How Lord Byron described Clare Clairmont

I am lifting this straight from Wikipedia.

There is no credit given for this letter specifically, unfortunately, so I can't tell you which volume of Byron's letters might contain it. I've checked a few online without success.

****Update: The source is Byron, Child of Passion, Fool of Fame by Benita Eisler. (Random House of Canada, 2000)


[Byron] referred to [Clare] also in the following manner, in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird (20 January 1817):

"[Claire Clairmont] You know--& I believe saw once that odd-headed girl—who introduced herself to me shortly before I left England—but you do not know—that I found her with Shelley and her sister at Geneva—I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man--& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way—the suite of all this is that she was with child--& returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island...This comes of "putting it about" (as Jackson calls it) & be dammed to it—and thus people come into the world."