hideous, shameless cheat, is on the face of Moore's account; yet the
'Blackwood' does not see it nor feel it, and brings up against Lady Byron
this touching story of a poor widow, who really had had a true lover
once,--a lover maddened, imbruted, lost, through that very drunkenness in
which the Noctes Club were always glorying.

It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore
and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering, broken-
hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share
alike with the poor dog,--the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and
cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love
and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as
he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth of life in
him. Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor, loving
brute,--most mournful and most sacred

But, oh that a noble man should have no higher ideal of the love of a
high-souled, heroic woman! Oh that men should teach women that they owe
no higher duties, and are capable of no higher tenderness, than this
loving, unquestioning animal fidelity! The dog is ever-loving,
ever-forgiving, because God has given him no high range of moral
faculties, no sense of justice, no consequent horror at impurity and
vileness.

Much of the beautiful patience and forgiveness of women is made possible
to them by that utter deadness to the sense of justice which the laws,
literature, and misunderstood religion of England have sought to induce
in woman as a special grace and virtue.

The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is, that