quented by them is held), could amply testify, were it worth
while. I was persecuted by these tourists even to my riding ground at
Lido, and reduced to the most disagreeable circuits to avoid them. At
Madame Benzoni's I repeatedly refused to be introduced to them; of a
thousand such presentations pressed upon me, I accepted two, and both
were to Irish women."

Shelley visited Byron at the Mocenigo Palace in 1818 on a matter
concerning Byron's daughter Allegra and Claire Clairmont, whom the other
poet brought with him. They reached Venice by gondola from Padua, having
the fortune to be rowed by a gondolier who had been in Byron's employ
and who at once and voluntarily began to talk of him, his luxury and
extravagance. At the inn the waiter, also unprovoked, enlarged on the
same alluring theme. Shelley's letter describing Byron's Venetian home
is torn at its most interesting passage and we are therefore without
anything as amusing and vivid as the same correspondent's account of his
lordship's Ravenna menage. Byron took him for a ride on the Lido, the
memory of which formed the opening lines of _Julian and Maddalo_.
Thus:--

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with a remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode;--for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonizing with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.

When the ride was over and the two poets were returning i