Lord Byron and the Genteel Reformers

Mr. Johnstone … who had more acquaintance with the springs and wires that move people than I had, suggested that we should wait upon Lady Oxford … When the asterisks in the following passage of Byron's diary are replaced by the correct name, light is shed on the practically unexplored problem of Byron's political connections and ambitions during his life in London—and on the question, crucial to an understanding of the later Byron, of what was going on in the poet's mind in his twenty-fifth year.