world of care; but the 'last', I do flatter myself, was reserved for
me, and a 'bonne bouche' it was."

The following passage certainly relates to Lady Oxford:

"There was a lady at that time," said Byron (Medwin's 'Conversations',
pp. 93, 94), "double my own age, the mother of several children who
were perfect angels, with whom I had formed a 'liaison' that continued
without interruption for eight months. The autumn of a beauty like
her's is preferable to the spring in others. She told me she was never
in love till she was thirty; and I thought myself so with her when she
was forty. I never felt a stronger passion; which she returned with
equal ardour.... She had been sacrificed, almost before she was a
woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible in the
scale of creation; and on whom she bestowed a numerous family, to
which the law gave him the right to be called father. Strange as it
may seem, she gained (as all women do) an influence over me so strong,
that I had great difficulty in breaking with her, even when I knew she
had been inconstant to me: and once was on the point of going abroad
with her, and narrowly escaped this folly."

To be near the Oxfords at Eywood, in Herefordshire, Byron took Kinsham
Court, a dower-house of the family, where Bishop Harley died in 1788. At
one time, as is evident from his correspondence with Hanson, he was bent
on going abroad with Lady Oxford. In the end he only accompanied her to
Portsmouth. Of Lady Oxford, Uvedale Price wrote thus to Rogers (Clayden,
'Rogers and his Contemporaries', vol. i. pp. 397, 398):

"This is a melancholy subject"--[the death, by consumption of Lord
Aberdeen's children]--"and I must go to another. Poor Lady Oxford! I