'I speak not--I trace not--I breathe not thy name-- There is Love in the sound--there is Guilt in the fame.'
Lord Lovelace, in his impetuosity, and with very imperfect knowledge of Byron's life-story, ties every doubtful scrap of his grandfather's poetry into his bundle of proofs against Augusta Leigh, without perceiving any discrepancy in the nature of his evidence. A moment's reflection might have convinced him that the lines we have quoted could not, by any possibility, have applied to one whom he subsequently addressed as:
'My sister! my sweet sister! if a name Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
Had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun, I had been better than I now can be; The passions which have torn me would have slept; _I_ had not suffered, and _thou_ hadst not wept.'
It must be admitted that Byron, through indiscreet confidences and reckless mystifications, was partly the cause of the suspicions which afterwards fell upon his sister. Lady Byron has left it on record that Byron early in 1814--before the birth of Medora--told Lady Caroline Lamb that a woman he passionately loved was with child by him, and that if a daughter was born it should be called Medora.[50] At about the same time 'he advanced, at Holland House, the most extraordinary theories about the relations of brother and sister, which originated the reports about Mrs. Leigh.'
That, after ninety years, such nonsense should be regarded as evidence against a woman so well known in the society of her day as was Mrs. Leigh, justifies our concurrence with Lord Lovelace's opinion that 'nothing is too stupid for belief.'
It appears that one day Lady Byron was talking to her husband about 'Lara,' which seemed to her to be 'like the darkness in which one fears to behold spectres.' This bait was evidently too tempting for Byron to resist. He replied: '"Lara"--there's more in _that_ than in any of them.' As he spoke he shuddered, and turned his eyes to the ground.
Before we examine that poem to see how much it may contain of illuminating matter, we will touch upon a remark Byron made to his wife, which Lord Lovelace quotes without perceiving its depth and meaning. We will quote 'Astarte':
'He told Lady Byron that if she had married him when he first proposed, he should not have written any of the poems which followed [the first and second Cantos] "Childe Harold."'