Viewed as a contribution to the debate, the speech does more credit to the speaker's heart than to his head. The appeal for pity for misguided, labouring men is mixed up with a denunciation of labour-saving appliances as devices for the further impoverishment of the poor. An economist might say a good deal about that if this were the place for saying it. Byron, such a one would point out, was a Radical by instinct, but a Radical who had as yet but an imperfect comprehension of the natural laws most favourable to the production, distribution, and exchange of wealth. But let that pass. The most resounding note of the speech is, after all, the note of the new man presenting himself, and explaining who he is, and what he has done: "I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsular, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces in Turkey; but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness," &c. &c. &c. That, in the days in which travel was really travel, involving adventure and bestowing unique experience, was the sort of utterance to draw attention. Byron had actually been to the places which other people only talked and read about; and he was no bronzed, maimed, or wrinkled veteran, but a youth with curling hair, a marble brow, a pallid face, a godlike aspect. What havoc must he not have wrought in harems, and in the hearts of odalisques! He was so young, so handsome, so clever--and, according to his own account, so wicked. And he had written a poem, it appeared--a poem as wicked and beautiful as himself, explaining, with all kinds of delightful details, the shocking courses into which he had been driven by disappointed love. However much poetry one left unread, one must read that poem, and read it at once, in order to show that one was "in the movement." So the women argued. It did not matter to them that Byron lacked the graces of the natural orator, and declaimed his sentiments in a monotonous sing-song tone, like a public schoolboy on a speech-day. It mattered still less to them whether his economics were sound or shaky. Sympathy, not argument, was what they wanted, and the sympathy was there. Byron would be some one to lionise--some one, it might be, to love--some one, at any rate, whom every woman must try to understand. And the first step towards understanding him must be to read his book.