106 Moore's Notices of Lord Byron. QFiSB. 



course of one year, was a roue, and clearly a troublesome companion 

 ibr a fire- side. But all this the lady knew before; for the gentleman 

 had never made any concealment of his tastes ; and she ought to have 

 abided by them. Moore says, with sufficient plainness, that the fault 

 " was in the choice" And as Miss Milbanke married, in the spirit of 

 llueism, a man who was proud of publishing his scorn of mankind and 

 womankind, and home and country, and the habits and principles of 

 English life, she ought to have made up her mind to go through with 

 the affair. Byron was no more to blame than every rake, and he was 

 probably not more a rake than ninety-nine out of the hundred of his 

 rank, except in his ostentation of offence to society. His wife took him 

 " with all faults," and her separation from him certainly threw the weight 

 of blame on her side. Byron's nature was arrogant and sullen, but he 

 had intervals of gentleness and feeling. Time, and kindness at home/ 

 might have softened him, and he might have gradually taken the place 

 in society, due. to men of abilities, who have at length discovered that 

 there is a more enduring fame, and a wiser occupation of life, than the 

 cackle of coteries, or the alternate riot and dejection of the tavern. 



The volume, on the whole, is amusing. Moore should be a man of 

 tact from his mixture with the race who are always talking about it-- 

 yet \ve miss this considerably in his determination to insert every thing 

 that dropped from Byron's pen the frequent panegyric of himself in 

 the letters must have been a painful pressure on the biographer's 

 feelings, to which we think his love of fidelity might have given way 

 without a crime. Byron's own detciils of his reprobate amours, the 

 morals of his friends, and his religious notions in general, (which are 

 nonsense, much less remarkable for their novelty than their ostentatious 

 emptiness, folly, and ignorance,) ought to have been wholly omitted. 



But, for the one grand merit of impartiality, the biographer may 

 claim universal praise. He lets out the facts, be they what they will, 

 and run a muck at whom they may. The following anecdote from one 

 of Byron's many journals, is we suppose, historic. 



" Murray, the bookseller ! has been cruelly cudgelled of misbegotten 

 knaves, in ' Kendal-green/ at Newington Butts, in his way home from 

 a purlieu dinner, and robbed would you believe it ? of three or four 

 bonds of forty pounds a-piece, and a seal ring of his grandfather's, 

 worth a million. This is his version ; but others opine that D'Iraeli, 

 with -whom he dined, knocked him down with his last publication, the 

 Quarrels of Authors, in a dispute about copyright. Be that as it may, 

 the newspapers have teemed with his injuria formce, and he has been 

 embrocated and invisible to all but his apothecary ever sines." 



Nothing is said in this volume, that we can discover, of the famous 

 MS. which was burned, " to the amount of 2,000/.," at the desire of 

 Mrs. Augusta Leigh, to the chagrin of Murray and Moore, and the 

 astonishment of every body. But whatever the loss was at the time, it 

 seems to have been completely atoned by the use of papers in extraordinary 

 abundance, provided by his lordship to acquaint posterity with his 

 " whereabout." We thus have one entiled a " Register" of his ways ; ano- 

 ther, a " Dictionary ;" a third, " A Journal ;" and so forth ; amounting not 

 perhaps " to the value of 2,000/.," but clearly amounting to a close detail 

 of almost every transaction of his mind or body. So much the better, 

 we say. The MS. ought not to have been burned ; though, from the 

 superfluity of Journalising, nothing may have been lost by its mounting 

 to that lunar region where 



