met with. Shelley rode and practised pistol-shooting
with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes,
and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.
All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution,
remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic
persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordinary kind he hated. The
voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with
Shelley's almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to
make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on
his mistaking his wife's mention of the Aziola, a little owl common
enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike
for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some
disagreement between him and Mrs. Shelley, and kept him further apart
from Byron than he might otherwise have been. In a valuable letter
recently published by Mr. Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all
society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that
is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to
Trelawny, he said:--"She can't bear solitude, nor I society--the quick
coupled with the dead."

In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all in Italy, except
Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs.
Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She was a
woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less
enthusiastic than Shelley liked, quite capable of appreciating the
inestimable privilege of his acquaintance. Her husband, to use a now
almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his
wife's enlightened opinions, and remained staunch through good and ill
report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew absolutely no
one. Shelley's time was therefore passed in study and composition. In
the previous summer he had translated the "Symposium" of Plato, and
begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a
fragment. Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his
observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to
their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of
Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Tasso struck him as cold
and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio
he preferred to both; a