"Then my curse upon your mother"s head! May Heaven rain all its plagues upon her! The Hecate!"
We should not have had a Venetia who is truly a delicious emanation from a poet"s mind, and the only woman worthy of becoming the wife of Lord Byron, who sums up in herself all the tenderness which he must have inspired in or felt for a woman, a sister, or a daughter. But we should have had, instead of her, three persons who really existed, and who exercised a great influence over Lord Byron"s life. The one a young lady of eighteen, whom Lord Byron styled light and coquettish, but who really possessed his heart at fifteen years of age; the other his dear Augusta, who was truly a Venetia toward him; and finally, his beloved little Ada, for whom he had such a paternal tenderness. Instead of an elderly Herbert returning to domestic happiness, which would simply have been impossible with the wife whom Fate had chosen for Lord Byron, we should have had a handsome young man who has not waited until he had reached the mature age of Herbert to be adorned with every virtue, in whom reason is not the effect of growing years, whose wisdom is not that of the old; and instead of the pathetic catastrophe which is attributed to Herbert and Cadurcis together, and which really occurred to Sh.e.l.ley, we should have had Lord Byron"s real death, which was infinitely more pathetic, and could have been described in equally beautiful and heartrending language. How sublime would have been the history of the death of that young man who at the age of thirty-four heroically sacrifices his life for the independence of a country which is not his own, and whose patriotism is greater than that of his countrymen, since he prefers the cause of humanity to the interests of the little spot on the globe where he was born!
If, then, instead of a novel, Mr. Disraeli had given us a true history, the work would have been an everlasting monument erected to the memory of two n.o.ble beings, and would have been transmitted to posterity as a valuable testimony of the virtues of Lord Byron.
As the book stands, and written by such a man as Mr. Disraeli, it will ever remain a study worthy of being quoted among those whose object it is to proclaim the truth respecting Lord Byron.
PARIS, _November, 1868_.
THE END.