s it has drawn from you
a tribute which, however unaccountable and mysterious it renders the
whole affair, is highly honorable to both parties. What I meant in
hinting a doubt with respect to the object of your selection, did not
imply the least impeachment of that perfect amiableness which the world,
I find, by common consent, allows to her. I only feared that she might
have been too perfect, too _precisely_ excellent, _too matter-of-fact a
paragon for you to coalesce with comfortably_, ... and that a person
whose perfection hung in more easy folds about her, whose brightness was
softened down by some of 'those fair defects which best conciliate
love,' would, by appealing more dependently to your protection, have
stood a much better chance with your good-nature. All these
suppositions, however, I have been led into by my intense anxiety to
acquit you of any thing like a capricious abandonment of your wife; and,
totally in the dark as I am with respect to all but the fact of your
separation, you can not conceive the solicitude--the fearful
solicitude--with which I look forward to a history of the transaction
from your own lips when we meet--a history in which I am sure of at
least one virtue, manly candor."

Those who knew Lord Byron, gifted as he was with so much that seemed to
render it impossible for any woman to resign herself to the loss of his
love; with so much to make a wife proud of bearing his name; may well
ask what strange sort of nature Lady Byron could have possessed to act
as she did toward him; and whether, if she really married out of vanity
(as Lord Byron one day told Medwin, at Pisa), and her heart being full
of pride only, she found some greater satisfaction for her vanity in the
courage and perseverance she fancied displayed in deserting him. But, in
order to view her inexplicable conduct with any sort of indulgence, we
must say that Lady Byron was an only and a spoilt child, a slave to
rule, to habits and ideas as unchanging and inflexible as the figures
she loved to study; that, being accustomed to the comforts of a rich
house, where she was idolized, she could not do without her regular
comforts, so generally appreciated and considered necessary by English
people. But it was no easy matter to satisfy all her tastes with
mathematical regularity, to let her keep up all her habits, and, above
all, to make Lord Byron share them in their married life. In the first
place, Lord Byron, who was naturally