Byron."
This strength of mind he only found a month afterward, and then he wrote to him:—
"I have not answered your letter for a time, and at present the reply to it might extend to such a length that I shall delay it till it can be made in person, and then I will shorten it as much as I can. I am at war with all the world and my wife, or, rather, all the world and my wife are at war with me, and have not yet crushed me, and shall not crush me, whatever they may do. I don't know that in the course of a hair-breadth existence I was ever, at home or abroad, in a situation so completely uprooted of present pleasure, or rational hope for the future, as this time. I say this because I think so, and feel it. But I shall not sink under it the more for that mode of considering the question. I have made up my mind.
"By the way, however, you must not believe all you hear on the subject; but don't attempt to defend me. If you succeeded in that it would be a mortal, or an immortal, offense. Who can bear refutation?"[141]
And, after having spoken of his wife's family, he concludes in these terms:—
"Those who know what is going on say that the mysterious cause of our domestic misunderstandings is a Mrs. C——, now a kind of house-keeper and spy of Lady N——, who was a washer-woman in former days."
Swayed by this idea, he went so far then in his generosity as to exonerate his wife, and accuse himself; whereupon Moore answered that, "after all, his misfortunes lay in the choice he had made of a wife, which he (Moore) had never approved."
Lord Byron hastened to reply that he was wrong, and that Lady Byron's conduct while with him had not deserved the smallest reproach, giving her, at the same time, great praise. But this answer, which, according to Moore, forces admiration for the generous candor of him who wrote it while adding to the sadness and strangeness of the whole affair—this answer, of such extraordinary generosity, will better find its place elsewhere. It contains expressions that show his real state of soul under the cruel circumstances:—
"I have to battle with all kinds of unpleasantness, including private and pecuniary difficulties, etc.
" ...It is nothing to bear the privations of adversity, or, more properly, ill-fortune, but my pride recoils from its indignities. However, I have no quarrel with that same pride, which will, I think, be my buckler through every thing. If my heart could have been broken it would have been so years ago, and by events more afflicting than these.... Do you remember the lines I sent you early last year? I don't wish to claim the character of 'Vates' the prophet, but were they not a little prophetic? I mean those beginning: 'There's not a joy the world can,' etc. They were the truest, though the most melancholy, I ever wrote."