But the voice of rumor and scandal was not silent. All the failings of Byron were now exaggerated and dwelt upon by those who envied him, and by those who hated him,--for his enemies were more numerous than his friends. Those whom he had snubbed or ridiculed or insulted now openly turned against him. The conventional public had a rare subject for their abuse or indignation. Proper people, religious people, and commonplace people, joined in the cry against a man with whom a virtuous woman could not live. Indeed, no woman could have lived happily with Byron; and very few were the women with whom he could have lived happily, by reason of that irritability and unrest which is so common with genius. The habits of abstraction and contemplation which absorbed much of his time at home were not easily understood by an ordinary woman, to whom social life is necessary. Byron lived much in his library, which was his solitary luxury. In the revelry of the imagination his heart became cold. "To follow poetry," says Pope, "one must leave father and mother, and cleave to it alone,"--as Dante and Petrarch and Milton did. Not even Byron's intense craving for affection could be satisfied when he was dwelling on the ideals which his imagination created, and which scarcely friendship could satisfy. Even so good a man as Carlyle lived among his books rather than in the society of his wife, whom he really loved, and whose virtues and attainments he appreciated and admired. An affectionate woman runs a great risk in marrying an absorbed and preoccupied man of genius, even if his character be reproachless. Unfortunately, the character of Byron was anything but reproachless, and no one knew this better than his wife, which knowledge doubtless alienated what little affection she had for him. He seems to have sought low company even after his marriage, and Lady Byron has intimated that she did not think him altogether sane. Living with him as his wife was insupportable; but though she separated from him, she did not seek a divorce. Byron would not have married at all if he had consulted his happiness, and still more his fame. "In reviewing the great names of philosophy and science, we shall find that those who have most distinguished themselves have virtually admitted their own unfitness for the marriage tie by remaining in celibacy,--Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, and a host of others."