man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine,
may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the
marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage-
vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour
his memory,--nay, to sacrifice to it the honour due to a kind father and
mother, slandered in their silent graves.

Such was the sympathy, and such the advice, that the best literature of
England could give to a young widow, a peeress of England, whose husband,
as they verily believed and admitted, might have done worse than all
this; whose crimes might have been 'foul, monstrous, unforgivable as the
sin against the Holy Ghost.' If these things be done in the green tree,
what shall be done in the dry? If the peeress as a wife has no rights,
what is the state of the cotter's wife?

But, in the same paper, North again blames Lady Byron for not having come
out with the whole story before the world at the time she separated from
her husband. He says of the time when she first consulted counsel
through her mother, keeping back one item,--

'How weak, and worse than weak, at such a juncture, on which hung her
whole fate, to ask legal advice on an imperfect document! Give the
delicacy of a virtuous woman its due; but at such a crisis, when the
question was whether her conscience was to be free from the oath of
oaths, delicacy should have died, and nature was privileged to show
unashamed--if such there were--the records of uttermost pollution.'

Shepherd.--'And what think ye, sir, that a' this pollution could hae
been, that sae electrified Dr. Lushington?'