The shocks were the more violent because Byron, in the midst of his pecuniary embarrassments and theatrical philanderings, was attacked by a disorder of the liver. No man is at his best when his liver is sluggish; and Byron probably was at his worst--gloomy, contentious, and prone to uncontrollable outbursts of passion. So there were scenes--the sort of scenes that one would expect: Lady Byron, on the one hand, coldly and reasonably reproachful--"always in the right," and most careful not to lose her temper; Byron, on the other hand, talking to provoke her, boasting of abandoned wickedness, falling into fits of rage, much as his own mother had been wont to do when she rattled the fire-irons--throwing his watch on the ground and smashing it to pieces with the poker. Very likely he was angry with Lady Byron because he did not love her--irritated beyond measure at every fresh revelation that she could never be to him what Mary Chaworth might have been. The beginning of unhappiness in marriage must often come like that. It is not unnatural, though it is unreasonable, and not to be combated by reason. Lady Byron, unhappily, had no other weapon than reason with which to combat it; and it is quite likely that her very reasonableness made the trouble worse. It did, at any rate, pass from bad to worse--and then from worse to worst--during the critical days of her confinement, at the end of 1815. Those were the circumstances which paved the way for open war and the demand for judicial separation. Or, at all events, those were some of the circumstances; for the story is long, and intricate, and involved, and darkened with the clouds of controversy. Byron's version of it, it is needless to say, is quite different from Lady Byron's. According to him the causes of the separation were "too simple to be easily found out." According to her, they included an enormity of which he dared not speak; and the clash of these conflicting allegations constitutes what has been called "the Byron mystery." Perhaps it is not possible to solve the whole of that mystery even now. New evidence, however, has lately been adduced, on the one hand in Hobhouse's Diary and Narrative, and on the other hand from Lady Byron's correspondence, printed by the late Earl of Lovelace in "Astarte." By sifting it, we may at least contrive to come nearer to the truth--to put, as it were, a ring fence round the mystery--to distinguish the assertions which have been proved from the assertions which have been disproved, and to reduce within narrow limits the fragment of the mystery which, until more conclusive documents are produced, must still remain mysterious.