If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible, like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day. The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light, even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron, like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters; “anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed, the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any civility”--in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the room (“I am this moment interrupted by the _Marito_, and write this before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances--at least, that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron _was_, in many of his relations, heartless.