Hartford, June 26, 1869.
Dear doctor,--I am going to ask help of you, and I feel that confidence in your friendship that leads me to be glad that I have a friend like you to ask advice of. In order that you may understand fully what it is, I must go back some years and tell you about it.
When I went to England the first time, I formed a friendship with Lady Byron which led to a somewhat interesting correspondence.
When there the second time, after the publication of “Dred” in 1856, Lady Byron wrote to me that she wished to have some private confidential conversation with me, and invited me to come spend a day with her at her country-seat near London.
I went, met her alone, and spent an afternoon with her. The object of the visit she then explained to me. She was in such a state of health that she considered she had very little time to live, and was engaged in those duties and reviews which every thoughtful person finds who is coming deliberately, and with their eyes open, to the boundaries of this mortal life.
Lady Byron, as you must perceive, has all her life lived under a weight of slanders and false imputations laid upon her by her husband.
Her own side of the story has been told only to that small circle of confidential friends who needed to know it in order to assist her in meeting the exigencies which it imposed on her. Of course it has thrown the sympathy mostly on his side, since the world generally has more sympathy with impulsive incorrectness than with strict justice.
At that time there was a cheap edition of Byron's This text is part of:
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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.
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