He had long been suspected and secretly hated by the orthodox in religion and politics. The couple of stanzas in _Childe Harold_ which venture in the most cautious terms to express a doubt that we shall meet our friends again after death, had been greeted with a cry of--heresy! and a whole book, _Anti-Byron_, had been written against them. The two verses to the Princess Charlotte, which, under the title, _Lines to a Lady Weeping_, were appended to the first edition of _The Corsair_, and in which the poet condoles with the daughter on the occasion of her father, the Prince Regent's, desertion of the Liberal side in politics, had set the whole Tory party violently against him. But hitherto he had been protected by his magic influence over men's minds as by an invisible coat of mail. This unfortunate episode in his private life offered a weak point, against which his enemies diverted the full force of public opinion. The life led by Lady Byron and her family was the life on which English public opinion has set the seal of its peculiar approbation; and it was easy to convince the public that the man whom such a wife felt obliged to leave must indeed be a monster. Rumours began to spread; the slanders once conceived and brought forth, developed feet to walk on, wings to fly with, and swelled as they flew. Their voices rose from a whisper to a cry, from a cry to a deafening roar. Who does not know that concerted piece in the production of which baseness and stupidity collaborate, and during the performance of which ignorance sings in chorus with conscious villainy, whilst spite heightens the effect by the contribution of its most piercing trills! Envy in this case entered the service of hypocrisy, and took its wages. Refined hypocrisy was, far on into the nineteenth century--as long, namely, as the period of religious reaction lasted--a social power, the authority of which differed from that of the Inquisitional tribunals of the sixteenth century only in the means it employed, not in the reach and efficacy of these means. It wrought through public opinion, and public opinion had become what Byron calls it in _Childe Harold_, "an omnipotence,--whose veil Mantles the earth with darkness, until right And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale Lest their own judgments should become too bright, And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light." As for hypocrisy, he felt incapable of doing justice to it unaided. "Oh for a forty-parson power!" he cries in _Don Juan_:-- "Oh for a _forty-parson power_ to chant Thy praise, Hypocrisy! Oh for a hymn Loud as the virtues thou dost loudly vaunt, Not practise! Oh for trump of cherubim!"