partly from
overwork in visiting and helping the poor, his health was thought to
be seriously endangered. In March 1818, together with the five souls
dependent on him--Claire and her baby, Mary and her two babies (a
second, Clara, had been born about six months before)--he left England,
never to return.

Mary disliked hot weather, but it always put Shelley in spirits, and his
best work was done beneath the sultry blue of Italian skies, floating in
a boat on the Serchio or the Arno, baking in a glazed cage on the roof
of a Tuscan villa, or lying among the ruins of the Coliseum or in the
pine-woods near Pisa. Their Italian wanderings are too intricate to be
traced in detail here. It was a chequered time, darkened by disaster
and cheered by friendships. Both their children died, Clara at Venice in
1818, and William at home in 1819. It is impossible not to be amazed at
the heedlessness--the long journeys in a rough foreign land, the absence
of ordinary provision against ailments--which seems to have caused the
death of these beloved little beings. The birth in 1819 of another son,
Percy (who survived to become Sir Percy Shelley), brought some comfort.
Claire's troubles, again, were a constant anxiety. Shelley worked hard
to persuade Byron either to let her have Allegra or to look after his
daughter properly himself; but he was obdurate, and the child died in a
convent near Venice in 1822. Shelley's association with Byron, of whom,
in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has drawn a picture with the darker
features left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned.
No doubt Byron's splenetic cynicism, even his parade of debauchery,
was largely an assumption for the benefit of the world; but beneath
the frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of his intimate conversation,
beneath his careful cultivation of the graces of a Regency buck, he was
fundamentally selfish and treacherous. Provided no serious demands were
made upon him, he enjoyed the society of Shelley and his circle, and the
two were much together, both at Venice and in the Palazzo Lanfranchi
at Pisa, where, with a menagerie of animals and retainers, Byron had
installed himself in those surroundings of Oriental ostentation which it
amused him to affect.

A more unalloyed friendship was that with the amiable Gisborne family,
settled at Leghorn; its serene cheerfulness is reflected in Shelley's
charming rhymed 'Letter to Maria Gisborne'. And early in 1821 they were