Indeed, we need no further justification for Napoleon's statements as to what the official intention was towards him. Without a doubt Dr. Max Lenz is too reckless in his generosity towards Lowe, for his actions from beginning to end of his career prove that he was a dreadful creature. The thought of him and of those incarnate spiders who kept spinning their web, and for six mortal years disgracing humanity, is in truth enough to unsettle one's reason. Vainly they had ransacked creation in search of persons in authority to support them in the plea of justification, but never a soul came forth to share what is now regarded as ingrained criminality.
Perhaps the virulent treatment of Byron ranks with the meanest and most impotent actions of the militant oligarchists because of his shocking (?) sympathy with England's enemy. The fierce though exquisite weaver of rhymes, who had been the idol of the nation and the drawing-room, was sought after by the highest and most cultured in the land. Byron had fallen a victim to public displeasure partly because he gave way to excesses that shocked the orthodoxy of a capricious public. He had reached a pinnacle of fame such as no man of his years had ever attained, and suddenly without warning he fell, a victim to unparalleled vituperation. His faults, if the meagre accounts that have been handed down are true, were great, but many of them were merely human. His marriage was not compatible, and his love entanglements embarrassing. His temper and habits were very similar to those of other geniuses, and great allowances should be made for personalities whose mental arrangements may be such as to nullify normal control.
It is all very well to say that these men should be compelled to adhere to a conventional law because ordinary mortals are expected to do so, but a man like Byron was not ordinary. In his particular line he was a great force with a brain that took spasmodic twists. It is absurd to expect that a being whose genius produced "Childe Harold" and "Manfred" could be fashioned into living a quite commonplace domestic life. Miss Milbanke, who married him, and the public who first blessed and then cursed and made him an outcast, were not faultless. Had they been possessed of the superiority they piously assumed, they would have seen how impossible it was for this eccentric man of stormy passions to be controlled and overridden by conventionality.