'A real reformation, according to Christian ideals, would not merely have driven Byron and Augusta apart from each other, but expelled them from the world of wickedness, consigned them for the rest of their lives to strict expiation and holiness. But this could never be; and in the long-run her flight to an outcast life would have been a lesser evil than the consequences of preventing it. The fall of Mrs. Leigh would have been a definite catastrophe, affecting a small number of people for a time in a startling manner. The disaster would have been obvious, but partial, immediately over and ended.... She would have lived in open revolt against the Christian standard, not in secret disobedience and unrepentant hypocrisy.' Poor Mrs. Leigh! and was it so bad as all that? Had she committed incest with her brother after the separation of 1816? Did she follow Byron abroad 'in the dress of a page,' as stated by some lying chronicler from the banks of the Lake of Geneva? Did Byron come to England in secret at some period between 1816 and 1824? If not, what on earth is the meaning of this mysterious homily? Does Lord Lovelace, in the book that survives him, wish the world to believe that Lady Byron prevented Augusta from deserting her husband and children, and flying into Byron's arms in a 'far countree'? If that was the author's intention, he has signally failed. There never was a moment, since the trip abroad was abandoned in 1813, when Augusta had the mind to join her brother in his travels. There is not a hint of any such wish in any document published up to the present time. Augusta, who was undoubtedly innocent, had suffered enough from the lying reports that had been spread about town by Lady Caroline Lamb, ever to wish for another dose of scandal. If the Lovelace papers contain any hint of that nature, the author of 'Astarte' would most assuredly have set it forth in Double Pica. It is a baseless calumny. In Lord Lovelace's opinion, 'judged by the light of nature, a heroism and sincerity of united fates and doom would have seemed, beyond all comparison, purer and nobler than what they actually drifted into. By the social code, sin between man and woman can never be blotted out, as assuredly it is the most irreversible of facts. Nevertheless, societies secretly respect, though they excommunicate, those rebel lovers who sacrifice everything else, but observe a law of their own, and make a religion out of sin itself, by living it through with constancy.'