when he saw Trelawny &apos;s printed letter , Lord Sidney wrote to Douglas Kinnaird saying that it was incorrect throughout . he had no sooner heard from Count Gamba and Fletcher that Byron would have wished his body to return to England than that course was immediately carried into effect - not in spite of himself and Sir Frederick Stoven , but with their perfect concurrence , while General Adam was at Corfu the whole time and never interfered in the slightest degree about the matter . his only reference to Trelawny by name in the course of several communications to Hobhouse and Kinnaird about Byron &apos;s affairs is satirical : I have not the honor of any acquaintance with Mr Trelawny who seems to have had charge of the Mule when Count Gamba accompanied the remains of our deceased friend to Zante &amp;hellip; . if Trelawny failed even to meet Lord Sidney and the British government &apos;s other representatives in the islands , while they warmly welcomed Gamba to their counsels , it would go far to explain his attempts to exalt himself at the young Italian &apos;s expense . in his popular and acutely unreliable book on Byron and Shelley , Trelawny implies that not only Gamba but Fletcher and Tita and the steward , Lega Zambelli , failed to perform the most elementary duties towards the dead . he pretends to have found everything in uttermost disorder - tokens that the pilgrim had most treasured , scattered on the floor , - as rubbish of no marketable value , and trampled on . this was to give colour to his pretext for copying Byron &apos;s last letter to his sister , which was that its chance of reaching its destination had seemed slight . the collection of Pietro Gamba &apos;s letters deposited among the Murray manuscripts show that the greatest care was observed in gathering together all the possessions of a man whose importance was fully recognized by everyone about him . I have had put under government seal his belongings , which will be opened by Prince Alexander Mavrocordato in my presence and that of certain Englishmen who are here . I have taken an exact inventory of them . thus on April 21st , several days before Trelawny appeared , Gamba wrote to Lord Sidney Osborne , and his inventory has been preserved . the papers were reopened in the presence of leading Missolonghi officials in order to make sure that no recent will was amongst them . it may have been then that Trelawny contrived to do his copying . considering that Pietro was not above twenty-three years of age when he undertook a load of heavy responsibilities , his conduct reveals him as one of the most intelligent as well as the most sympathetic of Byron &apos;s entourage in Greece . with his good looks - for he carried the passport of a very handsome person - his good manners and his perfect lack of pretension , he even succeeded in disarming Hobhouse &apos;s possessiveness and making him forget how deeply he had disapproved , less than two years ago in Italy , of the immoral way the Countess Guiccioli &apos;s family accepted Byron as her lover . Augusta Leigh too was favourably impressed , and wrote to Lady Byron after she had received a visit from him : I have today seen Count Gamba - which was very distressing for many reasons but quite unavoidable - he is a pleasing , fine looking young man &amp; spoke with great feeling . the unfortunate Augusta was in one of her worst states of confusion . she had loved Byron , but she had betrayed him , betrayed him not twice , as he had betrayed her , but again and again over a long span of time , fawning on his implacable wife , purveying to her in secret the unguarded letters he never suspected any eye but her own would see , feeding the stealthy fires of her animosity : and having betrayed him , she had grown to fear and almost to hate him . she had dreaded his outpourings of affection for her in poetry that he thought would clear her and that only compromised her , and the headstrong folly that tempted him to write on ever more daring themes , teaching the world to guess what repentance and unrepentance preyed upon his thoughts . she had dreaded still more that he might return to England , overshadowing her again with spiritual and social peril . but this kind of return was what she could never have foreseen &amp;hellip; that he should come back not voluble but silent , not beautiful but defaced , not in obloquy but with his praises ringing ! she could remember now his exciting laughter , his almost filial love for her , her almost maternal love for him . above all she could remember the anguish of their parting , and how he had been convulsed , absolutely convulsed with grief . so love revived , and in its most sentimental form . while he lived she had lost touch in her perpetual alarms with what was best in him ; dead his memory became sacred to her . she felt almost as strongly as Hobhouse about biographies . quite apart from the divagations of her poor brother - so she constantly referred to him - there were a hundred reasons why it would be objectionable to have the family history exposed . whatever latitude she allowed in the warmth of her kindly nature to others - or to herself - she believed implicitly in the moral code she had learned from her good grandmother , the Countess of Holderness , living in a well-ordered Derbyshire manor . she had no desire to see in print that her mother , who was to have been a duchess , had been involved in a scandalous and ruinous divorce , that her father , mad Jack Byron , was a profligate and a bankrupt who had squandered every penny two successive wives had brought him and left the second on the verge of destitution , and that he had died a drunkard and perhaps a suicide , hiding in France to escape his creditors . it was no more pleasant for the Hon Augusta Leigh to share this kind of story with the world than it would be for most 20th-century ladies moving in court circles and having children to be settled advantageously in life . she had lived down the rumours which had made the year of the Byron separation a nightmare to her , and she had also succeeded , though with an increasing sense of effort , in persuading her little world to avert its eyes from her husband , that drone , as Byron called him , whose career of devotion to the turf was reputed to have a certain shadiness . she had earned the right to be left in peace . Byron &apos;s fame was , of course , very wonderful , but it carried with it too many reminders of his terrible indiscretions - the writing of Don Juan , which she had never ceased to deplore , his shocking blasphemies like the vision of judgement , his making friends with the atheist known to her as that infamous Mr Shelley , and his mixing with really low and horrid people such as the subversive journalist Leigh Hunt , whom one would never conceivably meet in decent society . she was most emphatically opposed to the production of sheer indelicacies , and that was the light in which she saw the proposed book by Dallas . letters between a mother and a son - a son so outspoken and a mother so far from suitable to be paraded before the public ! and brought out by that seedy poor relation , Dallas ! could anything be in worse taste ? the ill-mannered man had not even had the common courtesy to write to her about it , but had sent her a verbal message through a niece of his simply informing her that it was his intention to bring out the book . it was a good thing she had Mr Hobhouse to depend on . there had been a time when she had shared Annabella &apos;s detestation of Mr Hobhouse - had agreed with her that he was a bad influence , one of the Piccadilly crew who encouraged Byron to drink and behave outrageously . she was far too diplomatic to have let him suspect the scornful terms in which she was referring to him in her daily letters to Annabella when the marriage was breaking up ; and this was fortunate because he had turned out to be a powerful friend to her . no one had done more to silence the whisperings which connected her , so untruly and unfairly , with the separation . he was not , after all , the godless debauchee he had once seemed but a serious-minded person who felt exactly as she did about Byron &apos;s poetical defiances , and who had the same passionate desire to protect his memory . he was generous too , and although his expenses as a member of parliament were heavy and he depended on an allowance from his father , he had renounced for her sake Byron &apos;s legacy of a thousand pounds . Hanson , the solicitor , was naturally remunerated for his services , but all Mr Hobhouse &apos;s duties as executor were performed without reward . and now there was more trouble brewing with those unbearable Dallases . Dallas senior was detained in Paris by severe illness , but Dallas junior was full of fight and applying for the injunction to be lifted . he had gone to Byron &apos;s cousin , now 7th lord , and had got him to compose an affidavit to the effect that , whereas he had formerly been reluctant to approve the publication unless it had first been examined by the relatives and friends of his predecessor , he had now read the book and was content for it to be issued without that precaution . there were few things in Augusta &apos;s whole life , full of calamities though it was , that hurt her more than this contemptuous slight from George Anson Byron , whom she had loved with an unswerving loyalty , and had looked on as her intimate friend . moreover , he was without the right to make such pronouncements : he had inherited nothing from her brother but his title , whereas she was not only of nearer consanguinity but the chosen recipient of his property . these , if she had only known it , were precisely the reasons why her cousin took pleasure in the opportunity of annoying her . Lady Byron did not like Augusta to have intimate friends , and in every instance where the occasion was granted her , she managed to find some excuse for bestowing , in whole or in part , those confidences which never failed to leave her audience agape with wonder at her magnanimity and Augusta &apos;s wickedness . George Anson Byron had seen enough of the poet &apos;s atrocious conduct as a husband to be aware that Augusta , so far from being responsible for the collapse of the marriage , had been Lady Byron &apos;s greatest support and comfort at the time ; but it had been deemed necessary all the same to enlighten him as to the suspicions in the background , and he had repeated them to his newly married wife . their friendship for Augusta became rather hollow , and the news that Byron had left her practically all his money caused it to crumble to oblivion . though Lady Byron knew perfectly well that Byron , as early as the year of their wedding , 1815 , had made a will in Augusta &apos;s favour , she had evidently not passed on that information ; and it came as an appalling surprise to Captain Byron that he had been left without the fortune that would keep up the title . why he should have cherished expectations it is difficult to see , considering that a nearer relative was poor and in debt , and that he had been on bad terms with Byron since the separation , in which he had whole-heartedly and with courage allied himself with the opposite side ; but that he suffered a shock his letters poignantly show , and the disappointment must have been all the worse because the will was not produced until nearly seven weeks after he had learned of his succession . respecting the will , he wrote to Byron &apos;s widow a few days after hearing its contents , the very thought of it is painful to me . what Mary has said about it is too true . what Mary , the new Lady Byron , had said about it was written on the first half sheet of the same paper : my dearest Annabella , the more we consider the most prominent subject in your letter , the more we are convinced of the truth of that dreadful history connected with it . 