reality have they, unless it be that they are the residues of ancestral features which have not been rubbed out by the wear, or pushed away by the gains of a succession of generations?

Natural affinity and vital dignity run by no means parallel. Sometimes they meet and cross, but as often, perhaps more often, they are apart. Identity of type, the possession of the same general plan of structure, must be always the chief token of affinity. By it we must group creatures together, even if we are unwilling to regard it as a sign of a common ancestry. But of two animals of the same broad type one may be taken to fill a place of high vital rank, while the other is left to an ignoble life. A little patch of highly wrought nervous tissue may overshadow all arrangements of fundamental parts.

To avail ourselves of an illustration. If the animal creation could be arranged in a linear series, if the various forms of animal life could be regarded as a ladder, one on which one might mount from round to round, until, on the topmost round we found our own kind, then zoological position and rank of like would be identical. But such is not the case. It is impossible so to arrange the prolific offspring of mother earth. Rather may animal life be likened to a great tree with countless branches spreading widely from a common trunk, and drawing their origin from a common root, branches bearing all manner of flowers, every fashion of leaves, and all kinds of fruit, and these for every use. A sphere enveloping such an umbrageous tree would touch many twigs equidistant from the root. These topmost twigs might symbolise many kinds of animals; one of them, but only one of them, would signify the human race.

ART. IV.-Macmillan's Magazine. September, 1869. Fifth Edition. Art. I. The True Story of Lady Byron's Life. By Harriet Beecher Stowe.

THE

THE controversy raised by Mrs. Beecher Stowe's pretended discovery and revelation has excited an unprecedented amount of interest at home and abroad. The fair fame of Lord Byron is dear to all admirers of his genius in both hemispheres ; and his personality is so mixed up and blended with his poetry, that to blacken his moral character is to lower his literary reputation and excite a mischievous prejudice against his works. A number of minor questions, critical, moral, and social, is involved; and a great deal of curious information, well worth preserving, has been elicited in the shape of scattered letters and desultory notices. For these (amongst other) reasons we think

that

that a complete summary and analysis of the controversy are imperatively required, and will not be deemed out of place in these pages.

If we had any doubts or scruples about the course to be pursued, they would be removed by the views and language of an influential portion of the press, which nothing short of searching investigation and unsparing exposure can counteract. Whilst one organ of opinion declared that a black mark had been set for all time to come against Byron's most perfect poems, and intimated a doubt whether it would be consistent with fine feeling or propriety ever to open his works again,—another regretted that, since so crushing an exposure was to come, it had not come in time to benefit the generation that read him, and took an interest in him, instead of being delayed till his fame and influence have passed away.

Now, no man of matured understanding, moderately versed in European and transatlantic literature, would hesitate to declare that Byron stands immeasurably higher for world-wide fame and influence than any living English poet; and there is something almost ludicrous to our minds in testing genius by morality. Are we not to relish Sterne because he preferred 'whining over a dead ass to relieving a dying mother'? or Rousseau, because, whilst expatiating on parental love, he sent his illegitimate children to a foundling hospital? or Alfieri, because he committed adultery with Lady Ligonier? or Dante, because he exalted his early love, Beatrice, far, far above 'la fiera moglie,' his wife? or Milton, because (according to Johnson) he was a harsh father, and drove the first Mrs. Milton from his house. David Deans would not take physic from a doctor who had not a right sense of the right-hand and left-hand defections of the day.' Miles Peter Andrews (as recorded by Boswell) could see no fun in a man who owed him three guineas. The sensitive journalist can derive no pleasure from Byron's poetry, since the terrible disclosure of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and almost feels that he shall never open his works again. It will, therefore, be a kind and good deed to take 'Childe Harold' and Don Juan' out of quarantine and fumigate them for family use. To do this effectually, to clear up a mystery which deeply affects the happiness of the living as well as the reputation of the dead, we must venture into a tainted atmosphere and handle things it is disagreeable to touch; but the critical tribunal resembles ordinary tribunals in this respect: conventional rules of delicacy must give way when truth and justice are at stake.

Moore, who had the best possible information and was best qualified to interpret any doubtful allusions in the journals and

letters,

letters, says: With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this separation, it seems needless, with the character of both parties before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons to account for it." This was, and is, the only rational and consistent theory. The case of this ill-assorted pair was a clear, undeniable, inevitable one of incompatibility. Each had fixed habits and modes of thought which neither was disposed to give up. They were both accustomed to have their own way. Each possessed no common amount of self-consciousness and self-esteem. His was the genuine poetic temperament, which required soothing and could not bear argument or contradiction. It was impossible for him to get on with a reasoning strictly reasonable wife, who made no allowance for the caprice or waywardness of genius, and was resolved on being always in the right. Granting that, in the minor differences which preceded the decisive one, she was always in the right, this does not much mend the matter. It was not the less evident that if, instead of making the best of the situation, she aggravated it by remonstrance or reproach, a catastrophe was inevitable sooner or later. There was some domestic sparring, no doubt. But there is ample evidence in his familiar letters that he was much attached to her, and that he accepted the (with his notions and habits) uncongenial part of husband in good faith. Their only daughter was the child of love, though born in bitterness.' Three weeks after the ceremony (Feb. 2, 1815) he writes to Moore:

Since I wrote last, I have been transferred to my father-in-law, with my lady and my lady's maid, &c., &c., &c., and the treacle-moon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to and in-admiration. Swift says "no wise man ever married; but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all future states. I still think one ought to marry upon lease; but am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though next term were for ninety-andnine years.. My papa, Sir Ralpho, hath recently made a speech at a Durham tax meeting; and not only at Durham, but here several, several times since, after dinner. He is now, I believe, speaking it to himself (I left him in the middle) over various decanters, which can neither interrupt him nor fall asleep-as might possibly have been the case with some of his audience.'

March 8, 1815, from Seaham :

'We leave this place to-morrow and shall stop on our way to town (in the interval of taking a house there) at Colonel Leigh's, near Newmarket, where any epistle of yours will find its welcome way. I have been comfortable here-listening to that d-d monologue, which

elderly

elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious father-inlaw repeats himself every evening-save one, when he played upon the fiddle. However, they have been very kind and hospitable, and I like them and the place vastly, and I hope they will live many happy months. Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour. But we are all in the agonies of packing and parting; and I suppose by this time to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a band-box. I have prepared another carriage for the abigail, and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them.'

The unwonted restraint of the married state becomes more galling as the novelty wears off. He proposes to Moore excursions without their wives: he contemplates another journey to the East alone: he partially resumes his bachelor habits, his irregular hours and meals, with the solitary musings, the fits of despondency and gloom, by which his wild bursts of mirth were alternated through life. The time of trial for the wedded partner of his cares was come, but if she had really studied and understood his character, she should have been prepared for it :

'Don Jóse and the Donna Inez led

For some time an unhappy sort of life,
Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead;
They lived respectably as man and wife,
Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred,

And gave no outward signs of inward strife,
Until at length the smother'd fire broke out,
And put the business past all kind of doubt.
'For Inez call'd some druggists, and physicians,
And tried to prove her loving lord was mad,
But as he had some lucid intermissions,

She next decided he was only bad;
Yet when they ask'd her for her depositions,
No sort of explanation could be had,
Save that her duty both to man and God
Required this conduct-which seem'd very odd.

'She kept a journal, where his faults were noted,
And open'd certain trunks of books and letters,
All which might, if occasion served, be quoted;

And then she had all Seville for abettors.'

Whilst they were living together in London, curiosity was all alive to discover what he was doing in poetry, and Lady Byron (he complained) was in the habit of rummaging amongst his papers, when he was out, in company with a female friend. In one of these voyages of discovery, they came upon some com

promising

promising letters from a married woman to him previous to his marriage; these Lady Byron seized and enclosed to the husband, who threw them into the fire, told his wife he had done so, and took no further notice of them.

His own account of the separation, supplied to Moore, is that she left London on a visit to her father's house, where he was to join her. They had parted in the utmost kindness. She wrote him a letter, full of playfulness and affection on the road, and immediately on her arrival at Kirby Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that she would return to him no more.' This letter began‘Dear Duck,' and ended 'Yours ever, Pippin:' a name he had given her in reference to the form of her face. Lady Byron's account is thus introduced by Mrs. Beecher Stowe :

'A short time after her confinement, she was informed by him in a note, that as soon as she was able to travel she must go, that he could not and would not longer have her about him—and when her child was only five weeks old he carried this expulsion into effect.

Here we will insert briefly Lady Byron's own account-the only one she ever gave to the public-of this separation. The circumstances under which this brief story was written are affecting.

'Lord Byron was dead. The whole account between him and her was closed for ever in this world. Moore's memoirs had been prepared, containing simply and solely Lord Byron's own version of their story. Moore sent these memoirs to Lady Byron, and requested to know if she had any remarks to make upon them. In reply, she sent a brief statement to him, the first and only one that had come from her during all the years of the separation, and which appears to have mainly for its object the exculpation of her father and mother from the charge made by the poet, of being the instigators of the separation.'

These alleged circumstances may be affecting, but they are imaginary. Lady Byron's own account, which Mrs. Beecher Stowe proceeds to quote, is comprised in Remarks on Mr. Moore's Life of Lord Byron by Lady Byron,' and written subsequently to the publication of the first volume of that work; as Mrs. Beecher Stowe might have seen from the references to the printed volume.* It runs thus:

In my observations upon this statement, I shall, as far as possible,

These 'Remarks' were first printed as a pamphlet for private circulation. They will be found in the Appendix to the sixth volume of the small octavo edition of Moore's Life of Byron.' The 'Life' originally appeared in two volumes quarto; the first was published separately; and in the Preface to the second, Moore alludes to the 'Remarks' as a document which made its appearance soon after the former volume, and which I have annexed without a single line of comment to the present.' His account of the separation was in the first volume.