be any truth, however, in the principle, that they "never
pardon who have done the wrong," Lord Byron, who was, to the last,
disposed to reconciliation, proved so far, at least, his conscience to
have been unhaunted by any very disturbing consciousness of aggression.

But though it would have been difficult, perhaps, for the victims of
this strife, themselves, to have pointed out any single, or definite,
cause for their disunion,--beyond that general incompatibility which is
the canker of all such marriages,--the public, which seldom allows
itself to be at a fault on these occasions, was, as usual, ready with an
ample supply of reasons for the breach,--all tending to blacken the
already darkly painted character of the poet, and representing him, in
short, as a finished monster of cruelty and depravity. The reputation of
the object of his choice for every possible virtue, (a reputation which
had been, I doubt not, one of his own chief incentives to the marriage,
from the vanity, reprobate as he knew he was deemed, of being able to
win such a paragon,) was now turned against him by his assailants, not
only in the way of contrast with his own character, but as if the
excellences of the wife were proof positive of every enormity they chose
to charge upon the husband.

Meanwhile, the unmoved silence of the lady herself, (from motives, it
is but fair to suppose, of generosity and delicacy,) under the repeated
demands made for a specification of her charges against him, left to
malice and imagination the fullest range for their combined industry. It
was accordingly stated, and almost universally believed, that the noble
lord's second proposal to Miss Milbanke had been but with a view to
revenge himself for the slight inflicted by her refusal of the first,
and that he himself had confessed so much to her on their way from
church. At the time when, as the reader has seen from his own honey-moon
letters, he was, with all the good will in the world, imagining himself
into happiness, and even boasting, in the pride of his fancy, that if
marriage were to be upon _lease_, he would gladly renew his own for a
term of ninety-nine years,--at this very time, according to these
veracious chroniclers, he was employed in darkly following up the
aforesaid scheme of revenge, and tormenting his lady by all sorts of
unmanly cruelties,--such as firing off pistols, to frighten her as she
lay in bed[96], and other such freaks.

To the falsehoods