thinks that the two volumes of 'The Last Reign' might be boiled down into a single good one; for ourselves, we have lately re-read the longer work, and we feel by no means sure that it needs serious compression. The discursive essays on liberty, constitutional government, the policy of Pitt and Castlereagh, the personal characters of the French royal family, and the possibility in 1815 of a fresh start by Napoleon upon a nobler path of peace and domestic reform, certainly stay the action of the drama, but they are well written, and disclose an honourable and enlightened mind. Considering the reactionary epoch in which they appeared, they are very remarkable.

Full of enthusiasm for the man who was one of his two idols, he made a somewhat adventurous journey to Paris, for the purpose of seeing him. His pilgrimage was rewarded; he actually stood, and that for no mere moment, but during a succession of exciting intervals, close by him against whom all Europe was rising, while he reviewed the veterans who were to support his supreme effort to stem that reactionary tide which was destined to overwhelm both him and them.

Hobhouse remained in Paris until June 16, when he started with a passport for Geneva. He was turned back at Morez, and retraced his steps to Bourg, where several of his most interesting letters of 1815 were written; and before the end of the same month he was once more at Paris. There he stayed till July 20, when, all being over, he started for England.

Interesting as is the earlier part of Lord Broughton's second volume, we propose to pass at once to the last long chapter in which he deals elaborately, and, as we think, finally, with that saddest of all matrimonial catastrophes the separation of Lord and Lady Byron. Seldom have two such lives been mutually wrecked; seldom has such a wreck been more complete; seldom, if we regard its effect upon Lord Byron's genius, character, and destiny, has a similar event been more disastrous to mankind. Splendid as is the literary heritage which he has bequeathed to us, but for this overthrow, and the moral breakdown which followed it, that heritage might have been at once more health-giving, and more splendid still. The story of his connexion with Miss Milbanke is well known, but it may be so briefly stated that it is worth

repetition. He met her in 1812, and, after a short acquaintance, proposed to her. She refused him; wisely, no doubt, had her refusal been final. But this she probably did not intend it to be. She began a correspondence with him immediately afterwards, and this she continued until the successful renewal of Lord Byron's offer in the autumn of 1814. They married on the 2nd of January, 1815; had a child born to them on December 11 in that year; on the 15th of January, 1816, Lady Byron with her child went on a visit to her parents at Kirkby Mallory; and on the 2nd of February Lord Byron received a formal letter from her father demanding a separation from her upon terms to be settled by private arbitration. Such terms were eventually arranged, and carried out by deed in April 1816. Lord Byron forthwith left England for ever. Such is the skeleton; now for the scandal that has been draped on it.

Lady Byron having for some time persistently based her demand personally, and through her parents, friends, and legal adviser, upon Lord Byron's general behaviour to her during her married life, his violence, his cruelty, his commonplace infidelities, his opinions, and the absolute incompatibility of their temperament and character, suddenly changed her ground. She then avowed confidentially to her lawyer, Dr Lushington, and to one or two other friends whom she had consulted, and whom she rightly thought disposed to advise a reconciliation with her husband, that, over and above the reasons which we have recapitulated, there was another, namely, that she suspected him of having been guilty of incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Of this dreadful accusation thus secretly made she did not, even to those to whom she confided it, adduce one tittle of evidence. We should say that it was her own independent fabrication, but for one reason. Among the many cruel and fantastic rumours let loose upon society about Lord Byron, as about Shelley, this hideous falsehood had had a momentary and limited circulation. It is known to have been started, in tigresslike revenge, by a certain lady of quality, who was a discarded mistress of Lord Byron. It was plainly employed by Lady Byron for the purpose of stiffening the attitude of her advisers. Mr Edgcumbe to whose book we henceforth refer no less gratefully than to Lord

Broughton's-thinks that at this moment Lady Byron had further been alarmed by a suggestion that, unless she could hurry through a separation, Lord Byron might either kidnap or, by legal process, obtain possession of her infant child. But even if this last incentive be not superadded, it is obvious that what she whispered into the ears of Dr Lushington was, though bred of another's rancour, adopted of her own design; and that it was never hinted by her to anybody till long after her true reasons had been carefully formulated, nor until she feared that they might prove insufficient. The new insinuation was effectual. Her group of advisers took note of it, and, although they would not allow her to make it any part of her case, they desisted from their suggestions of compromise.

On the 14th of March 1816, these 'suspicions' of Lady Byron were reduced to writing in the form of a statement said to have been made by her at Dr Lushington's request, and certainly settled by himself. It opens thus: 'During the year that Lady Byron lived under the same roof with Lord Byron, certain circumstances occurred, and some intimations were made, which excited a suspicion in Lady B.'s mind that an improper connection had at one time, and might even still, subsist (sic) between Lord B. and Mrs L-?'

The document goes on to admit that Lady Byron's suspicions were not based on any proof; proceeds to say that it does not pretend to contain any grounds which gave rise to those suspicions; and ends by acquitting her of anything dishonourable in not having acted upon them. It was signed by Mr Wilmot, Colonel Doyle, and Dr Lushington. It is pretty clear that Dr Lushington never heard of these suspicions till the 22nd of February. Up to that date he, like everybody else concerned, had been under the impression that her husband's general conduct and the conditions of her life with him were the true causes of her resolve. We do not shrink from declaring our strong belief that the disclosure of these suspicionssaid in the statement to have existed through her married life, that is, before any outside rumours had come into existence-was a false pretence, designedly advanced with the object already mentioned.

Scorn as well as candour underlies Hobhouse's dealing

with this abominable topic. That he does so conclusively all impartial readers will, we think, acknowledge. We propose to transcribe from him and from Mr Edgcumbe the salient points which make for the impossibility of the charge, and, so far as may be, we shall take things in their chronological order.

Mrs Leigh was married in 1807, when Byron was nineteen years old and she at least twenty-four. No one has ever suggested, not even the late Lord Lovelace, his grandfather's worst traducer, that anything could have happened before her marriage. The truth is that the brother and sister had been brought up entirely apart, Byron with his mother in Scotland, Augusta by her grandmother, Lady Holderness. For some time Mrs Leigh's marriage was happy, and she had three or four children in rapid succession. Meanwhile Byron went to Cambridge in 1805, and kept terms there, somewhat intermittently, till 1808. In June 1809 he went abroad, and only returned to England in July 1811. Even during this year he did not see his sister. He went to Newstead from London in August, at the time of his mother's death, and, while there, he writes thus to his sister for the first time since his return, much as to a comparative stranger (the italics are ours):

'I am losing my relatives, you are adding to yours; but which is best God knows. I hear that you have been increasing his Majesty's subjects, which in these times of war and tribulation is really patriotic.

I believe you know that for upwards of two years I have been wandering round the Archipelago.

I shall soon go abroad again, for I am heartily sick of your climate and everything it rains upon, always save and except yourself, as in duty bound.

I should be glad to see you here, as I believe you have never seen the place.

By-the-bye, I shall marry if I can find anything inclined to barter money for rank within six months, after which I shall return to my friends the Turks.

In the interim I am, Dear Madam' (signature erased). In a letter dated the 2nd of September, Augusta asks if he is likely to be staying long at Newstead, hopes that he will visit her at Six Mile Bottom, says that their cousin had told her that he had grown very thin (which shows

that she had not seen him since he went abroad), says further that she shall be daily expecting to hear of a Lady Byron, and signs herself Your most affect Sis. and Friend, A. L.' Mrs Leigh did not go to Newstead, and Byron, after a visit to Cambridge, was back in London by the end of September. He was very soon in the mire of his liaison with Lady Caroline Lamb, and from that time to March 26, 1813, there is not apparently a single letter extant between the brother and sister. On this date a letter from Byron marks the renewal of their long intermitted correspondence. It is obviously an answer to one from his sister asking for money. Her husband's irregularities had seriously embarrassed him. Byron starts by regretting that he cannot at the moment help her, and tells her why. His reason is that he had been vainly trying to sell Newstead, and her ignorance of this shows how little she had heard or seen of him. He adds (once more the italics are ours):

'I am going abroad again in June, but should wish to see you before my departure. You have perhaps heard that I have been fooling away my time with different "regnantes," but what better can be expected from me? I have but one relative, [herself] and her I never see. I have no connections to domesticate with, and for marriage I have neither the talent nor the inclination. My parliamentary schemes are not much to my taste. I spoke twice last session, and was told it was well enough. . . . On Sunday I set off with the Oxfords. I see you put on a demure look at the name; but I am quite out of a more serious scrape with another singular personage which threatened me last year.

...

'I am a fool, and deserve all the ills I have met, or may meet with, but nevertheless, very sensibly, dearest Augusta, 'Your most affectionate brother,

'BYRON.'

Could such a letter have passed from one to the other of two persons whose relations were so hideous as those suggested for this brother and sister? On the contrary, does it not show what strangers they still were? Besides, it must be remembered that the year 1812-13 had been occupied in the two great scrapes to which he alludes, between which his first proposal to Miss Milbanke had come as a respectable interlude.