The woman who is the helpless victim of cruelties which only unnatural states of the brain could invent, who is heart-sick to-day and dreads to-morrow,--looks in hopeless horror on the fatal process by which a lover and a protector changes under her eyes, from day to day, to a brute and a fiend.
Lady Byron's married life--alas! it is lived over in many a cottage and tenement-house, with no understanding on either side of the cause of the woeful misery.
Dr.Winslow truly says, 'The science of these brain-affections is yet in its infancy in England.' At that time, it had not even begun to be.
Madness was a fixed point; and the inquiries into it had no nicety.

Its treatment, if established, had no redeeming power.

Insanity simply locked a man up as a dangerous being; and the very suggestion of it, therefore, was resented as an injury.
A most peculiar and affecting feature of that form of brain disease which hurries its victim, as by an overpowering mania, into crime, is, that often the moral faculties and the affections remain to a degree unimpaired, and protest with all their strength against the outrage.
Hence come conflicts and agonies of remorse proportioned to the strength of the moral nature.

Byron, more than any other one writer, may be called the poet of remorse.

His passionate pictures of this feeling seem to give new power to the English language:-- 'There is a war, a chaos of the mind, When all its elements convulsed--combined, Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force, And gnashing with impenitent remorse, That juggling fiend, who never spake before, But cries, "I warned thee!" when the deed is o'er.' It was this remorse that formed the only redeeming feature of the case.
Its eloquence, its agonies, won from all hearts the interest that we give to a powerful nature in a state of danger and ruin; and it may be hoped that this feeling, which tempers the stern justice of human judgments, may prove only a faint image of the wider charity of Him whose thoughts are as far above ours as the heaven is above the earth..