Toward Shelley, Byron entertained the greatest respect and affection for
his suavity, gentleness, and good breeding; and Shelley's accidental
death was a great shock to him. Among his other intimate acquaintances
in Italy were Lord and Lady Blessington, with whom he kept up a pleasant
correspondence. The most plaintive, sad, and generous of all his letters
was the one he wrote to Lady Byron from Pisa, in 1821, in acknowledgment
of the receipt of a tress of his daughter Ada's hair:--

"The time which has elapsed since our separation has been considerably
more than the whole brief period of our union and of our prior
acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and
irrecoverably so.... But this very impossibility of reunion seems to me
at least a reason why on all the few points of discussion which can
arise between us, we should preserve the courtesies of life, and as much
of its kindness as people who are never to meet may preserve more easily
than nearer connections.... I assure you I bear you now no resentment
whatever. Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal,
or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two
things,--that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never
meet again."

At this period, about a year before Byron's death, Moore thus writes:--

"To the world, and more especially England, he presented himself in no
other aspect than that of a stern, haughty misanthrope, self-banished
from the society of men, and most of all from that of Englishmen. The
more beautiful and genial inspirations of his muse were looked upon but
as lucid intervals between the paroxysms of an inherent malignancy of
nature. But how totally all this differed from the Byron of the social
hour, they who lived in familiar intercourse with him may be safely left
to tell. As it was, no English gentleman ever approached him with the
common forms of introduction, that did not come away at once surprised
and charmed by the kind courtesy of his manners, the unpretending play
of his conversation, and on nearer intercourse the frank, youthful
spirits, to the flow of which he gave way with such zest as to produce
the impression that gaiety was after all the true bent of his
disposition."

Scott, writing of him after his death, says,--

"In talents he was unequalled; and his faults were those rather of a
bizarre temper, arising from an eager and irritable nervous habit, than
any