These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have remarked, are all variations on a single theme; and there are many more entries in the same key, which have been left unquoted. They succeed each other, week after week, and almost day after day, for a period of about five months. The story of the events to which they relate has been told, and need not be repeated. One may think of them as the cries attendant on the birth pangs of those aspects of Byron's character and personality which the world knows specifically as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to come to pass--and were to be necessary--before the angry heart could dash itself with its full force against the desolations of the world; but the train was being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung his unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born. Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen coming to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron who was presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists, and make his house their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a "Billy bald-coot," and shake his fist in the faces of the "holy three," already begins to reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks about legitimate kings and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only a case of instinct asserting itself and the imperious need to find something to scoff at following the line of least resistance; but that does not matter. What does matter is that here was a crisis and a turning point in Byron's development, brought about because Mary Chaworth had come back into his life, had passed through it, and had passed out of it again. Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into the story, startling students of Byron's biography with the suggestion that a child was born as the result of the intimacy--that Mrs. Leigh adopted the child and pretended that it was her own--that the child thus secretly born and falsely acknowledged was no other than Medora Leigh, who turned out so badly, and whose alleged autobiography was published by Charles Mackay. Passages can be quoted from the poems--and perhaps also from the letters--which might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a transaction. None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation as an alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe's theory.