The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861

This was the climax of the hardship of her case. She had no concern whatever with this act of publication. It was one of poor Campbell's disastrous pranks. He could not conceive how he could have done such a thing, and was desperately sorry; but there was little good in that. The mischief was done which could never be thoroughly repaired. She once more suffered in silence; for she was not weak enough to complain of irremediable evils. Nine years afterwards she wrote to a friend, who had been no less unjustifiably betrayed,—"I am grieved for you, as regards the actual position; but it will come right. I was myself made to appear responsible for a publication by Campbell, most unfairly, some years ago; so that, if I had not imagination enough to enter into your case, experience would have taught me to do so."

Those who are old enough to remember the year 1816 will easily recall the fluctuations of opinion which took place as to the merits of the husband and the wife, whose separation was as interesting to ten thousand households as any family event of their own. Then, and for a few years after, was Lady Byron the world's talk,—innocently, most reluctantly, and unavoidably.

At first, while her influence left its impression on his mind, Lord Byron did her some sort of justice,—fitful and partial, but very precious to her then, no doubt,—and almost as precious now to the friends who understood her. It was not till he was convinced that she would never return, not till he began to quail under the world's ill opinion, and especially, not till he felt secure that he might rely on his wife's fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, that he changed his tone to one of aspersion and contempt, and his mode of attack to that of charming, amusing, or inflaming the public with verses against her and her friends. We have his own testimony to her domestic merits in the interval between the parting and his lapse into a state of malignant feeling. In March, 1816, within two months after her leaving him, Byron wrote thus to Moore:—

"I must set you right in one point, however. The fault was not—no, nor even the misfortune—in my 'choice' (unless in choosing at all); for I do not believe—and I must say it, in the very dregs of all this bitter business—that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady B. I never had, nor can have, any reproach to make her, while with me. Where there is blame, it belongs to myself; and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it."

To us, this is enough; and nothing that he wrote afterwards, in angry and spiteful moods, can have the slightest effect on our impression of her: but the case was otherwise at the time. Lord Byron's praise of her to Moore was not known till the "Life" appeared; whereas pieces like "The Chanty Ball," coming out from time to time, made the world suppose that Lady Byron was one of those people, satirized in all literatures, who violate domestic duty, and make up for it by philanthropic effort and display. It is the prevalence of this impression to this day which makes it necessary to present the reality of the case after the lapse of many years. During Lady Byron's life, no one had a right to speak, if she chose to be silent; but the more modest and shrinking she was in regard to her own vindication, the stronger is the appeal to the fidelity of her friends to see that her reputation does not suffer through her magnanimity. We have guidance here in her own course in the case of her parents. Abhorrent as all publicity was to her, she felt and avowed the obligation to publish those facts of her life in which their reputation was concerned. The duty is far more easy, but not less imperative, to practise the same fidelity in regard to her, now that the truth can be told of her without shocking her modesty. We may hear some commonplaces about the feelings of the dead and the sensibilities of survivors, as always happens in such cases: but the sensibilities of survivors ought to relate, in the first place, to the fair fame of the dead; and the feelings of the dead, having been duly respected during life, merge after death into the general beauty of the self-sacrificing character which would not utter the word by which the adverse judgment of the world might have been reversed in a moment. While, at this day, she is regarded as the cause of her husband's sins, by her coldness, formality, and what not,—fidelity and love to her memory absolutely require, not fresh disclosures of a private character, but a new presentment of the evidence long ago given to the world by herself and by her husband's very partial biographer. This is what I have done, after thirty years more of life have proved the quality of her mind and heart.

As she loved early, she loved steadily and forever. It was through that love that her magnanimity was so transcendent. When Lord Byron was dying, he said to his confidential servant, Fletcher, "Go to Lady Byron,—you will see her, and say"–and here his voice faltered, and for nearly twenty minutes he muttered words which it was impossible to catch. The man was obliged to tell him that he had not understood a syllable. Byron's distress was great; but, as he said, it was too late. Fletcher, on his return to England, did "go to Lady Byron," and did see her: but she could only pace the room in uncontrollable agitation, striving to obtain voice to ask the questions which were surging in her heart. She could not speak, and he was obliged to leave her. To those with whom she conversed freely, and to whom she wrote familiarly, it was strangely interesting to hear, or to read, lines and phrases from Byron's poems dropped, like native speech, from her tongue or her pen. Those well-remembered lines or phrases seemed new, and were wonderfully moving, when coming from her to whom they must have been so much more than to any one else. How she surmounted such acts as the publication of "Fare thee well!" and certain others of his safe appeals to the public, no one could exactly understand. That she forgave them, and loved him to the end, is enough for us to know; for our interest is in the greatness of her heart, and not in the littleness of his.

Her life thenceforth was one of unremitting bounty to society, administered with as much skill and prudence as benevolence. As we have seen, her parents died a few years after her return to them for protection. She lived in retirement, changing her abode frequently, partly for the benefit of her child's education and the promotion of her benevolent schemes, and partly from a restlessness which was one of the few signs of injury received from the spoiling of associations with home. She felt a satisfaction which her friends rejoiced in, when her daughter married Lord King, at present the Earl of Lovelace, in 1835; and when grief upon grief followed in the appearance of mortal disease in her only child, her quiet patience stood her in good stead, as before. She even found strength to appropriate the blessings of the occasion, and took comfort, as did her dying daughter, in the intimate friendship which grew closer as the time of parting drew nigh. Lady Lovelace died in 1852; and for her few remaining years, Lady Byron was devoted to her grandchildren. But nearer calls never lessened her interest in remoter objects. Her mind was of the large and clear quality which could comprehend remote interests in their true proportions, and achieve each aim as perfectly as if it were the only one. Her agents used to say that it was impossible to mistake her directions; and thus her business was usually well done. There was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and sneers about the misapplication of bounty. Her taste did not lie in the "Charity Ball" direction; her funds were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she did not administer. In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular success. For one instance among a thousand:—A lady with whom she had had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty, with an easy conscience, to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the perfect rectitude of the resource. Lady Byron wrote to an intermediate person exactly what she thought of the case. Whether the judgment of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody's business but her own: this was the first point. Next, a voluntary poverty could never be pitied by anybody: that was the second. But it was painful to others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings which attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting that pain. Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighboring bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes; and in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so that the sufferer's name need not appear at all. Five-and-thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must make up a great amount of human happiness: but this was only one of a wide variety of methods of doing good. It was the unconcealable magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households within the four seas. Years ago, it was said far and wide, that Lady Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was difficult to imagine how anybody could do more. Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her property, while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by his will; yet she had eventually a large income at her command. In the management of it she showed the same wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions. She resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed help at the moment. Her care was for the existing generation, rather than for a future one, which would have its own friends. She usually declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities, preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.

It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while sorely misjudging her character. We hear much now—and everybody hears it with pleasure—of the spread of education in "common things." But, long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name was found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the thing, and put it in the way of making its own name. She was living at Ealing, in Middlesex, in 1834; and there she opened one of the first industrial schools in England, if not the very first. She sent out a master to Switzerland, to be instructed in De Fellenburg's method. She took on lease five acres of land, and spent several hundred pounds in rendering the buildings upon it fit for the purposes of the school. A liberal education was afforded to the children of artisans and laborers, during the half of the day when they were not employed in the field or garden. The allotments were rented by the boys, who raised and sold produce which afforded them a considerable yearly profit, if they were good workmen. Those who worked in the field earned wages,—their labor being paid by the hour, according to the capability of the young laborer. They kept their accounts of expenditure and receipts, and acquired good habits of business, while learning the occupation of their lives. Some mechanical trades were taught, as well as the arts of agriculture. Part of the wisdom of the management lay in making the pupils pay. Of one hundred pupils, half were boarders. They paid little more than half the expense of their maintenance; and the day-scholars paid three-pence per week. Of course, a large part of the expense was borne by Lady Byron, besides the payments she made for children who could not otherwise have entered the school. The establishment flourished steadily till 1852, when the owner of the land required it back for building-purposes. During the eighteen years that the Ealing schools were in action, they did a world of good in the way of incitement and example. The Poor-Law Commissioners pointed out their merits. Land-owners and other wealthy persons visited them, and went home and set up similar establishments. During those years, too, Lady Byron had herself been at work in various directions, to the same purpose.

A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her Leicestershire property; and not far off, she opened a girls' school, and an infant school; and when a season of distress came, as such seasons are apt to befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers, Lady Byron fed the children for months together, till they could resume their payments. These schools were opened in 1840. The next year, she built a school-house on her Warwickshire property; and five years later, she set up an iron school-house on another Leicestershire estate. By this time, her educational efforts were costing her several hundred pounds a year in the mere maintenance of existing establishments; but this is the smallest consideration in the case. She has sent out tribes of boys and girls into life fit to do their part there with skill and credit and comfort. Perhaps it is a still more important consideration, that scores of teachers and trainers have been led into their vocation, and duly prepared for it, by what they saw and learned in her schools. As for the best and the worst of the Ealing boys,—the best have, in a few cases, been received into the Battersea Training School, whence they could enter on their career as teachers to the greatest advantage; and the worst found their school a true reformatory, before reformatory schools were heard of. At Bristol she bought a house for a reformatory for girls; and there her friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and energetically carries out her own and Lady Byron's aims, which were one and the same.

There would be no end, if I were to catalogue the schemes of which these are a specimen. It is of more consequence to observe that her mind was never narrowed by her own acts, as the minds of benevolent people are so apt to be. To the last, her interest in great political movements, at home and abroad, was as vivid as ever. She watched every step won in philosophy, every discovery in science, every token of social change and progress, in every shape. Her mind was as liberal as her heart and hand, No diversity of opinion troubled her; she was respectful to every sort of individuality, and indulgent to all constitutional peculiarities. It must have puzzled those who kept up the notion of her being "strait-laced," to see how indulgent she was even to epicurean tendencies,—the remotest of all from her own.

But I must stop; for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate into panegyric.—Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery cause in the United States. Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American, to assist him under any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist.

All these deeds were done under a heavy burden of ill-health. Before she had passed middle life, her lungs were believed to be irreparably injured by partial ossification. She was subject to attacks so serious, that each one for many years was expected to be the last. She arranged her affairs in correspondence with her liabilities; so that the same order would have been found, whether she died suddenly or after long warning.

She was to receive one more accession of outward greatness before she departed. She became Baroness Wentworth in November, 1856. This is one of the facts of her history; but it is the least interesting to us, as probably to her. We care more to know that her last days were bright in honor, and cheered by the attachment of old friends, worthy to pay the duty she deserved. Above all, it is consoling to know that she who so long outlived her only child was blessed with the unremitting and tender care of her granddaughter. She died on the sixteenth of May, 1860.

The portrait of Lady Byron, as she was at the time of her marriage, is probably remembered by some of my readers. It is very engaging. Her countenance afterwards became much worn; but its expression of thoughtfulness and composure was very interesting. Her handwriting accorded well with the character of her mind. It was clear, elegant, and womanly. Her manners differed with circumstances. Her shrinking sensitiveness might embarrass one visitor, while another would be charmed with her easy, significant, and vivacious conversation. It depended much on whom she talked with. The abiding certainty was, that she had strength for the hardest of human trials, and the composure which belongs to strength. For the rest, it is enough to point to her deeds, and to the mourning of her friends round the chasm which her departure has made in their life, and in the society in which it is spent. All that could be done in the way of personal love and honor was done while she lived; it only remains now to see that her name and fame are permitted to shine forth at last in their proper light.

GETTING HOME AGAIN

It is a good thing, said an aged Chinese Travelling Philosopher, for every man, sooner or later, to get back again to his own tea-cup. And Ling Ching Ki Hi Fum (for that was the name of the profound old gentleman who said it) was right. Travel may be "the conversion of money into mind,"—and happy the man who has turned much coin into that precious commodity,—but it is a good thing, after being tossed about the world from the Battery to Africa,—that dry nurse of lions, as Horace calls her,—to anchor once more beside the old familiar tea-urn on the old familiar tea-table. This is the only "steamy column" worth hailing with a glad welcome after long absence from home, and fully entitled to be heartily applauded for its "bubbling and loud-hissing" propensities.

We are not a Marco Polo or a William de Rubruquis, and we have no wonders to tell of the Great Mogul or the Great Cham. We did not sail for Messrs. Pride, Pomp, Circumstance, and Company; consequently, we have no great exploits to recount. We have been wrecked at sea only once in our many voyages, and, so far as we know our own tastes, do not care to solicit aid again to be thrown into the same awkward situation. But for a time we have been

"Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

and now we are among our own tea-cups. This is happiness enough for a cold winter's night. Mid-ocean, and mid tea-cups! Stupendous change, let us tell you, worthy friend, who never yet set sail where sharks and other strange sea-cattle bob their noses above the brine,—who never lived forty days in the bowels of a ship, unable to hold your head up to the captain's bluff "good morning" or the steward's cheery "good night." Sir Philip Sidney discourses of a riding-master he encountered in Vienna, who spoke so eloquently of the noble animal he had to deal with, that he almost persuaded Sir Philip to wish himself a horse. We have known ancient mariners expatiate so lovingly on the frantic enjoyments of the deep sea, that very youthful listeners have for the time resolved to know no other existence. If the author of the "Arcadia" had been permitted to become a prancing steed, he might, after the first exhilarating canter, have lamented his equine state. How many a first voyage, begun in hilarious impatience, has caused a bitter repentance! The sea is an overrated element, and we have nothing to say in its favor. Because we are out of its uneasy lap to-night, we almost resemble in felicity Richter's Walt, who felt himself so happy, that he was transported to the third heaven, and held the other two in his hand, that he might give them away. To-morrow morning we shall not hear that swashing, scaring sound directly overhead on the wet deck, which has so often murdered our slumbers. Delectable the sensation that we don't care a rope's-end "how many knots" we are going, and that our ears are so far away from that eternal "Ay, ay, Sir!" "The whales," says old Chapman, speaking of Neptune, "exulted under him, and knew their mighty king." Let them exult, say we, and be blowed, and all due honor to their salt sovereign! but of their personal acquaintance we are not ambitious. We have met them now and then in the sixty thousand miles of their watery playing-places we have passed over, and they are not pretty to look at. Roll on, et cetera, et cetera,—and so will we, for the present, at least, as far out of your reach as possible.

Yes, wise denizen of the Celestial Empire, it is a good, nay, a great thing, to return even to so small a home-object as an old tea-cup. As we lift the bright brim to our so long absent lips, we repeat it. As we pour out our second, our third, and our fourth, we say it again. Ling Ching, you were right!

And now, as the rest of the household have all gone up bed-ward, and left us with their good-night tones,

"Like flowers' voices, if they could but speak,"

we dip our pen into the cocked hat of the brave little bronze warrior who has fed us many a year with ink from the place where his brains ought to be. Pausing before we proceed to paper, we look around on our household gods. The coal bursts into crackling fits of merriment, as we thrust the poker between the iron ribs of the grate. It seems to say, in the jolliest possible manner of which it is capable, "Oh, go no more a-roaming, a-roaming, across the windy sea!" How odd it seems to be sitting here again, listening to the old clock out there in the entry! Often we seemed to hear it during the months that have flown away, when we knew that "our ancient" was standing sentinel for Time in another hemisphere. One night, dark and stormy on the Mediterranean, as we lay wakeful and watchful in the little steamer that was bearing us painfully through the noisy tempest towards Saint Peter's and the Colosseum, suddenly, above the tumult of the voyage, our household monitor began audibly and regularly, we thought, to mark the seconds. Then it must have been only fancy. Now it is something more, and we know that our mahogany friend is really wagging his brassy beard just outside the door. We remember now, as we lay listening that rough night at sea, how Milton's magic sounding line came to us beating a sad melody with the old clock's imagined tramp,—

"The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint."

Let the waves bark to-night far out on "the desolate, rainy seas,"—the old clock is all right in the entry!

Landed, and all safe at last! our much-abused, lock-broken, unhinged portmanteau unpacked and laid ignobly to rest under the household eaves! Stay a moment,—let us pitch our inky passport into the fire. How it writhes and grows black in the face! And now it will trouble its owner no more forever. It was a foolish, extravagant companion, and we are glad to be rid of it. One little blazing fragment lifts itself out of the flame, and we can trace on the smouldering relic the stamp of Austria. Go back again into the grate, and perish with the rest, dark blot!

"We look round our quiet apartment, and wonder if it be all true, this getting home again. We stir the fire once more to assure ourself that we are not somewhere else,—that the street outside our window is not known as Jermyn Street in the Haymarket,—or the Via Babuino near the Pincio,—or Princes Street, near the Monument. How do we determine that we are not dreaming, and that we shall not wake up to-morrow morning and find ourself on the Arno? Perhaps we are not really back again where there are no

"Eremites and friars,White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery."

Perhaps we are a flamingo, a banyan-tree, or a mandarin. But there stands the tea-cup, and our identity is sure!

Here at last, then, for a live certainty! But how strange it all seems, resting safely in our easy slippers, to recall some of the far-off scenes so lately present to us! Yesterday was it, or a few weeks ago, that this "excellent canopy," our modest roof, dwelt three thousand miles away to the westward of us? At this moment stowed away in a snuggery called our own; and then—how brief a period it seems! what a small parenthesis in time—putting another man's latch-key into another man's door, night after night, in a London fog, and feeling for the unfamiliar aperture with all the sensation of an innocent housebreaker! Muffled here in the oldest of dressing-gowns, that never lifted its blessed arms ten rods from the spot where it was born; and only a few weeks ago lolling out of C.R.'s college-window at Oxford, counting the deer, as they nibbled the grass, and grouped themselves into beautiful pictures on the sward of ancient Magdalen!