Nor did it ring with Byron's, who, indeed, had nothing to complain of. The few allusions to the affair which Hobhouse contributes throw very little light upon it. He notes, in one place, that Lady Oxford was "most uncommon in her talk and licentious." He adds, on another page, the memorandum: "Got a picture of Lady Oxford from Mrs. Mee. Lord B.'s money for it." That is all; and there are no hints to be derived from "occasional" verses. However much Lady Oxford may have pleased Byron, she did not inspire him. The period of his intimacy with her was, from the literary point of view, a singularly barren period; and the allusions cited from the letters--they are all the allusions that can be cited--are chiefly instructive because of the difference between their tone and the tone of certain other letters written very soon afterwards. There is no suggestion in them of deep sentiment. What they do suggest is--first, a young man desperately determined to go through with a desperate adventure, and very much afraid of being warned of the consequences of his folly--then a young man who, having a haunting doubt of his own sincerity, shouts to keep up his courage--finally a young man who is grateful to the circumstances, whatever they may have been, which have deflected him from a rash course, and saved him from himself. One turns a few pages, and finds Byron writing in a very different strain: "I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women." "I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but at present...." "Some day or other, when we are _veterans_, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not tell you now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of attaching itself to _one_, whether I will or no." These passages are from letters to Moore. A few days before writing the last of them Byron had written to Miss Milbanke, whom he was shortly to marry: "I am at present a little feverish--I mean mentally--and, as usual, on the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last, and cut our correspondence short, with everything else."