As one might have expected, neither Henrietta Renan nor Dorothy Wordsworth ever married, though the latter is said to have been in love with Coleridge. Charles Lamb, the Gentle Elia, owes probably much of his quality of gentleness to his sister Mary, "Bridget Elia." She appears in his famous essays and they collaborated together in writing poems and tales. His kindness was no doubt enhanced by his pity for her unfortunate fits of insanity and by the fact that in one of these fits she had killed her mother. The love felt for their sisters by Byron and Shelley made the subject of incest a common topic of discussion between them. They went so far as to question whether the law or feeling against marriage between brother and sister was not a convention based on ungrounded prejudice. Byron's love for his sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh, did not create feminine qualities in him. She was to him a sort of refuge from the disappointment of other love affairs, a shelter when public opinion was against him. His poems to her rank among his best. He may have had unconscious incest thoughts in regard to her, and he may have drawn himself as married to her in _Cain_, where she may be Cain's sister Adah. But the accusation that Byron ever indulged in unlawful relationship with his sister is a groundless libel. We have no evidence for it and we have no right to make any assumptions because of misinterpretations put on his work. Between the thought and the deed there is a wide gap. Carlyle once said, the hand is on the trigger, but the man is not a murderer before the trigger is pulled. The story of the reputed incest with his sister was first published by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. The myth was revived again by "documentary" evidence furnished by Lord Lovelace, a descendant of Byron, and published in _Astarte_. A later woman biographer, Ethel C. Mayne, accepts the story. The entire tale is ably demolished by Richard Edggumbe in his _Byron, the Last Phase_, where he applies, without a knowledge of Freud's views, psychoanalytic methods to Byron. Brandes also defended Byron years ago.