ad 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 the church. At the time
when, as the reader has seen from his own honey-moon letters, he in all
faith fancied himself happy, and even boasted, in the pride of his
imagination, 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 chronicles, 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, and other such
freaks.[145] To the falsehoods concerning his green-room intimacies, and
particularly with respect to one beautiful actress, with whom, in
reality, he had hardly ever exchanged a single word, I have already
adverted; and the extreme confidence with which this tale was circulated
and believed affords no unfair specimen of the sort of evidence with
which the public, in all such fits of moral wrath, is satisfied. It is,
at the same time, very far from my intention to allege that, in the
course of the noble poet's intercourse with the theatre, he was not
sometimes led into a line of acquaintance and converse, unbefitting, if
not dangerous to, the steadiness of married life. But the imputations
against him on this head were not the less unfounded, as the sole case
in which he afforded any thing like real grounds for such an accusation
did not take place till after the period of the separation.

"Not content with such ordinary and tangible charges, the tongue of
rumor was emboldened to proceed still further; and, presuming upon the
mysterious silence maintained by one of the parties, ventured to throw
out dark hints and vague insinuations, of which the fancy of every
hearer was left to fill up the outline as he pleased. In consequence of
all this exaggeration, such an outcry was now raised against Lord Byron
as, in no case of private life, perhaps, was ever before witnessed; nor
had the whole amount of fame which he had gathered, in the course of the
last four years, much exceeded in proportion the reproach and obloquy
that were now, within the space of a few weeks, heaped upon him. In
addition to the many who, no doubt, conscientiously believed and
reprobated what they had but too much right, whether viewing him as poet
or