ich her family stood, in regard to
politics,--distressing and alarming. While the impression, too, of this
event was still recent, another circumstance occurred which, though
comparatively unimportant, had the unlucky effect of again drawing the
attention of the Tuscans to their new visitors. During Lord Byron's
short visit to Leghorn, a Swiss servant in his employ having quarrelled,
on some occasion, with the brother of Madame Guiccioli, drew his knife
upon the young Count, and wounded him slightly on the cheek. This
affray, happening so soon after the other, was productive also of so
much notice and conversation, that the Tuscan government, in its horror
of every thing like disturbance, thought itself called upon to
interfere; and orders were accordingly issued, that, within four days,
the two Counts Gamba, father and son, should depart from Tuscany. To
Lord Byron this decision was, in the highest degree, provoking and
disconcerting; it being one of the conditions of the Guiccioli's
separation from her husband, that she should thenceforward reside under
the same roof with her father. After balancing in his mind between
various projects,--sometimes thinking of Geneva, and sometimes, as we
have seen, of South America,--he at length decided, for the present, to
transfer his residence to Genoa.

His habits of life, while at Pisa, had but very little differed, except
in the new line of society into which his introduction to Shelley's
friends led him,--from the usual monotonous routine in which, so
singularly for one of his desultory disposition, the daily course of
his existence had now, for some years, flowed. At two he usually
breakfasted, and at three, or, as the year advanced, four o'clock, those
persons who were in the habit of accompanying him in his rides, called
upon him. After, occasionally, a game of billiards, he proceeded,--and,
in order to avoid starers, in his carriage,--as far as the gates of the
town, where his horses met him. At first the route he chose for these
rides was in the direction of the Cascine and of the pine-forest that
reaches towards the sea; but having found a spot more convenient for his
pistol exercise on the road leading from the Porta alla Spiaggia to the
east of the city, he took daily this course during the remainder of his
stay. When arrived at the Podere or farm, in the garden of which they
were allowed to erect their target, his friends and he dismounted, and,
after devoting about h