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companion and I stood, of the gentleman engaged for me and the possessor of the manuscripts. The latter was an unprepossessing fellow, grey of hair and slight of frame, a gold ring in his left ear the only mark of the adventurer about him. I can say nothing more about this personage, who after passing to my friend a shabby portmanteau, the contents of which he permitted to be but briefly examined, rose from his seat, and disappeared into the throng. I have never seen him more, nor heard further of his fate.
    When I had been assured of the nature of the manuscripts, insofar as my friend was able to ascertain it, I agreed to the payment; and under circumstances dictated by the possessor—again involving a public place, and anonymity—that portmanteau or carpet-bag was acquired on my behalf. I am assured that the sum which that day changed hands was put to the promised uses, but of that also I can furnish no further details. When the bag was later delivered to me, I found inside, wrapped in oiled parchment, the novel upon which you, gentle Reader, in whose existence I shall continue to believe, may now embark, as I did then—I hope with less difficulty than I at first encountered. Many of the pages were foxed and faded, some were out of order, and Lord Byron’s hand was never an easy one for me (I had as a child never been given any of the letters he had written to me, or to my mother; indeed I had never seen his handwriting until Mr John Murray presented me with the manuscript of his poem Beppo, when I was a married lady whose morals it was presumed would not be harmed by the poem). At the head of the first page was the title—as I assumed—though it seemed, as I began my first perusal, an odd one indeed, and I wondered—I looked again, and determined that the words were written in a different ink, by a different pen, perhaps at a different time, which caused me to wonder the more.
    I told not spouse nor parent what I had, and certainly not the world; and that for reasons which students of my unfortunate family (of whom there is an army, and new recruits daily) will understand. What my father had written was, for that time, mine alone. I set about making a fair copy, even as I learned to read the hand. I shall not describe with what emotions I did so.
    I had at that time reached what I may call an epoch in my feelings about my paternal ancestors. Not long before, my husband William, Lord Lovelace, and I had accepted an invitation to visit Newstead, the ancestral seat of the Byrons in Nottinghamshire, now in the possession of Colonel Wildman, once Lord Byron’s schoolfellow at Harrow. There—amid scenes where the father I never knew was wont to roam and to make merry; where his forebears worthy and profligate had lived, and whose incomes they had wasted, in former ages; where nearby stands the little parish church, in whose crypt my father lies with his people—I know not how, but all that I seemed once to have known concerning that troubled and tempestuous spirit, all that I had been taught to think about him—and to hold him guilty of—all vanished, or lifted as cloud; and I knew myself to be, with all my own faults, a Byron too, as was he, with his: and if I could not love him, without charges upon his soul, I could not love myself, or his grandchildren that were my children. In a letter that is quoted in the Life written by Mr Thomas Moore, Lord Byron stated his belief that a woman cannot love a man for himself who does not love him for his crimes . No other love, says he, is worthy the name. Whether or not my own soul is capable of so august an ideal of love, I hold it to be applicable as well to a daughter as to a spouse; and none may hinder me now from aspiring to it.
     
    A S I HAVE HEREIN met the need for an Introduction or Prolegomenon, I have had in addition the temerity to provide a number of notes, illuminating where I can the matter of this curious tale, and connecting its accounts to the scenes of my