scovered the amour, and
murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in
the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be
attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted
him all his life after.

"This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable
allusions to it in his poems."

And Moore adds:--"The grave confidence with which the venerable critic
traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events,
making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence, to furnish
grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition,
so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man full of
marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these
exaggerated or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed
upon the world, of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places
he never saw, and with persons who never existed, have, no doubt,
considerably contributed, and the consequence is, so utterly out of
truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long
current upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real
'flesh and blood' hero of these pages (the social, practical-minded,
and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron) may
not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers,
appear only an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage."

Then, quoting some of the falsehoods which were spread everywhere about
Byron, Moore says:--

"Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial
wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene; his voyages to
Sicily, to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, etc. But the most
absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications are the stories told by
Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father
Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo
has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got
up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the
Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, at Missolonghi."

As the numerous causes which led to the false judgment of Byron's true
character never ceased to exist during his lifetime, one consequence has
been that those who never knew him have never been able to arrive at
the truth of matters concerning him. The contrast which existed between