{113} There is something inexpressibly touching in the picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago; not faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty, first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her heart.
'To her there has been no change, no decay.

The god whom she worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is still the "Pythian of the age" to her at seventy.

To try such a book by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.' This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book, simply because it was written by Lord Byron's mistress.

That fact, we are assured, lends grace even to its faults.
Having brought the authoress upon the stage, the review now goes on to define her position, and assure the Christian world that 'The Countess Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble.

At the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate.