Celestial pair! if aught my verse can claim,
Wafted on Time’s broad pinion, yours is fame!
Ages on ages shall your fate admire,
No future day shall see your names expire,
While stands the Capitol, immortal dome!
And vanquished millions hail their empress, Rome!”
T. Moore on Byron
Byron’s friendships, in fact, with young men were so marked that Moore in his Life and Letters of Lord Byron seems to have felt it necessary to mention and, to some extent, to explain them:—
“During his stay in Greece (in 1810) we find him forming one of those extraordinary friendships—if attachment to persons so inferior to himself can be called by that name—of which I have already mentioned two or three instances in his younger days, and in which the pride of being a protector and the pleasure of exciting gratitude seem to have contributed to his mind the chief, pervading charm. The person whom he now adopted in this manner, and from similar feelings to those which had inspired his early attachments to the cottage boy near Newstead and the young chorister at Cambridge, was a Greek youth, named Nicolo Giraud, the son, I believe, of a widow lady in whose house the artist Lusieri lodged. In this young man he seems to have taken the most lively and even brotherly interest.”
Shelley on Friendship