I may be pardoned for my frequent reference to the sentiment (expressed by him), that I was only sent to show him the happiness he was forbidden to enjoy.' In this letter we have the heart, not of the wife, but of the mother,--the love that searches everywhere for extenuations of the guilt it is forced to confess.
That Lady Byron was not alone in ascribing such results to the doctrines of Calvinism, in certain cases, appears from the language of the Thirty- nine Articles, which says:-- 'As the godly consideration of predestination, and our election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the workings of the spirit of Christ;.

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so, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into recklessness of most unclean living,--no less perilous than desperation.' Lord Byron's life is an exact commentary on these words, which passed under the revision of Calvin himself.
The whole tone of this letter shows not only that Lady Byron never lost her deep interest in her husband, but that it was by this experience that all her religious ideas were modified.

There is another of these letters in which she thus speaks of her husband's writings and character:-- 'The author of the article on "Goethe" appears to me to have the mind which could dispel the illusion about another poet, without depreciating his claims.