and the
enchanted coast.

Leaving Spezia very early in the morning, there is nothing more
delightful than the voyage across the land-locked bay, past the
beautiful headlands and secret coves, to San Terenzo and Lerici. If you
leave the steamer at San Terenzo, you may walk along a sort of seawall,
built out of the cliff and boulders of the shore, round more than one
little promontory, to Lerici, whose castle seems to guard the Tuscan
sea. Walking thus along the shore, you pass the Villa Magni, Shelley's
house, standing, not as it used to do, up out of the sea, for the road
has been built really in the waves; but in many ways the same still, for
instance with the broad balcony on the first storey, which pleased
Shelley so much; and though a second storey has been added since, and
even the name of the house changed, a piece of vandalism common enough
in Italy to-day, where, since they do not even spare their own
traditions and ancient landmarks, it would be folly to expect them to
preserve ours, still you may visit the rooms in which he lived with
Mary, and where he told Claire of the death of Allegra.

The house stands facing the sea in the deepest part of the bay, nearer
to San Terenzo than to Lerici. Both Trelawney and Williams had been
searching all the spring for a summer villa for the Shelleys, who, a
little weary perhaps of Byron's world, had determined to leave Pisa and
to spend the summer on the Gulf of Spezia. Byron was about to establish
himself just beyond Livorno, on the slopes of Montenero, in a huge and
rambling old villa with eighteenth century frescoes on the walls, and a
tangled park and garden running down to the dusty Livorno highway. The
place to-day is a little dilapidated, and its statues broken, but in the
summer months it becomes the paradise of a school of girls, a fact which
I think might have pleased Byron.

However, the Shelleys were thinking of no such faded splendour as Villa
Dupoy for their summer retreat. "Shelley had no pride or vanity to
provide for," says Trelawney, "yet we had the greatest difficulty in
finding any house in which the humblest civilised family could exist.

"On the shores of this superb bay, only surpassed in its natural beauty
and capability by that of Naples, so effectually had tyranny paralysed
the energies and enterprise of man, that the only indication of human
habitation was a few most miserable fishing villages scattered along the
margin of the bay. Near its c