canto of 'Childe Harold,' together with a statement of the wrongs which
he forgave; but the Guiccioli thinks his virtue, at this period, has not
been enough appreciated. In her view, it rose to the sublime. She says
of Lady Byron,--

'An absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of
female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light of
magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did
it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which Lady
Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her
harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which cause
such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom
suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause
persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation. Yet, with
his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act? what
did he say? I will not speak of his "farewell;" of the care he took
to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too
large a share to himself.'

With like vivacity and earnestness does the narrator now proceed to make
an incarnate angel of her subject by the simple process of denying
everything that he himself ever confessed,--everything that has ever been
confessed in regard to him by his best friends. He has been in the world
as an angel unawares from his cradle. His guardian did not properly
appreciate him, and is consequently mentioned as that wicked Lord
Carlisle. Thomas Moore is never to be sufficiently condemned for the
facts told in his biography. Byron's own frank and lawless admissions of
evil are set down to a peculiar inability he had for speaking the truth
about himself,--sometimes about his near relations; all which does not in
the least discourage the authoress from giving a separate chapter on