other words, she is so determined to be what custom declares virtuous that she does what is genuinely wrong under the delusion that it is right.

If

Scott may have conventionalized the characteristic traits. there are any young women in his pages who rule their conduct with their brains, either they are not ladies, or like Di Vernon, they have been badly brought up. The Rowenas, Edith Bellendens, Rose Bradwardines are all alike, and follow the ladylike pursuits mentioned above. They are all virtuous, pious, kind and gentle, but inexperienced, helpless, and innocent. They do needlework, play or sing, and carry on some mild kind of study. Rose Bradwardine, for instance, has a little embowered library; Lucy Ashton collects ballads. If we wish to see these people in the flesh we have but to turn to Fanny Burney's diary, and read of the sisters of "the first gentleman." They sit in the parlors at Windsor, they go to chapel, they listen to concerts, they sew, they are kissed by their papa, they read only what has first been read and approved by their mother, and they wait to be married off to German princelings. How proper it was, and how stupid it must have been for the sons, and what wonder they took the course that they did.

Not merely stupid was it, however, but inherently false and wicked where all young women had to be nothing but good, and the young men had to be bad not to be bored, and where it was finally all smoothed over and blessed to the tune of wedding bells. For young women like Isabella were married by their fathers and mothers to men who had been young in the fashion of George and Byron. An ignorant, innocent weakling was married to a man who had lived as carnally as he chose, and then the British conscience took out its prayer-book and went to church, saying "Let by-gones be by-gones, boys will be boys, and they were only his wild oats."

Whatever the outcome, George IV and his sort could settle down contentedly to gout and senile bestiality. Not so Byron with his "sincerity and strength." When he married Annabella Milbanke he found his marriage intolerable. Miss E. C. Mayne, in her recent biography, offers once more a certain plausible explanation for the intensity of Byron's distaste for his matrimonial

arrangements. So revolting an explanation should, however, be based upon firmer evidence, especially when the situation explains itself anyhow without it. When Byron found himself married, something seemed to madden him, and Miss Mayne supposes this to have been a love-affair with his half-sister. Is it not more natural to suppose that the trouble was Annabella herself? If we have read Byron's letters, and if we can imagine him married to one of Scott's heroines, incest need not be added to the tortures which both parties to the union must have suffered. "Miss Edgeworth's novels stepping from their covers,

Or Mrs. Trimmer's books on education,

Or 'Caleb's Wife' set out in quest of lovers,

Morality's prim personification."

Thus Byron describes the matron, Donna Inez; the maiden Annabella steps from the pages of Waverley. In Miss Wardour of The Antiquary we saw the young woman of the aristocracy. Her head and the heads of her parents, when they thought of her, were filled with definite moral ideas concerning her. Because she wishes to be good she treats an honorable man like a cad, and it is this rigid devotion to a code of morals, making her merely prim and prudish in youth, but self-righteous, intolerant, and often blind to true morality as she grows older, which is the distinguishing trait of this type of woman. No man was ever less a prig than Scott. When, therefore, he represents as a moral prig a character whom he wishes to be admired, it must be in spite of himself and because he is reflecting staple conventions. No better witness to the tyranny of these conventions could be found.

Anna Isabella Milbanke was the daughter and only child of Sir Ralph Milbanke, a gentleman who had lost money without winning fame in politics, and was now retired to the obscurity of the country. He and his wife were model members of the gentry, exceedingly pious, charitable, comfortable, and as their son-in-law discovered, intensely uninteresting. Their daughter was also a model; she was a young lady with all the characteristics we have noted. She did nothing physically strenuous. She helped the poor. She was religious, and she cultivated her mind with theology, mathematics, and poetry. She was twenty

years old with no experience of the world, but her friends looked upon her as a prodigy of feminine righteousness and intellect. Such were the Milbankes and their lady daughter; such is one side of the picture with morality as its dominant note.

The picture has a sinister side too, however, and we must see both to understand Byron's bitter rage. Annabella, though her father's heir, could not expect a large fortune; politics had been costly. She therefore married Byron with a small dowry, and only the possibility of inheriting wealth from her uncle, Lord Wentworth, Sir Edward Noel. This brother of her mother was an old bachelor with a number of illegitimate children. The Milbankes were uncertain whether he would leave his fortune to his own offspring, or whether he would do what was more proper and leave it respectably to them. He did the latter, and the moral Milbankes found no objection to accepting it and to taking his name for their own. Let us hope that the children of a gentleman and no lady were decently provided for.

But this was not all. In the course of his affair with Caro Lamb, Byron had struck up a firm friendship with Lady Melbourne, the mother of Caro's husband. No person was in better position to know Byron's character than she; few could have known more about his subsequent courses with Lady Oxford and others. Byron's wild oats were not sown in distant and hidden fields. Now Lady Melbourne was also Annabella's aunt, and was on intimate terms with the Milbanke family. She therefore knew what Annabella was as well as what Byron was, and as a well-meaning friend to both, she suggested, promoted, and approved the match between them.

Into the details of Byron's courtship it is not necessary to go, although they reveal the ideals of the society in which he lived. The Duchess of Devonshire, for instance, writes to her son with regard to Annabella: "Lord Byron makes up to her a little; but she don't admire him except as a poet, nor he her except for a wife." In whatever light we look at this situation, it is bad. How could people who so prided themselves upon their moral probity have married their daughter to so immoral a man as Byron? It was impossible that they did not know what he was; not even the stupidity of the Milbankes could have compassed

that. How could Annabella herself ever marry such a man? Ingorance of his past might have been hers, but this makes the situation even blacker for her parents and her aunt who would have had to withhold from this child all knowledge of the character of the man she was to live with. The truth undoubtedly is that they all knew, and trusted Byron to play his part of the game according to the rules just as they played theirs. He was to reform like a gentleman, and settle down with a good grace under the moralizing influence of Annabella.

To such a person, into such a family, under such auspices, Byron married, but he could not continue to play the game according to the rules. It was not that he was unfaithful; that could have been provided for. He was simply disgusted, inexplicably, bitterly disgusted. We must remember that Byron was incapable of inhibiting the expression of his passions; his letters show that. Whatever he felt at the moment of writing, he poured forth like the flood from a broken dam. This is the reason why Arnold and Swinburne speak of his "sincerity," for the man who blazes out what he feels is inevitably sincere. On the other hand, Byron had no practical imagination; he acted from impulse or custom, not from thought. He vowed never to sell Newstead Abbey when in one mood, and in another sold it. He vowed that he would leave Madame Guiccioli unless the clock struck before his trunks were packed; the clock struck and determined that he should stay. Quick and ready to feel and utter, he seldom planned. Now when such a man attempted to live with Annabella Milbanke, what would be the logical result? We must revert again to Isabella Wardour. What would Byron have done if he had been the hero of Scott's Antiquary, and had been treated by the heroine as Lovell was? How would he have behaved if he had had to live with a woman whose actions, thoughts, and speech were so rigidly controlled by such rules? The answer is simple enough. "All other souls compared with his are inert," says Taine. Multiply by Byron's dynamic force the disgust which those of us who are young and healthy feel toward one of Scott's heroines, and we shall understand what happened in this unfortunate household. Byron did nothing to extricate himself,—the knot was cut by the child he had married, but he felt and uttered.

To live happily with his wife, he would have had to belie his past and his nature. He would have had to pretend what he did not feel,-that he had reformed. Concealment he was incapable of, yet conceal he must if he was to live with this prim little person from the country, who had come into his house with a neat and rigid code of morals which he must at least contemplate daily if not obey, morals which none knew better than he were rooted in the immorality of the Uncle Noels, the Caro Lambs, the Melbournes, the Oxfords, and himself. Poor little Annabella, striving in the bravery of ignorance to cage that "splendid and puissant personality" into rules, and rules which he particularly abhorred,—it was an impossible situation. Byron felt what he could not understand, what the others had not thought of, that it was also a fallacious and immoral situation. He felt the truth that, since he and his wife could agree only by a lie, they ought not to have been married, and this feeling he uttered with all his native force, uttered in all his native sincerity, -to his wife. He treated her as he treated everyone who affected him in a similar way, as he treated Southey and George III, with satire. Positive action he took none, but her presence provoked him to do and say wild things which would horrify and shock that prim provincial prudery. He resented the checks which she implied upon his tremendous self, and therefore he merely behaved more like that self than usual.

This is the explanation of that strange married life of theirs as Miss Mayne describes it,- Byron smashing his watch on the hearthstone, standing over his new-born child's cradle and exclaiming, "Oh what an implement of torture have I received in thee!" and making Annabella dine alone because he cannot bear to see a woman eat. Imagine treating Isabella Wardour or Rose Bradwardine or Rowena in this fashion. The terrified girl, who was not, however, like her husband, helpless when action was to be taken, could come to but one of two conclusions. First she did indeed call

'. . . . some druggists and physicians,

And tried to prove her loving lord was mad;

But as he had some lucid intermissions,

She next decided he was only bad" ;

and the rest of the story we all know.