Almost
at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, "If it
contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring."
He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her "talents,
and excellent qualities;" and saying, "she is so good a person that I wish
I was a better." About the same date he writes to various friends in the
good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge
undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate
House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.
[Footnote 2: Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the story.]
The most constant and best of those friends was his sister, Augusta Leigh,
whom, from the death of Miss Chaworth to his own, Byron, in the highest
and purest sense of the word, loved more than any other human being.
Tolerant of errors, which she lamented, and violences in which she had no
share, she had a touch of their common family pride, most conspicuous in
an almost cat-like clinging to their ancestral home. Her early published
letters are full of regrets about the threatened sale of Newstead, on the
adjournment of which, when the first purchaser had to pay 25,000_l_.
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