nally
entertained strangers; but his intimate acquaintanceship was confined to
Captain Williams and his wife, and Shelley's cousin, Captain Medwin. The
latter used frequently to dine and sit with his host till the morning,
collecting materials for the _Conversations_ which he afterwards gave to
the world. The value of these reminiscences is impaired by the fact of
their recording, as serious revelations, the absurd confidences in which
the poet's humour for mystification was wont to indulge. Another of the
group, an Irishman, called Taafe, is made, in his Lordship's
correspondence of the period, to cut a somewhat comical figure. The
master-passion of this worthy and genial fellow was to get a publisher for
a fair commentary on Dante, to which he had firmly linked a very bad
translation, and for about six months Byron pesters Murray with constant
appeals to satisfy him; e.g. November l6, "He must be gratified, though
the reviewers will make him suffer more tortures than there are in his
original." March 6, "He will die if he is not published; he will be damned
if he is; but that he don't mind." March 8, "I make it a point that he
shall be in print; it will make the man so exuberantly happy. He is such a
good-natured Christian that we must give him a shove through the press.
Besides, he has had another fall from his horse into a ditch." Taafe,
whose horsemanship was on a par with his poetry, can hardly have been
consulted as to the form assumed by these apparently fruitless
recommendations, so characteristic of the writer's frequent kindliness and
constant love of mischief. About this time Byron received a letter from
Mr. Shepherd, a gentleman in Somersetshire, referring to the death of his
wife, among whose papers he had found the record of a touching, because
evidently heart-felt, prayer for the poet's reformation, conversion, and
restored peace of mind. To this letter he at once returned an answer.
marked by much of the fine feeling of his best moods. Pisa, December 8:
"Sir, I have received your letter. I need not say that the extract which
it contains has affected me, because it would imply a want of all feeling
to have read it with indifference.... Your brief and simple picture of the
excellent person, whom I trust you will again meet, cannot be contemplated
without the admiration due to her virtues and her pure and unpretending
piety. I do not know that I ever met with anything so unostentatiously
beautiful. Indisputa