VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE 143

to see that, while Shakespeare and Burns lay open on the table all day, there was no reason for much mystery with Byron (though until later I was not allowed to read him for myself). She had trust in my disposition and education, and was no more afraid of my turning out a Corsair or a Giaour than a Richard III., or a-Solomon. And she was perfectly right, so far. I never got the slightest harm from Byron: what harm came to me was from the facts of life, and from books of a baser kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly considered extremely instructive-from Victor Hugo down to Doctor Watts.

165. Farther, I will take leave to explain in this place what I meant by saying that my mother was an “inoffensive” prude.¹ She was herself as strict as Alice Bridgenorth; but she understood the doctrine of the religion she had learnt, and, without ostentatiously calling herself a miserable sinner, knew that according to that doctrine, and probably in fact, Madge Wildfire was no worse a sinner than she.² She was like her sister³ in universal charity-had sympathy with every passion, as well as every virtue, of true womanhood; and, in her heart of hearts, perhaps liked the real Margherita Cogni quite as well as the ideal wife of Faliero.⁴

166. And there was one more feature in my mother’s character which must be here asserted at once, to put an end to the notion of which I see traces in some newspaper comments on my past descriptions of her, that she was in any wise like Esther’s religious aunt in Bleak House.⁵

¹ [See above, p. 122.]

² [For other references to Alice Bridgenorth (Peveril of the Peak), see Vol. XXXIV. p. 283; for Madge Wildfire, see Heart of Midlothian.]

³ [For Bridget, Ruskin’s Croydon aunt, see above, p. 19.]

⁴ [For Margherita Cogni, the Fornarina, with whom Byron had a liaison at Venice, see (in Prothero’s edition of his Letters and Journals) vol. iv. pp. 327 seq.; Angiolina, wife of Byron’s Marino Faliero.]

⁵ [Miss Barbary, aunt and godmother to Esther Summerson: “She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesday and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there were lectures; and ... she never smiled” (ch. iii.).]

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