[Footnote 117: To this lameness of Polidori, one of the preceding
letters of Lord Byron alludes.]

[Footnote 118: The Corsair.]

[Footnote 119: His system of diet here was regulated by an abstinence
almost incredible. A thin slice of bread, with tea, at breakfast--a
light, vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of Seltzer water, tinged
with vin de Grave, and in the evening, a cup of green tea, without milk
or sugar, formed the whole of his sustenance. The pangs of hunger he
appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking cigars.]

[Footnote 120: From his remembrance of this sketch, Polidori afterwards
vamped up his strange novel of the Vampire, which, under the supposition
of its being Lord Byron's, was received with such enthusiasm in France.
It would, indeed, not a little deduct from our value of foreign fame, if
what some French writers have asserted be true, that the appearance of
this extravagant novel among our neighbours first attracted their
attention to the genius of Byron.]

[Footnote 121: "The wind (says Lord Byron's fellow-voyager) gradually
increased in violence until it blew tremendously; and, as it came from
the remotest extremity of the Lake, produced waves of a frightful
height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam. One of our
boatmen, who was a dreadfully stupid fellow, persisted in holding the
sail at a time when the boat was on the point of being driven under
water by the hurricane. On discovering this error, he let it entirely
go, and the boat for a moment refused to obey the helm; in addition, the
rudder was so broken as to render the management of it very difficult;
one wave fell in, and then another."]

[Footnote 122: "I felt, in this near prospect of death (says Mr.
Shelley), a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though
but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been
alone; but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and
I was overcome with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have
been risked to preserve mine. When we arrived at St. Gingoux, the
inhabitants, who stood on the shore, unaccustomed to see a vessel as
frail as ours, and fearing to venture at all on such a sea, exchanged
looks of wonder and congratulation with our boatmen, who, as well as
ourselves, were well pleased to set foot on shore."]

[Footnote 123: In the account of this visit to Copet in his Memoranda,
he spoke in high terms of the d