either to him, except through my little offering.[87] Even now my heart
is breaking at the thought of the injustice with which he has been
treated.

"His friend Moore, to whom he had confided his memoirs, written with his
own hand, had not the courage to fulfill faithfully the desire of his
generous friend. Lady Blessington made a book upon him very profitable
_to herself_, but in which she does not always paint Lord Byron _en
beau_, and where she has related a thousand things that Lord Byron only
meant in joke, and which ought not to have been either written or
published. And when it is remembered that this lady (as I am assured)
never saw or conversed with Lord Byron but out of doors, when she
happened to meet him on horseback, and very rarely (two or three times)
when he consented to dine at her house, in both of these cases, in too
numerous a company for the conversation to be of an intimate nature;
when it is known (as I am further assured) that Lord Byron was so much
on his guard with this lady (aware of her being an authoress), that he
never accepted an invitation to dine with her, unless when his friend
Count Gamba did: truly, we may then conclude that these conversations
were materially impossible, and must have been a clever
mystification,--a composition got up on the biographies of Lord Byron
that had already appeared, on Moore's works, Medwin's, Lord Byron's
correspondence, and, above all, on "Don Juan." She must have made her
choice, without any regard to truth or to Lord Byron's honor; rather
selecting such facts, expressions, and observations as allowed her to
assume the part of a moral, sensitive woman, to sermonize, by way of
gaining favor with the strict set of people in high society, and to be
able to bring out her own opinions on a number of things and persons,
without fear of compromising herself, since she put them into Lord
Byron's mouth.

"Verily these conversations can not be explained in any other way. At
any rate, I confess this production of her ladyship so displeased me
that I threw it aside, unable to read it without ill-humor and disgust.
At that time (1814) he was not married; and I beheld in him a young man
of the rarest beauty. Superior intellect shone in his countenance; his
manners were at once full of simplicity and dignity; his voice was
sweet, rich, and melodious. If Lord Byron had defects (and who has not?)
he also possessed very great virtues, with a dignity and sincerity of
ch