They had read the filthy taunts in 'Don Juan,' and the nameless abominations in the 'Autobiography.' They had admitted among themselves that his honour was lost; but still this abused, desecrated woman must reverence her brutal master's memory, and not speak, even to defend the grave of her own kind father and mother.
That there was no lover of her youth, that the marriage-vow had been a hideous, shameless cheat, is on the face of Moore's account; yet the 'Blackwood' does not see it nor feel it, and brings up against Lady Byron this touching story of a poor widow, who really had had a true lover once,--a lover maddened, imbruted, lost, through that very drunkenness in which the Noctes Club were always glorying.
It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering, broken- hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share alike with the poor dog,--the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth of life in him.

Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor, loving brute,--most mournful and most sacred But, oh that a noble man should have no higher ideal of the love of a high-souled, heroic woman! Oh that men should teach women that they owe no higher duties, and are capable of no higher tenderness, than this loving, unquestioning animal fidelity! The dog is ever-loving, ever-forgiving, because God has given him no high range of moral faculties, no sense of justice, no consequent horror at impurity and vileness.
Much of the beautiful patience and forgiveness of women is made possible to them by that utter deadness to the sense of justice which the laws, literature, and misunderstood religion of England have sought to induce in woman as a special grace and virtue.
The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is, that man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine, may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage- vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour his memory,--nay, to sacrifice to it the honour due to a kind father and mother, slandered in their silent graves.
Such was the sympathy, and such the advice, that the best literature of England could give to a young widow, a peeress of England, whose husband, as they verily believed and admitted, might have done worse than all this; whose crimes might have been 'foul, monstrous, unforgivable as the sin against the Holy Ghost.' If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?
If the peeress as a wife has no rights, what is the state of the cotter's wife?
But, in the same paper, North again blames Lady Byron for not having come out with the whole story before the world at the time she separated from her husband.

He says of the time when she first consulted counsel through her mother, keeping back one item,-- 'How weak, and worse than weak, at such a juncture, on which hung her whole fate, to ask legal advice on an imperfect document! Give the delicacy of a virtuous woman its due; but at such a crisis, when the question was whether her conscience was to be free from the oath of oaths, delicacy should have died, and nature was privileged to show unashamed--if such there were--the records of uttermost pollution.' Shepherd.--'And what think ye, sir, that a' this pollution could hae been, that sae electrified Dr.Lushington ?' North.--'Bad--bad--bad, James.

Nameless, it is horrible; named, it might leave Byron's memory yet within the range of pity and forgiveness; and, where they are, their sister affections will not be far; though, like weeping seraphs, standing aloof, and veiling their wings.' Shepherd.--'She should indeed hae been silent--till the grave had closed on her sorrows as on his sins.' North.--'Even now she should speak,--or some one else for her,--.

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