en place in him since,
a few months before, he arrived at this old palace on the Arno with a
troop of servants, carriages, horses, fowls, dogs, and monkeys. The
selfish and sensual Byron of Venetian days is entirely a thing of the
past. "He is improved in every respect,"--says Shelley to Williams,
"in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness." And
although keeping up a certain splendour upon an income of L4000 a year,
he devotes L1000 of that income entirely to purposes of charity. His own
personal needs are of the simplest.

The game concluded, Byron's carriage is announced: his friends and
he proceed in it as far as the town gates of Pisa, by this means to
avoid the starers of the streets. Horses are in readiness at the gates:
the company, with one or two servant-men, mount and ride into the
pine-forest that reaches towards the sea.

Byron is as excellent and graceful a rider as a swimmer, with remarkable
powers of endurance. He can cover seventy or eighty miles a day, fast
going, and swim five miles at a stretch: he is indeed, in many respects,
the typical open-air Englishman. But to-day he rides slowly and immersed
in thought. As his wife years since assured him, he is at heart the most
melancholy of mankind, often when apparently the gayest. His abnormally
long sight takes in every detail of the scenery,--storing it up
unconsciously for future reference. It has been said that Byron is
nothing without his descriptions: and in these he has achieved some of
his finest work: notably in some immortal stanzas of _Childe Harold_,
with their dazzling panoramic succession of vivid scenes: whether
depicting how

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand.

or, on the eve of Waterloo,

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gather'd then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

whether again, in the "vale of vintage,"

The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine,
Whose breast of waters broadly sw