IT is seldom that a woman becomes the world's talk but by some great merit or fault of her own, or some rare qualification so bestowed by Nature as to be incapable of being hidden. Great genius, rare beauty, a fitness for noble enterprise, the venturous madness of passion, account for ninety-nine cases in the hundred of a woman becoming the subject of general conversation and interest. Lady Byron's was the hundredth case. There was a time when it is probable that she was spoken of every day in every house in England where the family could read; and for years the general anxiety to hear anything that could be told of her was almost as striking in Continental society and in the United States as in her own country. Yet she had neither genius, nor conspicuous beauty, nor "a mission," nor any quality of egotism which could induce her to brave the observation of the world for any personal aim. She had good abilities, well cultivated for the time when she was young; she was rather pretty, and her countenance was engaging from its expression of mingled thoughtfulness and brightness; she was as lady-like as became her birth and training; and her strength of character was so tempered with modesty and good taste that she was about the last woman that could have been supposed likely to become celebrated in any way, or, yet more, to be passionately disputed about and censured, in regard to her temper and manners: yet such was her lot. No breath of suspicion ever dimmed her good repute, in the ordinary sense of the expression: but to this day she is misapprehended, wherever her husband's genius is adored; and she is charged with precisely the faults which it was most impossible for her to commit. For the original notoriety she was not answerable; but for the protracted misapprehension of her character she was. She early decided that it was not necessary or

desirable to call the world into council on her domestic affairs; her husband's doing it was no reason why she should; and for nearly forty years she preserved a silence, neither haughty nor sullen, but merely natural, on matters in which women usually consider silence appropriate. She never inquired what effect this silence had on public opinion in regard to her, nor countenanced the idea that public opinion bore any relation whatever to her private affairs and domestic conduct. Such independence and such reticence naturally quicken the interest and curiosity of survivors; and they also stimulate those who knew her as she was to explain her characteristics to as many as wish to understand them, after disputing about them for the lifetime of a whole generation.

Anne Isabella Noel Milbanke (that was her maiden name) was an only child. Her father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, was the sixth baronet of that name. Her mother was a Noel, daughter of Viscount and Baron Wentworth, and remotely descended from royalty, that is, from the youngest son of Edward I. After the death of Lady Milbanke's father and brother, the Barony of Wentworth was in abeyance between the daughter of Lady Milbanke and the son of her sister till 1856, when, by the death of that cousin, Lord Scarsdale, Lady Byron became possessed of the inheritance and title. During her childhood and youth, however, her parents were not wealthy; and it was understood that Miss Milbanke would have no fortune till the death of her parents, though her expectations were great. Though this want of immediate fortune did not prove true, the report of it was probably advantageous to the young girl, who was sought for other things than her fortune. When Lord Byron thought of proposing, the friend who had brought him to the point of submitting to marriage objected to Miss Milbanke on two grounds, that she had no

fortune, and that she was a learned lady. The gentleman was as wrong in his facts as mischievous in his advice to the poet to marry. Miss Milbanke had fortune, and she was not a learned lady. Such men as the two who held a consultation on the points, whether a man entangled in intrigues and overwhelmed with debts should release himself by involving a trusting girl in his difficulties, and whether the girl should be Miss Milbanke or another, were not likely to distinguish between the cultivated ability of a sensible girl and the pedantry of a blue-stocking; and hence, because Miss Milbanke was neither ignorant nor silly, she was called a learned lady by Lord Byron's associates. He bore testimony, in due time, to her agreeable qualities as a companion, - her brightness, her genial nature, her quiet good sense; and we heard no more of her "learning" and "mathematics," till it suited her enemies to get up a theory of incompatibility of temper between her and her husband. The fact was, she was well-educated, as education was then, and had the acquirements which are common in every house among the educated classes of English society.

She was born in 1792, and passed her early years chiefly on her father's estates of Halnaby, near Darlington, Yorkshire, and Seaham, in Durham. She retained a happy recollection of her childhood and youth, if one may judge by her attachment to the old homes, when she had lost the power of attaching herself, in later life, to any permanent home. When an offer of service was made to her, some years since, by a person residing on the Northumberland coast, the service she asked was that a pebble might be sent her from the beach at Seaham, to be made into a brooch, and worn for love of the old place.

Her father, as a Yorkshire baronet, spent his money freely. A good deal of it went in election-expenses, and the hospitality of the house was great. It was too orderly and sober and old-fashioned for Lord Byron's taste, and he quizzed it accordingly; but he admitted

the kindliness of it, and the amiability which made guests glad to go there and sorry to come away. His special records of Miss Milbanke's good-humor, spirit, and pleasantness indicate the source of subsequent misrepresentations of her Till he saw it, he could not conceive that order and dutifulness could coexist with liveliness and great charms of mind and manners; and when the fact was out of sight, he went back to his old notion, that affectionate parents and dutiful daughters must be dull, prudish, and tiresome.

"Bell" was beloved as only daughters are, but so unspoiled as to be sought in marriage as eagerly as if she had been a merry member of a merry tribe. Lord Byron himself offered early, and was refused, like many other suitors. Her feelings were not the same, however, to him as to others. It is no wonder that a girl not out of her teens should be captivated by the young poet whom the world was beginning to worship for his genius as very few men are worshipped in their prime, and who could captivate young and old, man, woman, and child, when he chose to try. As yet, his habits of life and mind had not told upon his manners, conversation, and countenance as they did afterwards. The beauty of his face, the reserved and hesitating grace of his manner, and the pith and strength of such conversation as he was tempted into might well win the heart of a girl who was certainly far more fond of poetry than of mathematics. Yet she refused him. Perhaps she did not know him enough. Perhaps she did not know her own feelings at the moment. She afterwards found that she had always loved him. His renewed offers at the close of two years made her very happy. She was drawing near the end of her portion of life's happiness; and she seems to have had no suspicion of the baselessness of her natural and innocent bliss. It is probable that nobody about her knew, any more than herself, how and why Lord Byron offered to her a second time, till Moore published the facts in his "Life" of the poet.

The thrill of disgust which

ran through every good heart, on reading the story, made all sympathizers ask how she could bear to learn how she had been treated in the confidences of profligates. Perhaps she had known it long before, as her husband had repeatedly tried his powers of terrifying and depressing her; but, at all events, she could bear anything, not only with courage and in silence, but with calmness and inexhaustible mercy. According to Moore's account, a friend of Byron's urged him to marry, as a remedy for the melancholy restlessness and disorder of his life; “and, after much discussion, he consented." The next proceedings were in character with this "consent." Byron named Miss Milbanke: the friend objected, on the grounds of her possession of learning and supposed want of fortune; and Byron actually commissioned his adviser to propose for him to the lady he did not prefer. She refused him; and then future proceedings were determined by his friend's admiration of the letter he had got ready for Miss Milbanke. It was such a pretty letter, it would be a pity not to send it. So it was sent.

If she could have known, as she hung over that letter, what eyes had read lines that should have been her own secret property, and as what kind of alternative the letter had been prepared, what a different life might hers have been! But she could not dream of being laid hold of as a speculation in that style, and she was happy, as women are for once in their lives, and as she deserved to be. There was another alternative, besides that of two ladies to be weighed in the balance. Byron was longing to go abroad again, and he would have preferred that to marrying; but the importunity of his friends decided him for marriage. In a short time, and for a short time, Miss Milbanke's influence was too strong for his wayward nature and his pernicious friends to resist. His heart was touched, his mind was soothed, and he thought better of women, and perhaps of the whole human race, than he had ever done before. He wrote to

Moore, who owned he had "never liked her," and who boded evil things from the marriage, that she was so good that he wished he was better,- that he had been quite mistaken in supposing her of "a very cold disposition." These gentlemen had heard of her being regarded as a pattern lady in the North"; and they had made up an image of a prude and a blue in their own minds, which Byron presently set himself to work to pull down. He wrote against Moore's notion of her as "strait-laced," in a spirit of justice awakened by his new satisfactions and hopes: but there are in the narrative no signs of love on his part,— nothing more than an amiable complacency in the discovery of her attachment to him.

The engagement took place in September, 1814, and the marriage in the next January. Moore saw him in the interval, and had no remaining hope, from that time, that Byron could ever make or find happiness in married life. He was satisfied that love was, in Byron's case, only an imagination; and he pointed to a declaration of Byron's, that, when in the society of the woman he loved, even at the happiest period of his attachment, he found himself secretly longing to be alone. Secretly during the courtship, but not secretly after marriage.

"Tell me, Byron,” said his wife, one day, not long after they were married, and he was moodily staring into the fire, I in your way?"

"am

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Damnably," was the answer.

It will be remembered by all readers that the reason he assigned for the good terms on which he remained with his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, was that they seldom or never saw each other.

When Moore saw him in London, he was in a troubled state of mind about his affairs. His embarrassments were SO pressing that he meditated breaking off the match; but it was within a month of the wedding-day, and he said he had gone too far to retract. How it was that Sir Ralph Milbanke did not make it his business to ascertain all the conditions of a union with a man of Byron's reputation

it is difficult to imagine. Every movement of the idolized poet was watched, anecdotes of his life and ways were in all mouths; and a prudent father, if encouraging his addresses at all, should naturally have ascertained the chances of his daughter having an honorable and happy home. Sir Ralph probably thought so, when there were ten executions in the house in the first few months after the marriage. These difficulties, however, did not affect the happiness of the marriage unfavorably. The wife was not the less of the heroic temperament for being "a pattern young lady." She was one whose spirit was sure to rise under pressure, and who was always most cheerful when trouble called forth her energies on behalf of others. Liberal with her own property, making light of privation, full of clear and practical resource in 'emergency, she won her husband's admiration in the midst of the difficulties into which he had plunged her. For a time he was not ashamed of that admiration; and his avowals of it are happily on record.

They were married on the second of January. The wedding-day was miserable. Byron awoke in one of his melancholy moods, and wandered alone in the grounds till called to be married. His wayward mind was full of all the associations that were least congenial with the day. His thoughts were full of Mary Chaworth, and of old scenes in his life, which he fancied he loved because he was now leaving them behind. He declared that his poem of "The Dream" was a true picture of his wedding-morning; and there are circumstances, not told in his "Life," which render this probable.

After the ceremony and breakfast, the young couple left Seaham for Sir Ralph's seat at Halnaby. Towards dusk of that winter-day, the carriage drove up to the door, where the old butler stood ready to receive his young lady and her bridegroom. The moment the carriagedoor was opened, the bridegroom jumped out and walked away. When his bride alighted, the old servant was aghast. She

came up the steps with the listless gait of despair. Her face and movements expressed such utter horror and desolation, that the old butler longed to offer his arm to the lonely young creature, as an assurance of sympathy and protection. Various stories got abroad as to the cause of this horror, one probably as false as another; and, for his own part, Byron met them by a false story of Miss Milbanke's lady's-maid having been stuck in, bodkin-wise, between them. As Lady Byron certainly soon got over the shock, the probability is that she satisfied herself that he had been suffering under one of the dark moods to which he was subject, both constitutionally and as the poet of moods.

It is scarcely possible at our time of day to make sufficient allowance for such a woman having entered upon such a marriage, in spite of the notoriety of the risks. Byron was then the idol of much more than the literary world. His poetry was known by heart by multitudes of men and women who read very little else; and one meets, at this day, elderly men, who live quite outside of the regions of literature, who believe that there never could have been such a poet before, and would say, if they dared, that there will never be such another again. He appeared at the moment when society was restless and miserable, and discontented with the Fates and the universe and all that it contained. The general sensibility had not for long found any expression in poetry. Literature seemed something quite apart from experience, and with which none but a par ticular class had any concern. At such a time, when Europe lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French Empire,- when England had an insane King, a profligate Regent, an atrocious Ministry, and a corrupt Parliament, when the war drained the kingdom of its youth, and every class of its resources, when there was chronic discontent in the manufacturing districts, and hunger among the rural population, with a perpetual extension of pauperism,

swallowing up the working and even the middle classes, when everybody was full of anxiety, dread, or a reactionary recklessness, there suddenly appeared a new strain of poetry which.seemed to express every man's mood. Every man took up the song. Byron's musical woe resounded through the land. People who had not known exactly what was the matter with them now found that life was what Byron said it was, and that they were sick of it. I can well remember the enthusiasm, the better, perhaps, for never having shared it. At first I was too young, and afterwards I found too much of moods and too little of matter to create any lasting attachment to his poetry. But the music of it rang in all ears, and the rush of its popularity could not be resisted by any but downright churlish persons. I remember how ladies, in morning calls, recited passages of Byron to each other, and how gentlemen, in water-parties, whispered his short poems to their next neighbor. If a man was seen walking with his head down and his lips moving, he was revolving Byron's last romance; and children who began to keep albums wrote, in double lines on the first page, some stanza which caught them by its sound, if they were not up to its sense. On some pane in every innwindow there was a scrap of Byron; and in young ladies' portfolios there were portraits of the poet, recognizable, through all bad drawing and distortion, by the cast of the beautiful features and the Corsair style. Where a popularity like this sprang up, there must be sufficient reason for it to cause it to involve more or less all orders of minds; and the wisest and most experienced men, and the most thoroughly trained scholars, fell into the general admiration, and keenly enjoyed so melodious an expression of a general state of feeling, without asking too pertinaciously for higher views and deeper meanings. Old Quakers were troubled at detecting hidden copies and secret studies of Byron among young men and maidens who were to be preserved from all stimulants to the passions;

and they were yet more troubled, when, looking to see what the charm was which so wrought upon the youth of their sect, they found themselves carried away by it, beyond all power to forget what they had read. The idolatry of the poet, which marked that time, was an inevitable consequence of the singular aptness of his utterance. His dress, manners, and likings were adopted, so far as they could be ascertained, by hundreds of thousands of youths who were at once sated with life and ambitious of fame, or at least of a reputation for fastidious discontent; young ladies declared that Byron was everything that was great and good; and even our best literature of criticism shows how respectful and admiring the hardest reviewers grew, after the poet had become the pet and the idol of all England. At such a time, how should "Bell" Milbanke resist the intoxication, - even before the poet addressed himself particularly to her? A great reader in the quietness of her home, where all her tastes were indulged, - a lover of poetry, and so genial and sympathizing as to be always sure to be filled with the spirit of her time,- how could she fail to idolize Byron as others did ? /And what must have been her exaltation, when he told her that the welfare of his whole life depended upon her! Between her exaltation, her love, her sympathy, and her admiration, she might well make allowance for his eccentricities first, and for worse afterwards. Thus, probably, it was that she got over the shock of that wedding-drive, and was again the bright, affectionate, trusting and winning woman whom he had described before and was to describe again to his skeptical friend Moore.

Before six weeks were over, he wrote to Moore (after some previous hankerings) that he should go abroad soon, "and alone, too." He did not go then. In April the death of Lord Wentworth occurred, causing Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke to take the name of Noel, according to Lord Wentworth's will, and assuring the prospect of ultimate acces