It would appear from this that there was a last letter of Lady Byron to her husband, which he did not think proper to keep on hand, or show to the ‘initiated’ with his usual unreserve; that this letter contained some kind of pledge for which he preferred to take her word, without documents.
Each reader can imagine for himself what that pledge might have been; but from the tenor of the three letters we should infer that it was a promise of silence for his lifetime, on certain conditions, and that the publication of the autobiography would violate those conditions, and make it her duty to speak out.
This celebrated autobiography forms so conspicuous a figure in the whole history, that the reader must have a full idea of it, as given by Byron himself, in Vol. IV. Letter 344, to Murray:—
‘I gave to Moore, who is gone to Rome, my life in MS.,—in seventy-eight folio sheets, brought down to 1816 . . . also a journal kept in 1814. Neither are for publication during my life, but when I am cold you may do what you please. In the mean time, if you like to read them you may, and show them to anybody you like. I care not. . . . ’
He tells him also:—
‘You will find in it a detailed account of my marriage and its consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such an account.’
Of the extent to which this autobiography was circulated we have the following testimony of Shelton Mackenzie, in notes to ‘The Noctes’ of June 1824.
In ‘The Noctes’ Odoherty says:—
‘The fact is, the work had been copied for the private reading of a great lady in Florence.’
The note says:—