_No weight can be attached to the opinions of an opposing counsel upon accusations made by one party behind the back of the other, who urgently demanded and was pertinaciously refused the least opportunity of denial or defence_.

He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but _consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons._' {23} Neither John Murray nor any of Byron's partisans seem to have pondered the admission in these last words.
Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing with her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for herself and child against her husband.
She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under their direction.
Two of the greatest lawyers in England have pronounced that there has been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is neither proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but separation or divorce.
He asks her to state her charges against him.

She, making answer under advice of her counsel, says, 'That if he _insists_ on the specifications, he must receive them in open court in a suit for divorce.' What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man, who believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for virtue to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on her side even the lawyer he sought to retain on his; {24} that she was an unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain her ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, 'accused of every monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour'?
When she, under advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal _separation_ or open investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?
HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.
Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,--let any lawyer who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr.Lushington, ask whether _they_ were the men to take a case into court for a woman that had no _evidence_ but her own statements and impressions?
Were _they_ men to go to trial without proofs?
Did they not know that there were artful, hysterical women in the world, and would _they_, of all people, be the men to take a woman's story on her own side, and advise her in the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of the strongest kind?
Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this statement of Byron's--that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance of knowing whereof he _was accused--never appeared in public_.
It, however, was most actively circulated in _private_.

That Byron was in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have already shown.

We have recently come upon another instance of this kind.
In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has turned up, of which Mr.Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron's death, he published in the preface to his 'Domestic Pieces' the sentence: '_He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons_.' It appears that, up to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his place, had taken any notice of this newly found document, which we are now informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while Mr.Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to Mr.Matthew Gregory Lewis, _for circulation among friends in England_, found in Mr.
Lewis's papers after his death, and _now_ in the possession of Mr.
Murray.' Here it is:-- 'It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared "their lips to be sealed up" on the cause of the separation between her and myself.