:—
"But one thing want these banks of Rhine,
Thy gentle hand to clasp in mine."
To her he was writing a letter at Missolonghi (February 23, 1824), which he did not live to finish, "My dearest Augusta, I received a few days ago your and Lady Byron's report of Ada's health." He carried with him everywhere the pocket Bible which she had given him. "I have a Bible," he told Dr. Kennedy (
Conversations
), "which my sister gave me, who is an excellent woman, and I read it very often." His last articulate words were "My sister — my child." Several volumes of Mrs. Leigh's commonplace books are in existence, filled with extracts mostly on religious topics. She was, wrote the late Earl Stanhope, in a letter quoted in the
Quarterly Review
(October, 1869, p. 421), "very fond" of talking about Byron. "She was," he continues, "extremely unprepossessing in her person and appearance — more like a nun than anything, and never can have had the least pretension to beauty. I thought her shy and sensitive to a fault in her mind and character." Frances, Lady Shelley, who died in January, 1873, and was intimately acquainted with Byron and his contemporaries, speaks of her as a "Dowdy-Goody."
"I have seen," she writes[A] , "a great deal of Mrs. Leigh (Augusta), having passed some days with her and Colonel Leigh, for my husband's shooting near Newmarket, when Lord Byron was in the house, and, as she told me, was writing The Corsair, to my great astonishment, for it was a wretched small house, full of her ill-trained children, who were always running up and down stairs, and going into 'uncle's' bedroom, where he remained all the morning."
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