But if it is clear that Byron was not an interested, it is equally clear that he was not a passionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon after the emotional stress through which we have seen him passing; and the proofs that he was not are conclusive. The most conclusive proof of all is that at the time when he proposed, by letter, to Miss Milbanke, he had not seen her, or made any attempt to see her, for ten months, and that, though he had, during those ten months, been corresponding with her, he had also, during those ten months, been pursuing sentimental adventures with which she had nothing to do. It was, as we have already seen, during those ten months that the renewed relations with Mary Chaworth were broken off; and when, after the close of those renewed relations, Byron's thoughts turned to marriage, it was not Miss Milbanke whom he first thought of marrying. The desire to marry, in short, had only been a particular emotion with Byron when there was a possibility of marrying Mary Chaworth. Thereafter it was only a general emotion--a desire for an "escape from life," and a domestic refuge from the storms which threatened shipwreck. He was tired of the struggle, and here was a prospect of rest. A little more than three months before his proposal to Miss Milbanke he was thinking of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes--ready to marry her, as he wrote to Moore, "with the same indifference which has frozen over the 'Black Sea' of all my passions." A fortnight later--almost to a day three months before the proposal--he writes again to Moore: "I _could_ be very sentimental now, but I won't. The truth is, that I have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet quite succeeded--though there are great hopes--and you do not know how it has sunk with your departure." Byron assuredly was not in love with Miss Milbanke when he wrote that; and he had no opportunity of falling in love with her in the course of the next three months, for he did not even see her. None the less he made up his mind to ask her to marry him--as an alternative to departing on a long foreign tour; and it is from Hobhouse's lately published narrative that we can best see how he was led, or lured, to that decision. Byron had first met Miss Milbanke at the time when Lady Caroline Lamb was throwing herself at his head. Lady Caroline had shown him some verses which Miss Milbanke had written, and he had said that he considered them rather good--possibly because he thought so, but more probably because he wished to be polite. Soon afterwards, he had been presented to her, and had made her a first proposal of marriage, which she had declined.