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She never returned to her husband.

What the trouble was no one ever knew, although the gossips named a hundred and one reasons–running from drunkenness to homicide. But Byron, the world now knows, was no drunkard–he was at times convivial, but he had no fixed taste for strong drink. He was, however, peevish, impulsive, impetuous and often very unreasonable.

Byron, be it said to his credit, brought no recriminating charges against his wife. He only said their differences were inexplicable and unexplainable.

The simple facts were that they breathed a different atmosphere–their heads were in a different stratum. His normal pulse was eighty; hers, sixty-five.

What do you think of a spiritual companionship where the wife demands, “How much longer are you going to follow this foolish habit of writing verses?”

They did not understand each other. Byron uttered words that no man should voice to a woman, and his outbursts were met with a forced calmness that was exasperating. The lady sat down, yawned wearily, and when there came a lull in the gentleman’s verbal pyrotechnics, she would ask him if he had anything more to say.

One day she varied the program by packing up her effects and leaving him.

Of course, it is easy to say that had this woman been wise she would have stood the childish outbursts and endured the peevish tantrums, for the sake of the hours of tenderness and love that were sure to follow. By right treatment he would have been on his knees, begging forgiveness and crying it out with his head in her lap very shortly. But all this implies a woman of unusual power–extraordinary patience. And this woman was simply human. She left, and then in order to justify her action she gave reasons. Our actions are usually right, but our reasons for them seldom are.

Mrs. Byron made no concealment of her troubles. Society had occasion for gossip and the occasion was improved. Stories of Byron’s cruelty and inhumanity filled the coffeehouses and drawing-rooms; and the hints at crimes so grave they could not even be mentioned gave the gossips their cue.

The press took it up, and the poet was warned by his friends not to appear at the theater or upon the street for fear of the indignation of the mob. The spoilt child of London was paying the penalty of popularity. The pendulum had swung too far and was now coming back.

Byron, hunted by creditors, hooted by enemies, broken in health, crushed in spirit, left the country–left England, never to return alive.

When Byron trod the deck of the good ship bound for Ostend, and saw a strip of tossing, blue water separating him from England, his spirits rose. He was twenty-eight years old, and the thought that he would yet do something and be somebody was strong in his heart. All the old pride came back.

The idea that he would not sell the product of his brain for hire was abandoned, and soon after arriving in Holland he began to write letters home, making sharp bargains with publishers.

Further than this, his attorneys, on his order, made demand for a share of his wife’s estate. And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness. He was making money, and had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a conservative and written a book on “Getting on in the World, or Success as I Have Found It.”

Byron’s pilgrimage down through Germany, along the Rhine to Switzerland, was one of rest and recreation. At Berne, Basle, Lausanne and Geneva he found food for literary thought, and many instances in his writings show the reflected scenes he saw. No visitor at Lausanne fails to visit the Castle of Chillon, and all the guides will recite you these sweeping lines, so surcharged with feeling, beginning:

“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its many waters meet and flow.”