"This only is the witchcraft I have used."
Lord Byron, who was then only twenty-three years of age, and not married, was flattered, and more than pleased, by this preference shown to him. Although Lady C. L——'s beauty was not particularly attractive to him, and although her character was exactly opposite to the ideal which he had formed of what woman's character should be, yet she contrived to interest him, to captivate him by the power of her love, and in a very short time to persuade him that he loved her.
This sort of love could not last. It was destined to end in a catastrophe. Lady L——'s jealousy was ridiculous. Dressed sometimes as a page, sometimes in another costume, she was wont to follow him by means of these disguises. She quarrelled and played the heroine, etc. Byron, who disliked quarrels of all kinds (and perhaps even the lady herself), besides being intimate with all her family, was too much the sufferer by this conduct not to endeavor to bring her back to a sense of reason and of her duty. He was indulging in the hope that he had succeeded in these endeavors when, at a ball given by Lady Heathcote, Lady L——, after vain efforts to attract Byron's attention, went up to him and asked him whether she might waltz. Byron replied, half-absently, that he saw no reason why she should not; upon which her pride and her passion became so excited that she seized hold of a knife, and feigned to commit suicide. The ball was at once at an end, and all London was soon filled with accounts of this incident. Lady L—— had scarcely recovered from the slight wound she had inflicted on herself, when she wrote to a young peer, and made him all kinds of extravagant promises, if he would consent to call out Byron and kill him. This, however, did not prevent her calling again upon Lord Byron, not, however, says Medwin, with the intention of blowing his brains out; as he was not at home, she wrote on one of his books
"Remember me."
On returning home, Byron read what she had written, and, filled with disgust and indignation, he wrote the famous lines
"Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not,"
and sent her back several of her letters sealed up. "Glenarvon" was her revenge. She painted Byron in fiendish colors, giving herself all the qualities he possessed, so as to appear an angel, and to him all the passions of the "Giaour," of the "Corsair," and of "Childe Harold," so that he might be taken for a demon.
In this novel, the result of revenge, truth asserts its rights, notwithstanding all the contradictions of which the book is full. Thus Lady L—— can not help depicting Byron under some of his real characteristics. She was asked, for instance, what she thought of him, when she met him for the first time after hearing of his great reputation, and she answers, while gazing at the soft loveliness of his smile,—
"What do I think? I think that never did the hand of God imprint upon a human form so lovely, so glorious an expression."
And further she adds:—