'Five and thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must
make up a great amount of human happiness; but this was only one of a
wide variety of methods of doing good. It was the unconcealable
magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a
second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households
within the four seas. Years ago, it was said far and wide that Lady
Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was
difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.

'Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her
property while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he
could deprive her of by his will; yet she had, eventually, a large
income at her command. In the management of it, she showed the same
wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions. She
resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed
help at the moment. Her care was for the existing generation, rather
than for a future one, which would have its own friends. She usually
declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities;
preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve
definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help
over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.

'It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of
the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while
sorely misjudging her character. We hear much now--and everybody
hears it with pleasure--of the spread of education in "common things;"
but long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name
was found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the
thing, and put it in the way of making its own name.