The arrangement of three poets, three men, three gentlemen, for co-operation in a literary enterprise, differs from an arrangement of three tradesmen for a purely commercial undertaking. The project for starting the Liberal was a project from which each of the three adventurers could honourably retire, on giving the others timely notice of his purpose to do so. That Byron’s first intimation of a wish to retreat from the affair was given long before Hunt left England is indisputable. On receiving it both Hunt and Shelley should have disclaimed the disposition to cause him any embarrassment. In honour they were the more bound to do so,—because he was so much the strongest of the three in fame and purse; because in case of success the venture promised to be so much more beneficial to themselves than to him; and because they could not press him to persist in the enterprise against his will, without showing too lively a regard for their own interests. In taking the other course, and conspiring to hold Byron to the arrangement for their own ends, Hunt (for his own advantage) and Shelley (for Hunt’s profit) were guilty at least of sharp practice. From February to the end of June, they had been acting together confidentially against their powerful friend. For months they had known of Byron’s wish to get out of the affair. At the beginning of July, just four calendar months had passed since Shelley wrote from Pisa to his fellow-conspirator in England (2nd March, 1822),—‘I imagine it will be no very difficult task to execute that which you have assigned me—to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.’ Yet in her book Lady Shelley, speaking of the affair as it stood on 1st July, 1822, says,—
‘Byron had by this time been persuaded by Thomas Moore, and some of his other friends in London, that the projected magazine, about which he had been very anxious at first, would be injurious to his fame and interests; and Shelley now’ (‘by this time’ and ‘now,’ as though Byron now for the first time showed his distaste for the project, in which he was constrained to embark by the two confederates)—‘found him so desirous of making any possible retreat from his engagements, that, had he not feared he might damage his friend’s interests, he would have quarrelled outright with the noble poet. He was very much out of spirits when he left; and that was the last interview they ever had.’
In saying that Shelley parted in dejection from Byron, Lady Shelley is scarcely in accord with the best authorities touching the result of his action in Hunt’s behalf. Hopeful that Hunt and Byron would work together harmoniously for any considerable term, he could not well be, and certainly was not. But Mrs. Shelley’s words may be taken as conclusive evidence, that her husband was pleased with the immediate consequence of his mediation between the poet, who would fain have shipt the Hunts back to England, and the poet who had come to Italy with the purpose of planting himself on Byron. Speaking of her husband’s exertions to put the two partners at least in transient accord, Mrs. Shelley, in her August letter to Mrs. Gisborne, says:—
‘Shelley had past most of the time at Pisa—arranging the affairs of the Hunts—and skrewing L. B.’s mind to the sticking place about the journal. He had found this a difficult task at first, but at length he had succeeded to his heart’s content with both points. Mrs. Mason said that she saw him in better health and spirits than she had ever known him, when he took leave of her on Sunday, July 7th, his face burnt by the sun and his heart light that he had succeeded in rendering the Hunts tolerably comfortable.’
This would of itself dispose of Lady Shelley’s assertion that Shelley retired in depression from his final negotiations of Byron. On Thursday, 4th July, Shelley had written of the Hunts and of Byron’s obligation to take them at least for a brief while altogether on his hands, ‘Lord Byron must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot; but he seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and arrangements due to such a situation as Hunt’s. These, in spite of delicacy, I must procure.’ Three days later (Sunday, 7th August) he is in high spirits at having brought Byron into better humour with the Hunts, and made the Hunts fairly comfortable. With Byron he has ‘succeeded’ to his heart’s content; and in respect to the Hunts he is positively ‘light-hearted.’ Confirmed by several contemporary writings, Mrs. Shelley’s testimony respecting her husband’s satisfaction with and consequent elation at his arrangements for the Hunts, represents the view of Captain Roberts, Trelawny, Lady Mountcashel, the Hunts themselves, indeed of everyone of Shelley’s friends, who saw him in the last days of his existence at Pisa or Leghorn. The unquestionable success of his negotiations with Byron cannot have failed to gratify him. Yet Lady Shelley requires us to believe that he retired from those negotiations ‘very much out of spirits.’
On finding in July how he had been kept in ignorance of Hunt’s retirement from the Examiner, Byron might reasonably and honourably have used the concealment as a sufficient reason for breaking at once with the crafty practitioner. He had invited Hunt, as the Editor of the Examiner, to co-operate with him; he had furnished rooms in his house for the Hunts, on the understanding that Leigh Hunt had at least a sufficient income for the payment of his weekly bills; and now, through Hunt’s wary concealment of the real state of his affairs, he found himself with a numerous and absolutely destitute family in his house,—found himself, also, required by Shelley to take the maintenance of this penniless family altogether on his own hands—at least for a time. Byron had reason for resentment on finding himself over-reached and imposed upon in this unscrupulous and impudent manner. But what could he do? Mrs. Hunt was alarmingly ill, her children were guiltless of wilful complicity in the father’s extortionate manœuvre. He could not turn the sick woman and her babes out-of-doors. He could not even turn the wily operator on the pockets of his acquaintances out-of-doors. The clever, dextrous, irresistibly charming fellow had not a crown in his purse. For the moment Shelley could not relieve the necessities of the family, whom he had brought out from England and thrown upon Byron’s hands in so comical a manner. Shelley stated the situation precisely to his wife on the 4th of July, when he wrote, ‘Lord Byron must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot.’ One must needs smile at the thought of the three prime actors in the droll affair:—at the thrifty Byron’s dismay on being suddenly called upon to provide board and pocket-money, as well as bed and house-room, for the impecunious family; at the free-handed Shelley’s clear perception of Byron’s duty to these equally charming and shiftless Micawbers; at Hunt’s chagrin at the coldness with which he was welcomed to the Palazzo Lanfranchi. It is to Byron’s credit that he did all that honour and humanity required of him under the circumstances; and at the same time to his discredit that he did it ungraciously. Finding he ‘was in for it,’ without any easy and congenial way of escape, he started the Liberal; carried the Hunts in his train to Genoa; and, without causing Leigh Hunt more misery than he deserved, did divers things he should for his own dignity’s sake have left undone. It is not surprising that, after dropping a good deal of money and credit on the Liberal in a faint-hearted way, he declined to sacrifice himself yet further, for the advantage of his unsatisfactory partner.
After spending seven days between Leghorn and Pisa, Shelley set sail for Lerici in his little schooner with Edward Williams, who was longing to get back to his wife at the Casa Magni, and Charles Vivian, the young sailor who was the only regular nautical ‘hand’ on board the swift but unsteady craft. Contradicting one another even to the latest point of Shelley’s career, the authorities are at variance respecting the frame of mind in which he started on his brief voyage to death. On the one hand it is declared that he left Leghorn in dejection, and on the other that he went out of port in the highest elation. On seeking information from those who bade him farewell as he stept into his boat, Mrs. Shelley was assured that he went off ‘in one of those extravagant fits of good spirits in which’ he was ‘sometimes seen.’ The truth seems to be that, though dispirited for a few minutes by a despondent letter from Mary, he speedily recovered the jubilant air that had distinguished him on the previous day at Pisa, and in his satisfaction at the latest arrangements for the Hunts started in the happiest temper. He did not, however, glide out of the harbour without forewarning of the gale that was rising for his destruction. The day had been intensely hot, and a violent thunderstorm had broken over the gulf in the forenoon. Captain Roberts had even hinted that the voyagers should wait for more settled weather on the morrow:—an ominous hint from the ‘Don Juan’s’ builder. But though Shelley was faintly disposed to take the captain’s advice, Edward Williams, in his eagerness for his wife’s society, would hear of no delay, insisting with the wind then blowing they should be home in seven hours. Even as the ‘Don Juan’ slipt out of the harbour the Genoese mate of Byron’s yacht, ‘Bolivar,’ remarked to his captain, Trelawny, in reference to the dark clouds, rolling up from the south-west in threatening masses, that ‘the devil was brewing mischief.’ Three hours later the devil of this nautical prediction had for a brief while his own way with the gulf. It was about three p.m. when the small schooner scudded away from the Leghorn mole, from whose extremity Captain Roberts watched her performance till she passed beyond the range of his unaided vision at the rate of some seven knots an hour. At 6.30 Trelawny, who had gone to his cabin on board the ‘Bolivar,’ was roused from his afternoon’s slumber by noises, familiar to his nautical ear. Going on board he found the sky darkened by fog to almost nocturnal gloom, and learnt from the disturbances of the air and the commotion of the shipping in the harbour, that a mighty storm was on the point of breaking over the sea. A few minutes later the din and hubbub and shrill pipings of countless mariners were silenced by the thunder and wind and rattling rain of a wild and overpowering squall. The storm spent its fiercest fury in twenty minutes,—the brief passage of time during which the ‘Don Juan,’ that perfect plaything for the summer, foundered and sunk beneath the tumult of the angry billows.
Knowing from the force of the rising wind, even before she had passed from his view whilst he stood at the mole’s end, that the ‘Don Juan’ was in for a stiff breeze and hard weather, Captain Roberts went from the mole to the authorities, who could give him leave to ascend the lighthouse tower. On getting their permission to do so he climbed the Leghorn lighthouse, from whose summit he succeeded in sighting the toy-schooner with a glass, when she was some ten miles out at sea, off Via Reggio. The vessel was in view long enough for the captain to observe that her crew were in the act of taking in the top-sails. But it was only a glimpse he got of the boat before the sea-fog stole it from his sight. The circuit of the sea, covered by the captain’s glass, was alive with shipping, driven wildly by the mighty tempest; but when the sky and view cleared, though the gazer from the lighthouse saw again every other vessel he had held in sight before the transient obscuration, he looked in vain for the one vessel, in which he was personally interested.
On her recovery from a depth of from ten to fifteen fathoms of water in the following September, it was discovered that the ‘Don Juan’ had not capsized. She had gone under, swamped by an overwhelming sea or overborne by a felucca that ran her down. The large hole in her stern, and other signs of violence countenancing the latter conjecture, gave rise to the suspicion that she had been struck by a felucca in a piratical attempt to seize her, in the hope of getting possession of the dollars she was supposed to have on board. At this distance of time there is no need to examine the unsatisfactory evidence that favours this hideous hypothesis. That the ‘Don Juan’ was followed from Leghorn Harbour by pirates, set on making prize of the money she was believed to carry, is not unlikely. She may have been chased and even run down by pirates, set on plundering her in the open sea; but even in that case it is more probable that the immediate cause of her submergence was accidental collision, than that her piratical pursuers selected a moment for striking so slight a vessel, when the violence of the storm and the tumult of the waters rendered it impossible for them to board her. But at this date it matters little why and how she foundered.
It is more interesting to know that, sudden as it was, the catastrophe might have come more suddenly:—that the poet and his comrades had at least a brief minute or two, in which to prepare for the fate that did not overtake them altogether unawares. That they were taking in their topsails off Via Reggio is a sufficient indication that they were alive to the peril of their position before they passed from Captain Roberts’s view. That on its recovery Edward Williams’s corpse was found almost without clothing shows that before the little schooner went down he had time to realize the imminence of the danger, and to prepare for an attempt to save himself by swimming. On the other hand, the submerged boat and the remains of the three drowned bodies were found too near the point, at which Captain Roberts sighted and lost sight of them, for any difference of opinion respecting the hour or even the approximate minute of the catastrophe. At the most, they had only a few minutes to live when they busied themselves in hauling in their top-sails. A minute or two after passing from the view of the watcher on the lighthouse they were themselves face to face with death. In September, 1822, the vessel was discovered off Via Reggio; and on the 22nd of the previous July, just a fortnight after the fatal storm, the remains of Shelley’s corpse, and the remains of Edward Williams’s body, were found on shore,—those of Shelley being found near Via Reggio, on the Tuscan coast, whilst all that remained of Edward Williams’s manly form and presence had been carried to a point, some three miles distant, at the Bocca Lericcio, hard by the Migliarino tower. Three weeks later Charles Vivian’s skeleton was brought to shore by the waves, at a distance of some four miles from the spot to which Edward Williams’s corpse had been carried.