchess" to rake up the
ashes of old scandals; the second, by pointing out that, in 1822, he was
making "frantic endeavours to obtain money, not for himself, but to help
the cause of Greece."

(1) With regard to the marked inferiority of _Werner_ to Byron's other
plays, and the relative proportion of adapted to original matter, Mr.
Leveson Gower appears to have been misled by the disingenuous criticism
of Maginn and other contemporary reviewers (_vide_ the Introduction,
etc., p. 326). There is no such inferiority, and the plagiarisms, which
were duly acknowledged,