THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE.*

[By Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.]

[THE Editor of Macmillan's Magazine, in which (September, 1869) this pamphlet has first been published, introduces it with the following remarks:

Many readers of the 'Diary' of the late Mr. Crabb Robinson must have been much struck by a letter from Lady Byron, there printed for the first time. The tone of deep affection, and almost divine charity, in which she speaks of her husband, must have come with startling effect on those who knew her only through the representations of Don Juan,' and Mr. Moore's 'Life of Lord Byron.'

The following paper, from the pen of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on Lady Byron's life and relations to Lord Byron, is the first complete and authentic statement of the whole circumstances of that disastrous affair which

[The painful sensation caused throughout the literary world by Mrs. Stowe's pretended revelations, may warrant the Editors of this Collection to lay before the eyes of German readers the whole of the, to say the least, indiscreet and unfeminine accusation against the memory of a great Poet. They beg to subjoin the declaration, thereby provoked, of the Agents of the late Lady Byron, hoping it may soon be followed by a more satisfactory disclosure of the facts, which, even in the worst case, cannot be more hurting to the feelings of the surviving descendants, than the loud contest over the graves of their unfortunate ancestors.]

has been given to the world. Painful and appalling as are the details, the time is come when they can no longer be concealed. This paper is, in fact, Lady Byron's own statement of the reasons which forced her to the separation which she so long resisted, and on which, out of regard for her husband and child, she maintained so religious a silence up to the day of her death. Evidence at once so new and so direct cannot but materially alter the whole complexion of this most painful question; and all former judgments, being based on insufficient data, must of necessity be henceforward invalidated or superseded. A perusal of the facts here given for the first time will leave little doubt in the reader's mind both that Lady Byron's separation was the only course open to her, and that the motives for her persistent silence were of the same kind which governed her long life of active and noble beneficence. The intense faithfulness and love to her husband which survived private wrongs of the deepest kind, the continued attacks of Lord Byron himself, and a long course of public vituperation, were only a consistent part of her whole nature and life.

Towards so pure and lofty a character, compassion would be out of place; but justice may be rendered, even after this lapse of time; and it is peculiarly gratifying to the Editor of Macmillan's Magazine' that it should be rendered through these columns.]

The reading world has latety been presented with a book, which we are informed by the trade sells rapidly, and appears to meet with universal favour.

The subject of the book may be thus briefly stated. The mistress of Lord Byron comes before the world for the sake of vindicating his fame from slanders and aspersions cast on him by his wife. The story of the mistress versus wife may be briefly summed up as follows:

Lord Byron, the hero of the story, is represented as a human being endowed with every natural charm, gift, and grace, who by the one false step of an unsuitable marriage wrecked his whole life. A narrowminded, cold-hearted precision, without sufficient intellect to comprehend his genius, or heart to feel for his temptations, formed with him one of those mere worldly marriages, common in high life, and finding that she could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional rules of her own mode of life, suddenly and without warning abandoned him in the most cruel and inexplicable manner.

It is alleged that she parted from him in apparent affection and good-humour, wrote him a playful, confiding letter upon the way, but, after reaching her father's house, suddenly and without explanation announced to him that she would never see him again; that this sudden abandonment drew down upon him a perfect storm of scandalous stories, which his wife never contradicted, never in any way or shape stating what the exact reasons for her departure had been, and thus silently and quietly giving scope to all the malice of thousands of enemies. The sensitive victim was actually thus driven from England, his home broken up, and he doomed to be a lonely wanderer on foreign shores.

In Italy, under bluer skies, and among a gentler people, with more tolerant modes of judgment, the authoress intimates that he found peace and consolation. A lovely young Italian countess falls in love with him, and leaving all family ties for his sake, devotes herself to him, and in blissful retirement with her he finds at last that domestic life for which he was so fitted.

Soothed, calmed, and refreshed, he writes 'Don Juan,' which the world is at this late hour informed was a poem with a high moral purpose, designed to be a practical illustration of the doctrine of total depravity among young gentlemen in high life.

Under the elevating influence of love he rises at last to higher realms of moral excellence, and resolves to devote the rest of his life to some noble and heroic purpose, becomes the saviour of Greece, and dies untimely, leaving a nation to mourn his loss.

The authoress dwells with a peculiar bitterness on Lady Byron's entire silence during all these years, as the most aggravated form of persecution and injury. She informs the world that Lord Byron wrote his autobiography with the purpose of giving a fair statement of the exact truth in the whole matter, and that Lady Byron bought up the manuscript of the publisher, and insisted on its being destroyed unread, thus inflexibly, even after death, depriving her husband of his last chance of a hearing before the tribunal of the public.

As a result of this silent, persistent cruelty of a cold, correct, narrow-minded woman, the character of Lord Byron has been misunderstood, and his name transmitted to after ages clouded with aspersions and accusations which it is the object of this book to remove.

Such is the story of Lord Byron's mistress; a story which is going through England and America, rousing up new sympathy with the poet, and doing its best to bring the youth of our day once more under the power of that brilliant, seductive genius from which it was hoped they had escaped. Already we are seeing it revamped in magazine articles which take up the slanders of the paramour, and enlarge on them, and wax eloquent in denunciation of the marble-hearted, insensible wife.

All this while it does not appear to occur to the thousands of unreflecting readers that they are listening merely to the story of Lord Byron's mistress and of Lord Byron, and that even by their own showing the heaviest accusation against Lady Byron is that she has not spoken at all; her story has never been told.

For many years after the rupture between Lord Byron and his wife, that poet's personality, fate, and happiness occupied a place in the interest of the civilized world, which we will venture to say was unparalleled. It is within the writer's personal recollection how, in the obscure mountain town where she spent her early days, Lord Byron's separation from his wife was for a season the all-engrossing topic.

She remembers hearing her father recount at the breakfast-table the facts as they were given in the public papers, together with his own suppositions and theories of the causes.

Lord Byron's Fare thee well,' addressed to Lady Byron, was set to music and sung with tears by young schoolgirls, even in distant America.

Madame de Staël said of this appeal, that she was sure it would have drawn her at once to his heart and his arms: she could have forgiven everything; and so