was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and
sneers about the misapplication of bounty.

'Her taste did not lie in the "Charity-Ball" direction; her funds were
not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle
and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as
admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and
improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that
she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of
solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she
did not administer.

'In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular
success. For one instance among a thousand: A lady with whom she had
had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished
in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty with an easy
conscience to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the
perfect rectitude of the resource. Lady Byron wrote to an
intermediate person exactly what she thought of the case. Whether the
judgment of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody's business
but her own: this was the first point. Next, a voluntary poverty
could never be pitied by anybody: that was the second. But it was
painful to others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings
which attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting
that pain. Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighbouring
bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent
purposes; and, in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had
made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so
that the sufferer's name need not appear at all.