WHAT a question to ask! Can anyone in his senses maintain that a poem published in his name and with his sanction was not written by him? I will, nevertheless, undertake to show by circumstantial evidence that he was not the author of Werner, but that it was written by my grandmother, the Duchess of Devonshire.

My sister, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, told me many years ago that this was the case. Her statement was that the Duchess wrote the poem, and gave the manuscript of it to her niece, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, and that she, some years later, handed it over to Lord Byron, who subsequently published it in his own name.

Lady Caroline was the only daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough, and her mother was the younger sister of the Duchess of Devonshire. She was born in 1785, and was twenty-one when her aunt died. In 1805 she married Mr. William Lamb, who ultimately became the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Her conduct during her married life was so eccentric that it betokened madness, and it was probably on this account that her husband, who was really attached to her, showed her, in spite of her extraordinary behaviour, the greatest forbearance. At last he was obliged to get separated from her, and he never saw her again until he hurried from Ireland to be present at her death, which took place in 1826.

It was in 1812, when she was living with her husband, that she made acquaintance with Byron, with whom she fell desperately in love. At first his vanity was flattered; but he gradually became bored by her pursuit of him, and in 1813, after many quarrels, a final rupture between them took place.

My sister's story seemed so incredible that I thought she must have been misinformed, and I paid at the time little attention to it, and never even spoke to my mother about it. I, however, the other day came across the following passage in a letter written by her to her sister, Lady Carlisle, which throws much light on the subject, and confirms the story.

These are her words: 'Did you know that my mother had written an entire tragedy from Miss Lee's tale, Kreutzner, or the

Hungarian? William Ponsonby sent it to me this morning, and I will, if you like, send it you when Lord G. goes to London.' This proves that the Duchess wrote a tragedy on the same subject as Werner. Byron in his preface to this poem says: "The following drama is taken from the German tale, Kreutzner, published many years ago in Lee's Canterbury Tales.'

My mother's letter also confirms my sister's account of the way Byron obtained the manuscript. It shows that when that letter was written the manuscript was in the possession of Mr. William Ponsonby, Lady Caroline's brother. He could not have obtained it

from his aunt, the Duchess, as he was a mere boy when she died, and Lady Caroline was the only one of the family to whom she was likely to have given it. Her brother must, therefore, have received it from her, either as a loan or gift, when he sent it to my mother.

There is, therefore, little doubt that the manuscript was in the hands of Lady Caroline when she was intimate with Lord Byron; and that being so, it is scarcely credible that during all that period they never referred to the subject; that she never spoke to him of her aunt's performance, and that he never informed her of his admiration of the original story; and in that case it would be the strangest coincidence that he should have hit upon the same tale to dramatise which had been previously dramatised by his intimate friend's aunt, without his knowledge. In his preface to Werner he does not allude to any other version, which is to be accounted for if he appropriated the one produced by the Duchess. He says his drama was entirely taken from Miss Lee's tale, which he read when he was a boy about fourteen, and which made a deep impression upon him. Indeed, he added, it may be said to contain the germ of much that he had since written. This praise of it now appears strange, as Miss Lee's writings, although well thought of by contemporaries, have fallen into complete oblivion, and few people now alive are aware of her existence..

My mother's letter is not dated, but was written early in 1822, some time before the publication of Werner, which occurred in November of the same year, and of which my mother, when she wrote, evidently knew nothing. On the 3rd of December, immediately after its publication, she writes to her sister that Granville has promised to read Werner out loud to me.' It is a pity that there is no record of the impression made upon them by its perusal. They must have expected to meet with an original composition, and great must have been their surprise to find it a reproduction of the original manuscript. At all events, my mother must have become acquainted with both, and if they were different could never have allowed my sister to believe that the Duchess was the author of the published poem. I am, moreover, certain that my sister's statement was that the tragedy was purloined. This is confirmed by my brother-in-law, Mr. Fuller

ton, who, in spite of his great age, retains an excellent memory, and who writes to me that he was always under the impression that the Duchess wrote Werner.

There is another slight circumstance which bears upon this question. It was Byron's habit to hand over his poems to some lady friend to be fairly copied out. Mrs. Shelley, who was living with her husband at that time with Byron at Pisa, wrote out a fair copy of Werner, which still exists, and is the copy from which the poem was printed; and it is noteworthy that while the rough copies of his other poems have been preserved, no rough copy of Werner is to be found. This is easily to be accounted for if what Mrs. Shelley transcribed was a copy of the original manuscript, the production of another person, but not so if it was the production of the poet.

The internal evidence is even more important. This cannot fail to strike anyone who compares this tragedy with his other poems. When it appeared it was at once condemned, alike by friends and critics. Though they were struck by its inferiority to his other works, it naturally never occurred to them that it was not written by him. One of them wondered what Byron could be at. Some praised the work as a drama, for which they gave Miss Lee the credit; but they all found fault with the poetry. Blackwood said of it: It is, indeed, most unmusical, most melancholy. Of's, to's, for's, by's, but's and the like, are the most common conclusions of a line; there is no ease, no flow, no harmony, neither is there anything of abrupt fiery vigour to compensate for these defects.' Campbell says:

In this drama there is absolutely no poetry to be found; and if the measure of verse which is here dealt to us be a sample of what we are to expect for the future, we have only to entreat that Lord Byron would drop the ceremony of cutting up his prose into lines of ten, eleven, or twelve syllables (for he is not very punctilious on this head), and favour us with it in its natural state. It requires no very cunning alchemy to transmute his verse into prose, nor, reversing the experiment, to convert his plain sentences into verses like his own. When,' says Werner, 'but for this untoward sickness, which seized me upon this desolate frontier, and hath wasted, not alone my strength, but means, and leaves us-No! this is beyond me; but for this I had been happy.' This is indeed beyond us.

It is true that in Byron's dramas the blank verse is generally poor, but not to the same extent as it is in Werner. In it are whole passages taken bodily from Miss Lee's tale, with only the occasional addition of a word to make it scan like blank verse. Many instances of this are given in the notes, of which one specimen will suffice. The following occurs in the tale:

Ul. He too must be silenced.

Wer. How so?

Ul. As Starlenheim is. Are you so dull as never to have hit on this before? When we met in the garden, what except discovery in the act could make me know his death? Or had the prince's household been then summoned, would the cry for

the police been left to such a stranger? Or should I have loitered in the way? Or could you, Werner, the object of the Baron's hate and fears, have fled, unless by many an hour before suspicion woke ?

Now, the whole of this passage, without the alteration of a single word, was incorporated in the tragedy (Sc. 1, Act V.).

This is indeed remarkable-that a poet who had such wealth of language at his command should offer to the public as poetry the prose of another person. All this All this appears to prove that Byron committed so extraordinary an act; but, however conclusive the evidence may be, many persons will disbelieve it. They will declare it impossible that so great a poet should, at the height of his fame, assume the authorship of anything so inferior, or that he should so wantonly expose himself to the shame and ridicule of detection. Was he not aware that it was in the power of some of the relations of the Duchess to expose him by producing her manuscript? But he may have thought that Lady Caroline had destroyed it, and that they knew nothing about it, or he may have relied on their unwillingness to do anything that would revive the scandal connected with her name. It may have been this consideration which induced the daughters of the Duchess and the Ponsonby family to keep the matter secret.

However difficult it may be to account for Byron's conduct, we must bear in mind that a fact proved cannot be denied because it is unlikely. Of course the production of the original manuscript and its identity with the published poem would convince the most incredulous. I have made inquiries about it, but hitherto without success. If not got rid of, it must be hidden in the recesses of some country house and will be some day forthcoming. Lady Caroline may herself have destroyed it, being unwilling to preserve a document which, if produced, would be so damaging to the great poet, to whom she had been so much attached.

It may be asked, What motive could have induced Byron to impose this fraud on the public. His published correspondence gives an answer. We learn from it that in 1822 he made frantic endeavours to obtain money, not for himself, but to help the cause of Greece, to which from his own private means he had largely contributed. On the 6th of February of that year he writes to Sir Walter Scott:

By the last post I transmitted to you a letter upon some Rochdale toll business, from which there are moneys in prospect. My agent says two thousand pounds; but supposing it to be only one, or even one hundred, still they may be moneys, and I have lived long enough to have an exceeding respect for the smallest current coin of any realm, or the least sum which, although I may not want it myself, may do something for others who need it more than I. . . . But to return; I am determined to have all the moneys I can, whether by my own funds, or succession, or lawsuit, or MSS., or any lawful means whatever. . . . Recollect, too, that I expect some moneys for the various MSS. (no matter what); and, in short, 'Rem quocunque modo, Rem!'-the noble feeling of cupidity grows upon us with our years.

Again on the 1st of March:

As I still have no news of my Werner &c. packet, sent to you on the 29th of January, I continue to bore you (for the fifth time, I believe) to know whether it has not miscarried, as it was fairly copied out; it will be vexatious if it is lost.

Again to Mr. Moore on the 4th of March:

I am sorry you think Werner even approaching to any fitness for the stage, which, with my notions upon it, is very far from my present object. With regard to the publication, I have already explained that I have no exorbitant expectations of either fame or profit in the present instances; but wish them published because they are written, which is the common feeling of all scribblers.

Again to Mr. Murray on the 6th of March:

I have written to Moore by this post to forward to you the tragedy of Werner. I shall not make or propose any present bargain about it or the new mystery till we see if they succeed. If they don't sell (which is not unlikely), you sha'n't pay.

Again from Genoa, on the 23rd of October, to Mr. Murray:

You have sent me a copy of Werner, but without the preface. If you have published it without, you will have plunged me into a very disagreeable dilemma, because I shall be accused of plagiarism from Miss Lee's German tale, whereas I have fully and freely acknowledged that the drama is taken entirely from the story.

Again from Cephalonia, on the 23rd of December, 1823, to Mr. Douglas Kennaird:

I presume that some agreement has been concluded with Mr. Murray about Werner. Although the copyright should only be worth two or three hundred pounds, I will tell them what can be done with them. For three hundred pounds I can maintain in Greece, at more than the fullest pay of the Provisional Government, rations included, one hundred armed men for three months. You may judge of this when I tell you that the four thousand pounds advanced by me to the Greeks is likely to set a fleet and an army in motion for some months.

The foregoing extracts explain why Byron at that conjuncture, having nothing of his own to dispose of, may have been induced to sell Werner as his own production. There may have been other motives also -his love of mystification, and some curiosity to see how far the public could be bamboozled. That he thought the work had some merit may be inferred from his dedicating it to Goethe, but he could hardly think it would add to his fame.

He tells us in the preface that he had begun a drama upon this tale so far back as 1815, and had nearly completed an act when he was interrupted by circumstances; that this was somewhere amongst his papers in England, but as it had not been found, he had rewritten the first and added the subsequent acts. Now, curiously enough, Mr. Murray discovered only the other day this mislaid fragment in Byron's own handwriting among the poet's papers. The story is the same as in the printed version, but is differently treated, and the language is decidedly superior, and more like what one would