knew," as the happiest of her life. On their return to London, Lady Caroline at once became "the rage; or, in Hepworth Dixon's words - the "belle of her season, toast of her set, star of her firmament." The Prince of Wales, a constant visitor at Melbourne House, stood sponsor to her first child, who was named after him. The flattery she received was enough to turn a steadier brain, but love and admiration for her husband kept her safe. They sympathized in literary tastes till Lady Caroline fell under the evil influence of the "Satanic school," whose manufactured melancholy her husband ridiculed and in seeking the society of literary people. Jerdan describes an evening party winding up with a game at forfeits which he, kneeling blindfold before Lady Caroline, had to cry. Being asked what he would do if an injured ghost assaulted him for wrongs done in the flesh

I was about to reply [he says] when a smart cuff on the head proved that it was no ghost story. I pulled off the silken bandage, and, looking up from his laughing lady's knee, saw William Lamb, just returned from the Commons, and come to take his wife home.

charm for Byron. To win the unconcealed devotion of a woman brilliant and beloved, whose wildest follies had never compromised her before, was a triumph even for the fashionable Apollo whom "the women suffocated."

But it was a triumph of which he speedily tired. "These violent delights have violent ends." Real thunder and lightning soon issued from the atmosphere of artificial gloom both revelled in. Their frantic despairs, vows, jealousies, have been ludicrously likened to the parody on the woes of Mr. and Mrs. Haller:

She, seeing him, screamed, and was carried
out kicking;
While he banged his head 'gainst the oppo
site door.

But the misery brought by this extravagance on her husband and herself was only too genuine Byron, with his mockmadness and callous heart, could pass unscathed through many such entanglements; at the root of Lady Caroline's follies lay the germ of real insanity and the misguided fervor of a loving nature. Byron, in after years, with his customary cynicism, deliberately misstated facts in order somewhat to exonerate his own conduct. He said to Medwin:

Rogers, Moore, and Spencer "were all my lovers," she tells Lady Morgan, "and wrote me up to the skies. I was in the She possessed an infinite vivacity, and an clouds." Moore, devoted to his quiet imagination heated by novel-reading, which Bessy, and Rogers to his cynical bachelor-made her fancy herself a heroine of romance, hood, would have smiled at this assertion. and led her into all sorts of eccentricities. While she was still "the cynosure of She was married, but it was a match of conveworth Dixon "beautiful and deadly as another than she and her husband. neighboring eyes," Byron - called by Hep-nance, and no couple could be more fashionably indifferent to or independent of one nightshade" returned from Italy. The manuscript of "Childe Harold" was lent As regards her actual criminality with to Lady Caroline by Rogers, and she be- Byron, out of their own mouths we might came crazy to see the poet. "He has a indeed judge them guilty; for the exagclub-foot, and bites his nails," said Rogers.gerated self-condemnation in which both "If he is ugly as Esop, I must know so morbidly indulged cannot be forgotten. him," she answered. Lady Westmoreland offered to introduce them at a ball, but with an impulse of aversion Lady Caroline turned away, noting him in her diary as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." She changed her opinion when, on Byron's first call at Melbourne House, he held her sleeping child on his knee for more than an hour, lest by moving he should wake him. For nearly a year his visits were incessant. He had a real regard for Lady Melbourne, whom he called "the best friend he ever had a second mother" yet played at being in love with her daughter-in-law. On Lady Caroline's part it was not play, but lamentable earnest. There was much gratified vanity at first on both sides. Rank and ton had an irresistible

Rogers never suspected of too lenient judgments-though describing how Lady Caroline "absolutely besieged" Byron, offering him in her first letter "all her jewels" if he were in want of money, and whenever practicable going to and from parties in his carriage, or, if he went where she was not invited, waiting in the street for his return declares, in spite of all this absurdity," his firm belief in their innocence. And it has been shrewdly remarked that where so much was on the surface friends did not suspect anything beneath. Nevertheless, a hundred strange stories were current about this strange liaison. When Charles Kemble and his wife visited Paris they met William Lamb and Lady Caroline at a dinner given by

Lord Holland. It had been settled that | need not fear me. I do not pursue pleasthe Lambs were to return to England on ure like other men; I labor under an inthe following day, but a rumor of Byron's curable disease and a blighted heart. probable arrival being mentioned at table, Believe me, she is safe with me." She Lady Caroline created a sensation among was not safe from being raised to the sev the guests by emphatically announcing enth heaven by adulation at one moment, her intention of remaining in Paris. Wil- or sunk to that nethermost hell endured liam Lamb took the matter quietly, as was by "a woman scorned" at the next. She his wont, but it may have had something was not safe from such alternations of to do with the scene which followed. rage, jealousy, and tenderness as shook Both the Lambs and Kembles occupied her ill-balanced mind to its foundations.* rooms in the Hôtel Meurice, and as the Her ostentation of intimacy with Byron carriages which took them home drew up irritated him as much as it angered her at the same time, the latter saw William own family, and led to some outrageous Lamb jump out, lift his wife's girlish fig-scenes. Francis Jackson, in the bright, ure in his arms, and carry her into the vivacious "Bath Archives," writes to his hotel, to avoid the deep gutter dividing brother George on the 3rd of July, 1813: the road from the trottoir. "I," growled Kemble, as he watched this piece of gallantry, "should have put your ladyship in the gutter." On reaching their respective sitting-rooms, which had facing windows, uncurtained and brilliantly lighted, the Kembles saw a curious domestic tableau: Mr. Lamb was seated in an armchair; Lady Caroline had placed herself on his knee; that position not expressing sufficient tenderness and humility, she slid to his feet. But some chance word perhaps turned the tide of her feelings, for when her husband rose, she sprang to her feet, and, rushing round the room, swept down vases, glasses, cups, and saucers all its breakable ornaments in a whirlwind of passion, her husband following and vainly endeavoring to soothe her. In the midst of this tragi-comedy down fell the curtain the window-blind and the finale was left to the spectators' imagination.

-

William Lamb, knowing how evanescent were his wife's fancies, and that a revulsion was inevitable, does not seem to have been much troubled by her Byron-worship.

He cared nothing for my morals [she remarks bitterly in one of her letters]; I might flirt and go about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord Byron, and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness and suffering he deserts me.

Which, being interpreted, probably means that, when she was tolerably reasonable, her husband was happy in her society; but he had not always patience with her rhapsodies. Lady Melbourne, with the perspicacity of a woman of the world, remonstrated with Byron against the growing intimacy, and he replied, in the sublime strain he was fond of assuming: "You VOL. XXIII. 1148

LIVING AGE.

Caroline Lamb, who had been flirting with At Lady Heathcote's ball, last week, Lady Lord Byron, upon some quarrel with him, stabbed herself with a knife at supper, so that the blood flew about her neighbors. She was taken away, and as it was supposed she was faint, a glass of water was brought, when she broke the glass, and struck herself with the pieces. A little discipline will, I suppose, bring these schoolgirl fancies into order.

Fanny Kemble's version of the origin of the quarrel is incredible. "Lady Caroline," she says, "with impertinent disregard of Byron's infirmity, asked him to waltz. He contemptuously replied, ‘I cannot, and you nor any other woman ought not."" Whereupon the impetuous woman rushed into the dressing-room, threw up the window, exclaiming with St. Preux, "La roche est escarpée; l'eau est profonde!" and was about to fling herself out, when a friendly grasp on her petticoats restrained her. She then asked for some water, and, biting a piece out of the glass, endeavored to stab herself with it, but was persuaded to go home to bed. Byron's own history of the affair is thus given by Medwin:

:

I am easily governed by women, and she [Lady Caroline] gained an ascendency over me that I could not easily shake off. I submitted to this thraldom long, for I hate scenes, and am of an indolent disposition, but I was forced to snap the knot rather rudely at last. Like all lovers, we had several quarrels before we came to an open rupture. . . Even during our intimacy, I was not at all constant to this fair one, and she suspected as much. In order to detect my intrigues, she watched me, and earthed a lady into my lodgings-and came herself, terrier-like, in the disguise of a car

*Rogers says: "They frequently had quarrels; and C. walking in the garden [in St. James's Place] waitmore than once, on coming home, I have found Lady ing for me, to beg that I would reconcile them."

man. My valet, who did not see through the | your mother, and the kindness of your conmasquerade, let her in: when, to the despair of Fletcher, she put off the man, and put on the woman. Imagine the scene! It was worthy of Faublas! Her after conduct was unaccountable madness a combination of spite and jealousy. It was perfectly agreed and understood that we were to meet as strangers. We were at a ball, she came up and asked me if she might waltz. I thought it perfectly indifferent whether she waltzed or not, and with whom, and told her so, in different terms, but with much coolness. After she had finished, a scene occurred, which was in the mouths of every one.

tion, sensibility, and thought." "Byron," | to personate "Lady Caroline," while she was the natural reply. "No," she said, herself in boy's clothes sat writing at a "my own husband, William Lamb." Lady distant table as "the author." Next time Morgan called her friend's taste in dress the "man of business" called, he was in"perfect," and Mr. Torrens says "she formed that the boy-novelist, "William dressed as she painted and played, pic- Osmand," was dead, but that Lady Caroturesquely; indifferent to opinion, and line was still resolved the book should be never exactly in the mode." According to published. This masquerade served no Madame d'Arblay, her costume in 1815, purpose, as the identification of the author however "picturesque," was by no means and chief characters - rather encouraged "perfect." than sought to be disguised - constituted its sole claim to a fleeting notoriety. It is stagey and spasmodic, with an involved plot, in which Italians, begums, nuns, gipsies, white boys, sybils, and guilty countesses, whose angel faces are distorted by demon passions, twist and twirl in a bewildering manner. Here and there are gleams of eloquence and feeling run wild, and bits of shrewd self-knowledge.

At Madame de la Tour du Pin's party, I just missed meeting the famous Lady C. L., who had been there to dinner, and whom I saw crossing the Place Royale [Brussels] to the Grand Hôtel, dressed, or rather not dressed, so as to attract universal attention, and authorize every boldness of staring among the military groups constantly parading La Place, for she had one shoulder, half her back, and all her throat and neck displayed, as if at the call of some statuary for modelling a heathen goddess. A slight scarf hung over the other shoulder, and the rest of her attire was of accordant lightness. As her ladyship was not then considered as one apart from being known as an eccentric authoress, this demeanor excited something beyond surprise, and provoked censure upon the whole English nation.

Calantha's motives appeared the very best, but the actions resulting from them were ab surd and exaggerated. Thoughts swift as lightning hurried through her brain-projects seducing, but visionary, crowded upon her view.

Without a curb she followed the im

pulse of her feelings, and those feelings varied with every varying interest and impression.

The one respectable character in the book is "Lord Avondale " (William Lamb), who,

It was from this period that her eccentricities in every direction became more marked and irritating. She had a mis- with an utter contempt for all hypocrisy in chievous page who used to throw detonat-word and act, with a frankness and simplicity ing balls into the fire, for which Lord of character sometimes observed in men of Melbourne scolded Lady Caroline, and the ordinary or the corrupted mind, appeared extraordinary abilities, but never attendant on Lady Caroline scolded the page. One day to the world as he really felt, and never thought when she was playing at ball with him, he nor studied whether such opinion were agreethrew a squib into the fire; she threw the able to his own vanity or the taste of his comball at his head - it drew blood, and he panions, for whom, however, he was at all cried out, “Oh, my lady, you have killed times ready to sacrifice his time, his money, me! She rushed into the hall scream- and all on earth but his honor and integrity. ing, "Oh, God! I have murdered the page!" The report spread like wildfire; people in the street took up the cry, and the "horrible tragedy" at Melbourne House was in everybody's mouth. The family would no longer tolerate such escapades.

Who could tell what scandal she might not bring upon them next? A separation was inevitable. To this William Lamb

He and Calantha fell desperately in love with each other, and, after some misunderstandings,

Lord Avondale sought and won that strange, uncertain being for whom he was about to sacrifice so much. He considered not the

lengthened journey of life, the varied scenes through which they were to pass; where all the qualities in which she was deficient would be so often and so absolutely required- discretion, prudence, firm and steady principle, obedience, humility.

reluctantly agreed. While the deeds were being drawn, Lady Caroline occupied her self with writing "Glenarvon," in which she figured as the heroine Calantha, and Byron as the hero. She says that she wrote the book in a month. When about to dispose of the manuscript, she, with her uncontrollable love of mystification and romance, elegantly dressed her compan- Never did the hand of the sculptor, in the ion, Miss Walsh, and placed her at a harp | full power of his art, produce a form and face

In spite of sundry wild flights on Lady Avondale's part, the young couple have some prospect of happiness, till Glenarvon, "the spirit of evil," appears on the scene.

more finely wrought- -so full of soul, so ever- | The sort of impression she expected varying in expression.

He exerts all his powers to dazzle and beguile Calantha, so successfully that they are twice on the verge of elopement, but the thought of her husband and children keeps her back, and the lovers part, after swearing to be wickedly true to each other, in a scene absurdly reminiscent of the "Veiled Prophet." Calantha's heart is still bleeding from the wounds thus in flicted when she receives, in answer to After Byron had left England, Lady Carseveral tender inquiries, the "cruel letter "oline called once on her cousin, Lady Bywe have already quoted.