A dead silence followed the reading. Trelawny looked up and seeing no one asked, “Where is he?”
“Who?” said Jane. “Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit no one knows when or where.”
The next day it was Shelley himself who took Trelawny to call on Byron. Here the surroundings were very different. A large marble hall, a giant staircase, powdered footmen and surly dogs. Trelawny, like every one else, saw in Byron’s external appearance all the traits with which imagination endows genius, but the great man’s conversation struck him as commonplace. He seemed too to be playing a part, and an out-of-date one—that of a rake-hell of the Regency. He told stories about actors, boxers and hard-drinkers, and of how he had swum the Hellespont. Of this exploit he was very proud.
At three the horses were brought round. After riding for a couple of hours, the party dismounted at a small podere, pistols were sent for, a cane was stuck into the ground behind the house and a piece of money placed in a slit at the top of the cane. Byron, Shelley and Trelawny fired at fifteen paces, and their firing was pretty equal. Each time the cane or the coin was hit by one or the other. Trelawny was pleased to see that despite his feminine appearance, Shelley could hold his own with men.
On the way back they talked poetry, and Trelawny cited a couplet from Don Juan as an example of felicitous rhyming. Byron, won over, brought his horse round to trot beside him.
“Confess now,” said he, “you expected to find me a Timon of Athens or a Timur the Tartar, and you’re surprised to find a man of the world—never in earnest—laughing at all things mundane?”
Then he muttered as to himself:
“The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull.”
⁂