This, however, is not all that the tragedy possesses of the author.  The character of Zarina is, perhaps, even still more strikingly drawn from life.  There are many touches in the scene with her which he could not have imagined, without thinking of his own domestic disasters.  The first sentiment she utters is truly conceived in the very frame and temper in which Byron must have wished his lady to think of himself, and he could not embody it without feeling that—

How many a year has pass’d,
Though we are still so young, since we have met
Which I have borne in widowhood of heart.

The following delicate expression has reference to his having left his daughter with her mother, and unfolds more of his secret feelings on the subject than anything he has expressed more ostentatiously elsewhere:

I wish’d to thank you, that you have not divided
My heart from all that’s left it now to love.

And what Sardanapalus says of his children is not less applicable to Byron, and is true:

Deem not
I have not done you justice: rather make them
Resemble your own line, than their own sire;
I trust them with you—to you.

And when Zarina says,

They ne’er
Shall know from me aught but what may honour
Their father’s memory,

he puts in her mouth only a sentiment which he knew, if his wife never expressed to him, she profoundly acknowledged in resolution to herself.  The whole of this scene is full of the most penetrating pathos; and did the drama not contain, in every page, indubitable evidence to me, that he has shadowed out in it himself his wife, and his mistress, this little interview would prove a vast deal in confirmation of the opinion so often expressed, that where his genius was most in its element, it was when it dealt with his own sensibilities and circumstances.  It is impossible to read the following speech, without a conviction that it was written at Lady Byron:

My gentle, wrong’d Zarina!
I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse—borne away with every breath!
Misplaced upon the throne—misplaced in life.
I know not what I could have been, but feel
I am not what I should be—let it end.
But take this with thee: if I was not form’d
To prize a love like thine—a mind like thine—
Nor dote even on thy beauty—as I’ve doted
On lesser charms, for no cause save that such
Devotion was a duty, and I hated
All that look’d like a chain for me or others
(This even rebellion must avouch); yet hear
These words, perhaps among my last—that none
E’er valued more thy virtues, though he knew not
To profit by them.