But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, "admitted everything in her letters of June, July, and August, 1816"; and then he goes on to say: "It is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter." But when we turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as referring to a confession, if one knew that a confession had been made. Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may, almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the chapter entitled "Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron." The letter[9] in question is a love letter. It begins "My dearest Love" and ends "Ever Dearest." Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his correspondence passed through his sister's hands, in order to satisfy oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron's papers. So that our conclusion must be: 1. That Lord Lovelace's most substantial piece of evidence against Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9] which though it passed through her hands, was really written to Mary Chaworth. 2. That the alleged confession does not exist--for if it did exist, Lord Lovelace would have printed it. And we may go further, and say, with confidence, not only that the alleged confession does not exist at the present time, but that it never did exist; for even that conclusion follows irresistibly from the known circumstances of the final meeting between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, at Reigate, in the presence of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in 1851.