The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed, that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period anterior to his marriage--the period covered by the Journal from which we have quoted, and by those mysteriously morbid and gloomy poems of which "The Bride of Abydos" and "Lara" are the most remarkable. This passion, according to Lord Lovelace, was the cause of the spiritual "crisis" through which poems and Journal alike prove him to have passed. When Byron writes that "The Bride" was "written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of * * *," Lord Lovelace interprets him to mean that it was written to drive his thoughts from the recollection of Mrs. Leigh. Hers, he invites us to believe, was the "dear sacred name" which was to "rest ever unrevealed." That theory is not only nonsense, but arrant nonsense--obviously so to readers who are familiar with Byron's letters, and demonstrably so to those who are not. All that can be said in favour of the view is that some of the passages in some of the poems are so obscure that they can be tortured into accord with the most preposterous hypothesis. On the other hand, while there is no direct evidence on the subject at all, there is conclusive circumstantial evidence which effectually disposes of Lord Lovelace's calumnious assertion--evidence, happily, so simple that one almost can sum it up in a sentence. Throughout the whole of the "crisis" in question Byron was in correspondence with Mrs. Leigh; and a great deal of the correspondence has been published. The letters are letters in which Byron takes his sister into his confidence. We find him writing to her, first about his "affairs" with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and then about his desolating passion for another lady whom we have seen reason to identify with Mary Chaworth. Nor does it matter, for the purposes of the present argument, whether that identification is correct or not. The solid fact, in any case, remains that, at the very time when Lord Lovelace represents Byron as engaged in an intrigue with Augusta Leigh, he was, in fact, writing to her to apologise for his "long silence," and attributing that silence to trouble in connection with another lady: "It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; _but perhaps you may guess_, and, if you do, do not tell." There are other letters to the same effect, but that letter should suffice. No sane man will believe Byron to have been devoured by a guilty passion for the woman to whom he confided secrets of that sort; and, if there were any disposition to entertain the belief were still harboured, it could hardly fail to be expelled by an examination of the letters which passed between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and between Mrs. Leigh and Francis Hodgson.