Temoins de sa Vie," without the name of the countess. A more
unfortunate designation could hardly have been selected. The
"witnesses of his life" told us nothing but what had been told before
over and over again; and the uniform and exaggerated tone of eulogy
which pervaded the whole book was fatal to any claim on the part of
the writer to be considered an impartial judge of the wonderfully
mixed character of Byron.

'When, however, the book is regarded as the avowed production of the
Countess Guiccioli, it derives value and interest from its very
faults. {113} There is something inexpressibly touching in the
picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago;
not faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous
as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty,
first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul
up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her
heart.

'To her there has been no change, no decay. The god whom she
worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is
still the "Pythian of the age" to her at seventy. To try such a book
by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign
the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of
indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.'

This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most
classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book,
simply because it was written by Lord Byron's mistress. That fact, we
are assured, lends grace even to its faults.