Papa." To Murray he writes in the same paternal strain. "My daughter Allegra is well, and growing pretty; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features. She will make, in that case, a manageable young lady."
Other pens bear ready witness to Allegra's temper. Mr. Jeaffreson, who has written a very offensive book about Lord Byron, takes pains to tell us that the poor child was "greedy, passionate, and, in her fifth year, precocious, vain and saucy." Mr. Hoppner, after the publication of the Countess Guiccioli's "Recollections," wrote an agitated letter to the "Athenæum," assuring an indifferent public that he had no acquaintance with the lady, and that his own respectability was untarnished by any intimacy with the poet, of whose morals he disapproved, and whose companionship he eschewed, save when they rode together,—on Byron's horses. "Allegra was not by any means an amiable child," he added sourly, "nor was Mrs. Hoppner nor I particularly fond of her."
It could hardly have been expected that the
