Lady Byron Vindicated | Page 2

that hard duty
of making these disclosures, which it appears to me ought to have been
made by others.
I claim that these facts were given to me unguarded by any promise or
seal of secrecy, expressed or implied; that they were lodged with me as
one sister rests her story with another for sympathy, for counsel, for
defence. Never did I suppose the day would come that I should be
subjected to so cruel an anguish as this use of them has been to me.
Never did I suppose that,--when those kind hands, that had shed
nothing but blessings, were lying in the helplessness of death, when
that gentle heart, so sorely tried and to the last so full of love, was lying
cold in the tomb,--a countryman in England could be found to cast the
foulest slanders on her grave, and not one in all England to raise an
effective voice in her defence.
I admit the feebleness of my plea, in point of execution. It was written
in a state of exhausted health, when no labour of the kind was safe for
me,--when my hand had not strength to hold the pen, and I was forced
to dictate to another.
I have been told that I have no reason to congratulate myself on it as a
literary effort. O my brothers and sisters! is there then nothing in the
world to think of but literary efforts? I ask any man with a heart in his
bosom, if he had been obliged to tell a story so cruel, because his
mother's grave gave no rest from slander,--I ask any woman who had
been forced to such a disclosure to free a dead sister's name from
grossest insults, whether she would have thought of making this work
of bitterness a literary success?
Are the cries of the oppressed, the gasps of the dying, the last prayers
of mothers,--are any words wrung like drops of blood from the human

heart to be judged as literary efforts?
My fellow-countrymen of America, men of the press, I have done you
one act of justice,--of all your bitter articles, I have read not one. I shall
never be troubled in the future time by the remembrance of any unkind
word you have said of me, for at this moment I recollect not one. I had
such faith in you, such pride in my countrymen, as men with whom,
above all others, the cause of woman was safe and sacred, that I was at
first astonished and incredulous at what I heard of the course of the
American press, and was silent, not merely from the impossibility of
being heard, but from grief and shame. But reflection convinces me that
you were, in many cases, acting from a misunderstanding of facts and
through misguided honourable feeling; and I still feel courage,
therefore, to ask from you a fair hearing. Now, as I have done you this
justice, will you also do me the justice to hear me seriously and
candidly?
What interest have you or I, my brother and my sister, in this short life
of ours, to utter anything but the truth? Is not truth between man and
man and between man and woman the foundation on which all things
rest? Have you not, every individual of you, who must hereafter give an
account yourself alone to God, an interest to know the exact truth in
this matter, and a duty to perform as respects that truth? Hear me, then,
while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my course
in relation to it.
A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the
'Blackwood' of July 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of
criminals, and recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public
as interesting from the very fact that it was the avowed production of
Lord Byron's mistress. No efficient protest was made against this
outrage in England, and Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the 'Blackwood'
article, and the Harpers, the largest publishing house in America,
perhaps in the world, re-published the book.
Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and
other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the young
reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them advertised

in dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and thus the
generation of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron but by
these fables of her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The friends
who knew her personally were a small select circle in England, whom
death is every day reducing. They were few in number compared with
the great world, and were silent. I saw these foul slanders crystallising
into history uncontradicted by friends who knew her personally, who,
firm in