This gives us, of course, the point of view of the populace--or perhaps one should say of the middle classes. They, it is evident, knew nothing of any specially gross or unspeakable charges against Byron, but were satisfied to turn the hose of virtuous indignation on him because, instead of managing Drury Lane in the sole interest of dramatic art, he had availed himself of opportunities and yielded to temptations. And so no doubt he had, though not exactly in such circumstances as the populace supposed or in connection with the particular lady whose guilt the populace had hastily assumed. The popular indictment, indeed, included at least three glaring errors of fact. In the first place the partner of Byron's latest passion (if passion be the word) was not Mrs. Mardyn, but Miss Jane Clairmont. In the second place his relations with Miss Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with his separation from Lady Byron, because he did not make Miss Clairmont's acquaintance until after Lady Byron had left him. In the third place it was not Byron who pursued Miss Clairmont with his attentions, but Miss Clairmont who threw herself at Byron's head. Jane Clairmont was, as is well known, sister by affinity to Mary Godwin who was then living with Shelley and was afterwards married to him. She had accompanied Shelley and Mary on their first trip to Switzerland in 1814, and had subsequently stayed with them in various lodgings. In the impending summer she was to go to Switzerland with them again, and Byron was to meet her there, whether accidentally or on purpose. In the early biographies, indeed, the meeting figures as accidental; but the later biographers knew better, and the complete story can be pieced together from a bundle of letters included in the Murray MSS., and the statement which Miss Clairmont herself made in her old age to Mr. William Graham, who travelled all the way to Florence to see her, and, after her death, reported her conversations in the _Nineteenth Century_. "When I was a very young girl," Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, "Byron was the rage." She spoke of the "troubling morbid obsession" which he exercised "over the youth of England of both sexes," and insisted that the girls in particular "made simple idiots of themselves about him"; and then she went on to describe how one girl did so: