"A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the
'Blackwood' of July, 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of
criminals, and recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public
as interesting from the very fact that it was the avowed production of
Lord Byron's mistress. No efficient protest was made against this
outrage in England, and Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the
'Blackwood' article, and the Harpers, the largest publishing house in
America, perhaps in the world, republished the book.
"Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,'
and other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the
young reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them
advertised in dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and
thus the generation of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron
but by these fables of her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The
friends who knew her personally were a small, select circle in
England, whom death is every day reducing. They were few in number
compared with the great world, and were silent. I saw these foul
slanders crystallizing into history, uncontradicted by friends who
knew her personally, who, firm in their own knowledge of her virtues,
and limited in view as aristocratic circles generally are, had no idea
of the width of the world they were living in, and the exigency of the
crisis.
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