it be
expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa's--

'Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled,'

should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the
bit.[144]

"Even had the new condition of life into which he passed been one of
prosperity and smoothness, some time, as well as tolerance, must still
have been allowed for the subsiding of so excited a spirit into rest.
But, on the contrary, his marriage was at once a signal for all the
arrears and claims of a long-accumulating state of embarrassment to
explode upon him; his door was almost daily beset by duns, and his house
nine times during that year in possession of bailiffs; while, in
addition to these anxieties, he had also the pain of fancying that the
eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and
that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most
perverted light.

"He saw but little society, his only relief from the thoughts which a
life of such embarrassment brought with it was in those avocations which
his duty, as a member of the Drury Lane Committee, imposed upon him. And
here, in this most unlucky connection with the theatre, one of the
fatalities of his short year of trial, as husband, lay. From the
reputation which he had previously acquired for gallantries, and the
sort of reckless and boyish levity to which--often in very bitterness of
soul--he gave way, it was not difficult to bring suspicion upon some of
those acquaintances which his frequent intercourse with the green-room
induced him to form, or even (as in one instance was the case) to
connect with his name injuriously that of a person to whom he had
scarcely ever addressed a single word.

"Notwithstanding, however, this ill-starred concurrence of
circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper
or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded,
to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon
ended in disunion, is to be traced.

"'In all the unhappy marriages I have ever seen,' says Steele, 'the
great cause of evil has proceeded from slight occasions,' and to this
remark, I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be
found, upon inquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed,
when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have
expressed, in a few words, the whole pith of the mystery.

"An English gentleman,