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If this be not so, how comes it to pass, that women of tainted reputations find the same countenance and reception in all public places, with those of the nicest virtue, who pay, and receive visits from them without any manner of scruple? which proceeding, as it is not very old among us, so I take it to be of most pernicious consequence: It looks like a sort of compounding between virtue and vice, as if a woman were allowed to be vicious, provided she be not a profligate; as if there were a certain point, where gallantry ends, and infamy begins, or that a hundred criminal amours were not as pardonable as half a score.
"Well," it may be said, "and what of all this, because some Justices and Parsons are profligate, debauched, and abandoned, would you infer that to be any justification or palliation for your errors?" Not in the least. I do not wish to assume any such ridiculous proposition.
The women frequently were placed in embarrassing positions. In marriage they were not always equally yoked. When the husband was a persecutor, faithfulness in the house and fidelity to Jesus required the highest wisdom on the part of the wife. Lady Anne Rothes occupied such a home. Both she and her husband were born Covenanters. He became a profligate and persecutor.
Sir Peel was represented as pleading his own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket."
Think of the predicament in which you would have me stand of the defence which you place, in my lips. Should your tenantry ask me 'why are you thus cruel and oppressive-upon us? what reply could I make but this 'I am thus cruel because his lordship is profligate.
Lord Dunroe, having no strength of character to check his profligate impulses, was, in the course of some years, thrown off by all his high connections, and reduced to great indigence. Norton's notion of his character was correct. The society of that treacherous sharper was necessary to him, and in some time after they were reconciled.
What, my lords, can a drunkard or a profligate be supposed to wish, but that the law may still remain in its present state, that he may still be pursued in a track by which he knows how to escape, and opposed by restraints which he is able to break?
It is this proud and ridiculous principle which consigns youth, and beauty, and innocence, to the arms of some dissipated profligate of rank, merely because he happens to inherit a title which he disgraces. There is, we would wager, scarcely an individual who knows the world, but is acquainted with some family laboring under this insane anxiety for connection.
By his fellow-labourers and associates in the work of spreading the gospel, Staples of Meath and Bale of Ossory, he was denounced as a heretic, an avaricious dissembler, a drunkard, and a profligate, who preached only two sermons with which the people became so familiar that they knew what to expect once he had announced his text.
It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate, and sometimes moral but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as if the eagle were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl were seen soaring to the mid-day sun.
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