ase Miss
Milbank. Her answer was couched in very flattering terms, and the fatal
marriage was thus decided on. This was perhaps the only time in his life
that Lord Byron did not follow the counsels of friendship. It would
indeed seem as if an evil genius had taken possession of his will.
Warnings were not wanting; but he refused to listen to them. "If you
have any thing to say against my decision," wrote he to Moore, in his
usual jesting way, after the marriage had been agreed on, "I beg you to
say it. My resolve is taken, so positively, fixed, and irrevocably,
that I can very well listen to reason, since now it can do me no more
harm."

And so he married Miss Milbank three months afterward. During the
interval between the promise exchanged and the ceremony concluded, Lord
Byron saw his betrothed frequently. Had he no warning, no inspiration
from his good genius during all that time? Had he no fear of such
perfection? Did he not feel that a faultless coat of mail, like hers,
might so have pressed upon her heart that no pulse would be left giving
earnest of life? Might not tenderness, piety, indulgence, forbearance,
the most amiable and sublime virtues belonging to a Christian woman,
have their place filled in the breast of this perfect creature by
another kind of sublimity? and was it not very possible that she would
increase by one the number of those chaste wives who judge, condemn,
punish, and never forgive any thing that does not enter into the
category of their virtues, or rather of the single virtue they practice,
and under shadow of which they consider themselves able to dispense with
all others? Did he not fear that the profound mathematical knowledge of
that learned person might have slightly deadened her heart and given a
dogmatic tone to her mind, of which he doubtless with his usual
penetration suspected the narrowness, likely to render its science
pernicious to the heart? All this is easily to be believed, when we see
how preoccupied he was before marriage.

"At the beginning of the month of December, being called up to town by
business, I had opportunities, from being a good deal in my noble
friend's society, of observing the state of his mind and feelings under
the prospect of the important change he was now about to undergo; and it
was with pain I found that those sanguine hopes with which I had
sometimes looked forward to the happy influence of marriage, in winning
him over to the brighter and better