The last illness began towards the end of 1827. William Lamb, when he heard of it, hurried to his wife's side; devoted to her, and eager to humour her, in spite of everything, to the last. She was "able to converse with him and enjoy his society," and he found her "calm, patient, and affectionate." She died of dropsy on January 28, 1828; and William Lamb published an article consecrated to her memory in the _Literary Gazette_ in the course of the following month. One gathers from it, reading between the lines, not only that he forgave, but that he understood. Hopes, he admitted, had been drawn from her early years which "her maturity was not destined to realise"; but he concluded: "Her manners, though somewhat eccentric, and apparently, not really, affected, had a fascination which it is difficult for any who never encountered their effect to conceive." All this, however, though not irrelevant, is taking us a long way from Byron, to whom it is now time to return. CHAPTER XIII LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER Byron's separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of Lady Bessborough. "Received a note from Lady Bessborough. Went to Byron, who agrees to go out of town," is the entry in his Diary which reveals the part he played. A further entry relating that Lady Caroline found him and Lady Bessborough together, and charged them with looking like conspirators, adds all the confirmation needed. Byron went out of town as he had promised, stayed at Cheltenham, and presently wrote the letter in which he told Lady Caroline that he had ceased to love her. He added insult to injury, as Lady Caroline felt, by writing on notepaper bearing the arms of the Countess of Oxford. She and Lady Oxford knew each other rather well, and had been friends. "Lady Oxford and Caroline William Lamb," we read in one of the letters of Harriet Lady Granville, "have been engaged in a correspondence, the subject whether learning Greek purifies or inflames the passions." The right answer to the conundrum is, perhaps, that it depends upon the learner--or else that it depends upon the teacher. Lady Oxford's passions, at any rate, were, like Lady Caroline's, inflammable. She was forty--the romantic age in the view of the philosophers; and she was unhappily married. Byron spoke of her to Medwin as "sacrificed, almost before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible." A less prejudiced witness, Uvedale Price, wrote to Rogers, at the time of her death: "There could not, in all respects, be a more ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of the cruel sports of Venus or, rather, of Hymen."