In the fifth canto, written in 1820, after the ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ we find Byron once more in a confidential mood:
‘I have a passion for the name of “Mary,”
For once it was a magic sound to me;
And still it half calls up the realms of Fairy,
Where I beheld what never was to be;
All feelings changed, but this was last to vary
A spell from which even yet I am not quite free.’
And there is a sigh for Mary Chaworth in the following lines:
‘To pay my court, I
Gave what I had—a heart; as the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.
’Twas the boy’s mite, and like the widow’s may
Perhaps be weighed hereafter, if not now;
But whether such things do or do not weigh,
All who have loved, or love, will still allow
Life has naught like it.’
Early in 1823, little more than a year before his death, Byron refers to ‘the fair most fatal Juan ever met.’ Under the name of the Lady Adeline, this most fatal fair one is introduced to the reader:
‘Although she was not evil nor meant ill,
Both Destiny and Passion spread the net
And caught them.’
‘Chaste she was, to Detraction’s desperation,
And wedded unto one she had loved well.’
‘The World could tell
Nought against either, and both seemed secure—
She in her virtue, he in his hauteur.’
Here we have a minute description of Newstead Abbey, the home of the ‘noble pair,’ where Juan came as a visitor:
‘What I throw off is ideal—
Lowered, leavened, like a history of Freemasons,
Which bears the same relation to the real
As Captain Parry’s Voyage may do to Jason’s.
The grand Arcanum’s not for men to see all;
My music has some mystic diapasons;
And there is much which could not be appreciated
In any manner by the uninitiated.’
Adeline, we are told, came out at sixteen:
‘At eighteen, though below her feet still panted
A Hecatomb of suitors with devotion,
She had consented to create again
That Adam called “The happiest of Men.”’