He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear
from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we
could be interested in establishing. His early death had been
the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss
Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others.
There had been an impression about 1825 that he had "treated
her badly," just as there had been an impression that he had
"served," as the London populace says, several other ladies
in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been
able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him
conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps
more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate,
it appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter
in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward.
Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung
themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion
many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise.
He was not a woman's poet, as I had said to Mrs. Prest,
in the modern phase of his reputation; but the situation had been
different when the man's own voice was mingled with his song.
That voice, by every testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard.
"Orpheus and the Maenads!" was the exclamation that rose to my
lips when I first turned over his correspondence. Almost all
the Maenads were unreasonable, and many of them insupportable;
it struck me in short that he was kinder, more considerate than,
in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a place!)
I should have been.
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