Perhaps Aurora Raby may have been drawn from his recollection of Miss Mercer Elphinstone, who afterwards married Auguste Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie, one of Napoleon's Aides-de-Camp, then an exile in England. This young lady was particularly gracious to Byron at Lady Jersey's party, when others gave him a cold reception. We wonder how matters would have shaped themselves if she had accepted the proposal of marriage which Byron made to her in 1814! But it was not to be. That charming woman passed out of his orbit, and as he waited upon the shore, gazing at the dim outline of the coast of France, the curtain fell upon the first phase of Byron's existence. The Pilgrim of Eternity stood on the threshold of a new life: 'Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 'Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon's verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lashed from the foam of Ages.' And after eight years of exile, in his 'Last Words on Greece,' written in those closing days at Missolonghi, with the shadow of Death upon him, his mind reverts to one whom, in 1816, he had called 'Soul of my thought': 'What are to me those honours or renown Past or to come, a new-born people's cry? Albeit for such I could despise a crown Of aught save laurel, or for such could die. I am a fool of passion, and a frown Of thine to me is as an adder's eye-- To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering down Wafts unto death the breast it bore so high-- Such is this maddening fascination grown, So strong thy magic or so weak am I.' 'The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; the worm, The canker, and the grief, are mine alone!' PART III 'ASTARTE' 'The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.' SHAKESPEARE: _Julius Cæsar_. CHAPTER I From the moment when Lord Byron left England until the hour of his death, the question of his separation from his wife was never long out of his thoughts. He was remarkably communicative on the subject, and spoke of it constantly, not only to Madame de Staël, Hobhouse, Lady Blessington, and Trelawny, but, as we have seen, even in casual conversation with comparative strangers. There is no doubt that he felt himself aggrieved, and bitterly resented a verdict which he knew to be unjust. In a pamphlet which was subsequently suppressed, written while he was at Ravenna, Byron sums up his own case. In justice to one who can no longer plead his own cause, we feel bound to transcribe a portion of his reply to strictures on his matrimonial conduct, which appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_: