There has always been in England, as John Stuart Mill says, a class of
women who glory in the utter self-abnegation of the wife to the husband,
as the special crown of womanhood. Their patron saint is the Griselda of
Chaucer, who, when her husband humiliates her, and treats her as a brute,
still accepts all with meek, unquestioning, uncomplaining devotion. He
tears her from her children; he treats her with personal abuse; he
repudiates her,--sends her out to nakedness and poverty; he installs
another mistress in his house, and sends for the first to be her handmaid
and his own: and all this the meek saint accepts in the words of Milton,--

'My guide and head,
What thou hast said is just and right.'

Accordingly, Miss Martineau tells us that when Campbell's defence came
out, coupled with a note from Lady Byron,--

'The first obvious remark was, that there was no real disclosure; and
the whole affair had the appearance of a desire, on the part of Lady
Byron, to exculpate herself, while yet no adequate information was
given. Many, who had regarded her with favour till then, gave her up
so far as to believe that feminine weakness had prevailed at last.'

The saint had fallen from her pedestal! She had shown a human frailty!
Quite evidently she is not a Griselda, but possessed with a shocking
desire to exculpate herself and her friends.

Is it, then, only to slandered men that the privilege belongs of desiring
to exculpate themselves and their families and their friends from unjust
censure?