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 joined by a young
couple who proved very congenial. Ned Williams was a half-pay
lieutenant of dragoons, with literary and artistic tastes, and
his wife, Jane, had a sweet, engaging manner, and a good
singing voice. Then there was the e'citing discovery of the
Countess Emilia Viviani, imprisoned in a convent by a jealous
step-mother. All three of them--Mary, Claire, and Shelley--at
once fell in love with the dusky beauty. Impassioned letters
passed between her and Shelley, in which he was her "dear
brother" and she his "dearest sister"; but she was soon found
to be a very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as the
instrument chosen by chance to inspire 'Epipsychidion'.
Finally there appeared, in January 1822, the truest-hearted and
the most lovable of all Shelley's friends. Edward John
Trelawny, a cadet of a Cornish family, "with his knight-errant
aspect, dark, handsome, and moustachioed," was the true
buccaneer of romance, but of honest English grain, and without
a trace of pose. The devotion with which, though he only knew
Shelley for a few months, he fed in memory on their friendship
to the last day of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else
can, the force of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man
lived until 1881, an almost solitary survivor from the Byronic
age, and his life contained matter enough to swamp recollection