I was glad to hear Miss Baillie, who is an intimate friend of Lady Byron, speak of her with tender reverence, and of her conjugal infelicity as not at all the result of any quality or deficiency on her part, but inevitable.[1] Strange this is not the universal impression, after Byron's own declaration to Moore that "there never was a better or even a brighter, a kinder or a more amiable and agreeable bang than Lady B."
After lunch we walked over to a villa occupied by Miss Baillie's nephew, the only son of Dr. Baillie. It commands a view almost as beautiful and as English as that from Richmond Hill; a view extending far—far over wide valleys and gently-swelling hills, all standing thick with corn. Returning, we went to a point on Hampstead Hill overlooking the pretty "vale of 'ealth," as our coachman calls it, and which has been to us the vale of hospitality and roost homelike welcome. This elevation, Miss B. told me, was equal to that of the ball on the dome of St Paul's. We could just discern the dome penetrating far into the canopy of smoke that overhangs all London. Miss B. says Scott delighted in
- ↑ I should not have presumed, by a public mention of Lady Byron, to have penetrated the intrenchments of feminine delicacy and reserve which she has with such dignity maintained, but for the desire, as far as in my humble sphere I might do it, to correct the impression so prevailing among the readers of Moore's biography in this country, that Lady B. is one of those most unlovely of women who, finding it very easy to preserve a perpendicular line, have no sufferance for the deviations of others, no aptitude, no flexibility. How different this image from the tender, compassionate, lovable reality! the devoted mother, the trusted friend, the benefactress of poor children.
