The mistress of Lord Byron could easily be stirred up and flattered to come before the world with a book which should re-open the whole controversy; and she proved a facile tool.

At first, the work appeared prudently in French, and was called 'Lord Byron juge par les Temoins de sa Vie,' and was rather a failure.

Then it was translated into English, and published by Bentley.
The book was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,--a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account.

It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius has the art to tell his story so as to take both the cultivated few and the average many.

De Foe and John Bunyan are almost the only examples.