ter than those of other men; and instead
of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have
mutually lent each other strength;" but "in social life no human being can
be more gentle, patient, and unassuming. He is cheerful, frank, and witty.
His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by
it as by a spell."

Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and
during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines
among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley
refers to the "tempest-cleaving swan of Albion," to the "music flung o'er
a mighty thunder-fit," and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his
ocean refuge,--

As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Seamander's wasting springs,
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light.

"The sun," he says, at a later date, "has extinguished the glowworm;" and
again, "I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may; and there is no
other with whom it is worth contending."

Shelley was, in the main, not only an exquisite but a trustworthy critic;
and no man was more absolutely above being influenced by the fanfaronade
of rank or the din of popularity. These criticisms are therefore not to be
lightly set aside, nor are they unintelligible. Perhaps those admirers of
the clearer and more consistent nature, who exalt him to the rank of a
greater poet, are misled by the amiable love of one of the purest
characters in the history of our literature. There is at least no
difficulty in understanding why he should have been, as it were, concussed
by Byron's greater massiveness and energy into a sense--easy to an
impassioned devotee--of inferiority. Similarly, most of the estimates--
many already reversed, others reversible--by the men of that age, of each
other, can be explained. We can see how it was that Shelley overestimated
both the character and the powers of Hunt; and Byron depreciated Keats,
and was ultimately repelled by Wordsworth, and held out his hand to meet
the manly grasp of Scott. The one enigma of their criticism is the respect
that they joined in paying to the witty, genial, shallow, worldly, musical
Tom Moore.

This favourite of fortune and the minor muses, in the course of a short
tour through the north of Italy in the autumn of 1819, found his noble
friend on the 8th of October at La Mira, went with him on a sight-seeing
e