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 242 seldom accorded to sin. To the close of Shelley's life, his sister-in-law continued to be a source of endless irritation and anxiety.

No engagement at Drury Lane was procurable. Indeed, Miss Clairmont soon ceased to desire one. Her infatuation for Lord Byron drove all other thoughts and hopes and ambitions from her heart. She wrote to him repeatedly,—clever, foolish, half-mad, and cruelly long letters. She praised the "wild originality of his countenance." She sent him her manuscripts to read. There is something pathetic in Byron's unheeded entreaty that she should "write short." There is something immeasurably painful in his unconcealed indifference, in his undisguised contempt. The glamour of his fame as a poet gave a compelling power to that fatal beauty which was his undoing. When we read what men have written about Byron's head; when we recall the rhapsodies of Moore, the reluctant praise of Trelawney, the eloquence of Coleridge; when we remember that Scott—the sanest man in Great Britain—confessed ruefully that Byron's face was a thing to dream of, we are the less surprised