thor can afford me, and it appears to
me that if Mr. Disraeli, with his admirable talent, had chosen to write
the life of Lord Byron, he would have done better. We should not, it is
true, have had in the biography either the pleasant life at Cherbury, or
the scene at Newstead, neither the duel nor its consequences; but we
should have had almost a similar Lady Mounteagle, and we should have
seen the rise of that same base spirit in his colleague which greeted
him at one period of his life, the same wickedness which assailed him,
the same jealousy with which he was looked upon, the same cruel
persecution to which he was subjected, the same hatred which assailed
him on the part of the people who had a little before so idolized him,
and, in short, the same reaction in the public mind which actually took
place. We should, on the other hand, have equally seen the same noble
mind, too proud again to submit to the curb under the yoke of popular
public feeling. He would not have shown us a charming Lady Annabel
styled a virtuous woman, though she abandons her husband simply because
she believes he no longer entertains for her all the ardent love which
he had evinced during the honey-moon!--a Lady Annabel, indeed, who
constitutes in herself a being morally impossible, who though she does
abandon her husband, spends her night in bewailing his loss at the foot
of his portrait; who, though she adores her daughter, nearly causes her
death with grief from the fear which she has that the child will not
marry a man of genius like her father. Instead of such a woman we should
have had, if not one more logical in her acts, at least more real and
historical, and exemplifying the painful and murderous effects of
silence in the condemnation of a man against whom the venom of calumny
has been directed--that man being no less a person than her own husband.
Instead of a Lady Annabel repentant at last, and self-accusing, truth
and reality would have presented us with an insensible, hard-hearted,
and inexorable woman, who remains inflexible to the last, and who
deserves that the effects should be applied to her of the words which
Cadurcis, in a moment of despair, pronounces against Venetia's mother,
when the former declares that she is the victim of her mother, but that
nevertheless she will do her duty:

"Then my curse upon your mother's head! May Heaven rain all its plagues
upon her! The Hecate!"

We should not have had a Venetia who is truly