his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.

We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every insult
and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have heaped
upon Lady Byron. We have been betrayed into injustice and a complicity
with villainy. After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders in
England, and died full of years and honours, the 'Blackwood' takes
occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of
slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past. What was
the consequence in America? My attention was first called to the result,
not by reading the 'Blackwood' article, but by finding in a popular
monthly magazine two long articles,--the one an enthusiastic
recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over
the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.

Both articles represented Lady Byron as a cold, malignant, mean,
persecuting woman, who had been her husband's ruin. They were so full of
falsehoods and misstatements as to astonish me. Not long after, a
literary friend wrote to me, 'Will you, can you, reconcile it to your
conscience to sit still and allow that mistress so to slander that
wife,--you, perhaps, the only one knowing the real facts, and able to set
them forth?'

Upon this, I immediately began collecting and reading the various
articles and the book, and perceived that the public of this generation
were in a way of having false history created, uncontradicted, under
their own eyes.

I claim for my countrymen and women, our right to true history. For
years, the popular literature has held up publicly before our eyes the