He kissed and told, and he enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s letters--“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”: She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then remember it is to deceive _un marito_, and to prevent all the unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.” It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him to go on writing to her husband: Again, she desires me to write to _him kindly_, for she believes he cares for nobody but _me_! Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne. Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who declaims--how gloriously!--: The mountains look on Marathon-- And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave. And there is Byron behind the scenes--the Byron who might have been invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the child runs: Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.