Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.
'Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel than Clytemnestra's poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady Byron's silence was destined to kill the soul,--and such a soul!--leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful wrongs, perhaps even depravity.

In vain did he, feeling his conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination.

She refused; and the only favour she granted was to send him, one fine day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.
'And, why, then, had she believed him mad?
Because she, a methodical, inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul, because she could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits different to those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life.

Not to be hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write while she was sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to gratify the requirements of material and intellectual life at hours different to hers,--all that was not merely annoying for her, but it must be madness; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could neither submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.
'Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and revenge of his enemies.
'She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely organised,--the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and fatally was it decreed that this woman alone of her species should be Lord Byron's wife!' In a note is added,-- 'If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her silence?
Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons which kill at once, and defy all remedies; thus insuring the culprit's safety.

This silence it is which will ever be her crime; for by it she poisoned the life of her husband.' The book has several chapters devoted to Lord Byron's peculiar virtues; and under the one devoted to magnanimity and heroism, his forgiving disposition receives special attention.