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Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who suffered most. The Countess Guiccioli, it seems, was the only woman who comprehended his nature sufficiently to lead him in the direction of peace and poise.
This was in 1822, when Byron was in his thirty-fifth year. He never returned to Italy, but died in the historic land for which he gave his life as truly as if he had fallen upon the field of battle. Teresa Guiccioli had been, in all but name, his wife for just three years.
She was no Countess Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and exercise an indirect power for good on a capricious lover.
We have this on the testimony of the Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington and others. Byron himself made the mistake of referring to it several times in his verse, and doubtless all the torture he had suffered through ill-considered medical counsel, and his mother's taunts, caused the matter to take a place in his sensitive mind quite out of its due proportion.
Of the Hunts he may have had enough; but the invidious statement about La Guiccioli has no foundation, other than a somewhat random remark of Shelley, and the fact that he left her nothing in his will.
The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820, during which period he made the acquaintance of the Countess Guiccioli, whom he persuaded to leave her husband. It was about this time that he received a visit from Moore, to whom he confided his MS. autobiography, which Moore, in the exercise of the discretion left to him, burned in 1824.
His laurels had for some time ceased to flourish, the sear and yellow, the mildew and decay, had fallen upon them, and he was aware that the bright round of his fame was ovalling from the full and showing the dim rough edge of waning. He was, moreover, tired of the Guiccioli, and again afflicted with a desire for some new object with which to be in earnest.
Both her wisdom and her want of wisdom were on the side of her feelings, in which there was doubtless mingled a good deal of the self-love natural to a flattered beauty. . . . In a word, Madame Guiccioli was a kind of buxom parlour-boarder, compressing herself artificially into dignity and elegance, and fancying she walked, in the eyes of the whole world, a heroine by the side of a poet.
The palace was certainly pleasanter than his gloomy house in the Strada di Porta Sisi, and the society of the Countess Guiccioli was rather a stimulus than otherwise to his literary activity.
Hear me, then, while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my course in relation to it. "A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the 'Blackwood' of July, 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of criminals, and recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public as interesting from the very fact that it was the avowed production of Lord Byron's mistress.
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