The Express.
London, England, 1860-05-24 00:00:00

LONDON, THURSDAY OD:TING, MAY 24, 1800.

LADY NOEL BYRON.
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When the only child of Sir Ralph and Lady
;Milbank was born it would have been considered a
strange prophecy if any seer had told how that in-
fant should be in character simply a good and
Arne woman, without genius or any remarkable in-
tellectual qualities, without ambition or vanity,
and that yet she should twice become an object of
ideep,interest to the English people—her name on
the tongues of millions, and her merits discussed,
unoe with party heat, and again, after a lapse of
Mete than forty years, with the warrqth of well-
retnded popular gratitude. Such, however, has
been the lot of that quiet, beneficent, true-hearted
Englishwoman, Lady Noel Byron. Her life began
with sunshine; then it was shaken by a fearful
skim, which clouded the rest of her life ; but she,
sitting in the shade, sent a multitude into the sun-
shine, and patiently wore away the last two-thirds
at her life in making others happier than she could
be herself.

While everybody assumes to know Lady Byron's
history, none but her intimate friends seem to have
any notion of her character. The chief reason of
this is that Lord Byron gave forth two irreconci-
feeble accounts of it ; one when he first lost her,
andanother when it suited him to set up a case of
inaseapatibility of tamer. The long trod of tins
'orb. which she has passed since his death-Would'
hays settled the matter in all minds if Lady Byron
Vfesired that it should. But she desiied only
• and it is by her benefactions only that the
'e;art of her life has been recognised and will
be remembered.

Her childhood was spent for the most part at
Seaham, in Durham, where Sir Ralph Milbank's
estate was situated. She preserved such love for
the place, up to her later years, that a pebble from
its beach was an acceptable present to her.
She was carefully reared, and, for the time
in which she lived, well educated. Mr. Moore
and Lord Byron could have known but little
of the education of girls at the opening of the cen-
tury, and must have been bad judges of the minds
and manners of sensible women, if they were sin-
cere in their representations of Miss Milbank as a
blue, as a mathematical prude, and so forth. Moore,
who had no vigorous intellectual tastes, might have
been sincere ; and he no doubt was so in the plain-
ness of his avowal that he "never liked her.' Lord
Byron knew better than he pretended. He knew
that she was impulsive, affectionate, natural in her
feelings and manners when he first offered to her ;
and 110110 knew so well as he what she proved
herself to be capable of under trial—how passion-
ately she loved him, and how devoted she would
have been, through good and evil report, if he had
made her companionship possible. When he first
offered to her she was, in her girlishness, evidently
taken by suprise. She refused him, but desired not
to lose him as a friend. When he offered himself
again she knew nothing (how should she t) of
the profligate spirit in which the deed was
done. Moore's account, in his " Life of
Byron," of the way in which the second
proposal was brought about, and the circumstances
under which the letter was despatched, was the first
that most people knew about it. When that book
came out, every one saw how wise and how good
was the silence which the injured woman had pre-
served. Her enemies were then convicted on their
own confession. To say nothing of what the women
of England felt, there was not a man with an
honest heart in his breast who did not burn with
indignation over the shameless narrative of how
the trusting, admiring, and innocent girl whom
the poet had wooed before, was now made sport of
among profligate jesters, and deliberately proposed
as a sacrifice to the bare chemise of the Una a
self-restraint.

What her father was about to permit his child to
enter into such a marriage seems never to have
been explained. The less hie child knew of Byron's
moral entanglements, the more vigilant should her
father have been over her chances of domestic
peace ; and the more generous she was sure to
be about the poverty of her lover, the more
should her parents have taken care that she
should not leave them for a home which was to
tfe'bretai into" by nine or ten executions in the
first year. Never was a young creature led to
the altar more truly as a sacrifice. She was rash,
no doubt, but she loved him ; and who was not,
in the whole business, more rash than she ? At
the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice :
but before sunset of that winter day she knew it,
if a judgment may be formed from her face and
attitude of despair when she alighted from the
carriage on the afternoon of her marriage-day. It
was not the traces of tears which won the sym-
pathy of the old butler who stood at the open
door. The bridegroom jumped out of the carriage
and walked away. The bnde alighted, and came
up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame
agonised and listless with evident horror and despair.
The old servant longed to offer his arm to the
young lovely creature, as an assurance of sympathy
and protection. rom this shock she cer-
tainly rallied, and soon. The pecuniary
difficulties of her new home were exactly
what a devoted spirit like hers was fitted to
encounter. Her husband bore testimony, after
the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more sym-
pathising and agreeable companion, never blessed
any man's home. When he afterwards called her
cold and, mathematical, and over-pious, and so
forth, it was when public opinion had gone against
him, and when he had disoovered that her fidelity
and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, might be
relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his
part good, as far as she was concerned.
Silent she was, even to her own parents, whose
feelings she magnanimously spared. She did not
act rashly in leaving him, though she had been
most rash in marrying him. As long as others
called him insane, she was glad to do so too ; and
when she left him for her father's house she re-
garded him as mad. When Dr. Baillie and other
physicians whose opinions were asked (not by her)
declared him sane, she still abstained from acting
,on her own impulses or judgment. As all the
world knows, the case was submitted, in
an anonymous form, to Dr. Luahington and
Sir Samuel Hominy ; and the unhesitating
decision of these two great lawyers and good men
was that the wife—whoever she might be—must
never see her husband again. When they knew
whose cane it was, they never swerved from their
first judgment, but declared that they would never
aid or countenance Lady Byron's return to her hue-
band. Under the circumstances, the general sym-
pathy was with the wife, to whose wifely merits the
husband had borne such strong testimony at his
most trustworthy moment, and who had herself
preserved so complete a silence under the insult and
contempt with which he afterwards endeavoured to
overwhelm her. If her attachment to him had
been more superficial, or if she had been vain or
egotistical, or weak, or timid, she would have said
something—something which would have let the
public into the privacy of her griefs, and have
broken down, wore or less, the sacred domestic
enclosure. All that was said, however, was said
by him ; and there were always just and generous
people enough to remember that they had only
Byron's story, and that Byron's stories were not apt to
be over and above true. Great wee the disappointment
of such people when there appeared, in 1836, in the
New Monthly Magazine, a sort of disclosure, offered
in the name of Lady Byron. The first obvious re-
mark was that there was no/real disclosure ; and
the whole affair had the appearance of a desire on
the part of Lady Byron to exculpate herself, while
yet no adequate information was iFivett. Many who
had regarded her with favour til then, gave her
up, so far as to believe that feminine weakness had
prevailed at last. But she, on this occasion, gave
another proof of her strength. The whole business
was one of poor Campbell's freaks, He excused
himself by saying it was a mistake of his—that he