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Last Links with 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats 
 
Last Links with 
 
 Byron, Shelley, and 
 
 Keats 
 
 WILLIAM GRAHAM 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LEONARD SMITHERS & CO. 
 
 S OLD BOND STREET, W. 
 
 1898 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 pag£ 
 IlflTRODUCTION ..... ix 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Chats with Jane Clermont . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 Chats with Jane Clermont — continued . . 35 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The Secret of the Byron Separation . . 64 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Keats and Severn . . . .98 
 
 ii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I HAVE been asked to write an introduction to the 
 following articles, appearing now for the first time 
 in book form — an introduction rendered doubtless 
 to some extent necessary by the numerous contro- 
 versies they aroused, and the great attention they 
 claimed at the time of their appearance in monthly 
 review form. The writer may perhaps be permitted 
 to say without egotism that it appears to him that 
 a longer life than the fugitive life of the magazine 
 or review paper is due to articles written under 
 such very exceptional conditions ; or rather he 
 should say it is due to the public that papers 
 throwing such a flood of new light upon the person- 
 alities of the three greatest poets of this century 
 should be permanently preserved in book form. He 
 himself is a man who, having been imbued from 
 childhood with a passionate love, almost idolatry, 
 of poetry and poets, and having in earliest youth 
 been granted special opportunities of conversing 
 with two of those who played so prominent a part 
 in the lives of these three great poets, and even of 
 forming an intimate and affectionate friendship with 
 one of them, is placed in a unique position in 
 regard to the present (indeed, almost in regard to 
 the immediately preceding) generation, and it would 
 
 ix 
 
be mere affectation for him to attempt to deny, 
 what all the leading organs of the press stated at 
 the time of their appearance, that these articles 
 possess a unique literary value. The writer looks 
 upon himself as a mere humble instrument. Possibly, 
 indeed probably, it is rare in the history of the 
 press that a series of review articles have created 
 such feverish excitement as these. Leaders were 
 allotted to them in nearly all the prominent metro- 
 politan and provincial papers, and in many American 
 and colonial journals. Several well-known con- 
 tinental journals also reviewed them at length — a 
 most unusual compliment to be paid by critics, 
 whether French or German, to articles of a purely 
 literary nature in English reviews ; though the 
 attention they attracted in Italy is no doubt more 
 easily explained, as all the three great poets of whom 
 my articles speak, and both of my interlocutors who 
 were the media of my obtaining such exceptional 
 information as to those three mighty companions 
 of the past who have made with refracted splendour 
 their own names immortal too, lived in Italy — the 
 great poets for a large part of their short lives, and 
 the others for a proportional part of their extended 
 lives — while all except Byron died there ; indeed, 
 almost every one connected with Byron and Shelley 
 seems to have gravitated sooner or later to that 
 enchanted land. 
 
 For the most part the press of all countries was 
 most kindly, and all such reviewers I cordially thank, 
 but certain weak-minded Shelley enthusiasts took 
 another tack, and attacked me bitterly for what they 
 were pleased to consider as the vilification of their 
 idol's character. As regards Byron my joints re- 
 
mained unwrung ; and the only two living men, 
 except perhaps Mr Jeaffreson, whom I consider 
 capable of expressing in any way an authorative 
 opinion on the subject — namely, Mr Kegan Paul 
 and Mr Murray — told me that they consider my 
 final article, " The Secret of the Byron Separation," 
 the true and only explanation of the mystery which 
 has always overshadowed that mysterious breach. 
 But Byron has not been such a prey for the faddist 
 and the fainiant as Shelley. Byron was complex 
 indeed ; but his was essentially a masculine com- 
 plexity. It was not the complexity of Shelley, or 
 rather the eccentricity of Shelley (for, with all his 
 genius and obscurity, the man was, to my mind, 
 not particularly complex) which horrified the Mrs 
 Grundy, if that lady were then invented, of the 
 early century even more than Byron, but who would 
 have been considered, in our larger-minded age, 
 almost fitted to deliver lectures in Exeter Hall, or, 
 •at least, to write for the Nineteenth Century, the 
 review in which my own two first chaste articles 
 of this series appeared. Byron would have been a 
 mauvais sujet at any epoch, but his was the 
 " naughtiness " for which the world has more human 
 sympathy than for the dogmas and dreams of 
 Shelley's overwrought brain. But in those days of 
 the early century a hatred and distrust of all ideas 
 in any way connected with the French Revolution 
 was in the air, and the age when men could believe 
 what they pleased and say what they pleased pro- 
 vided they conformed fairly well to the usages of 
 society and the aforesaid Mrs Grundy, was far from 
 dawning, although rank profligacy was considered 
 very excusable, if not even an ornament to a young 
 
 xi 
 
nobleman. Shelley's ideas, which he insisted with 
 true propagandist zeal in ramming into the very 
 teeth of the society of the day, brought him into 
 far more trouble than Byron's profligacy would ever 
 have done for him. The real original reason of the 
 outcry against Byron was simply that the women 
 made such a ridiculous fuss about him that the men 
 grew jealous, and were not satisfied until he was 
 hounded out of England. 
 
 There is, however, a clique which had made what 
 Mr Rudyard Kipling would term " a little tin god " 
 of Shelley ; and the members of this absurd coterie, 
 in affecting to raise their idol above ordinary 
 human nature, really do his fame nothing but great 
 disservice in depicting him as what that very 
 caustic and sarcastic lady Miss Clairmont termed 
 "an inspired idiot." Some of these good people 
 seemed to have contracted the idea that Shelley is 
 their exclusive property, and have attacked me 
 furiously because in my pages he has been set 
 before the world as a reasonable being, upon the 
 authority of one who had the best opportunities of 
 judging. To this I have, however, alluded in the 
 body of this book ; but as an amusing instance of 
 what I mean by saying that some of these people 
 would appear to consider Shelley as a personal 
 appanage I may mention that, among endless 
 letters from all sorts and conditions of people, 
 which the following chapters have procured me, I 
 received one from a rather noted Shelleyolater, who 
 was much incensed with me for stating that the 
 Shelleys had visited Marlow in 1815, as there was 
 no record of a residence there before 18 17. I did 
 not think it worth while replying to the letter, but 
 
 xii 
 
shortly afterwards chanced to meet the same gentle- 
 man, among the weird shades of the underground 
 one dark winter's night. I am a naturally timid 
 man, and the reader may imagine my terror when 
 a sepulchral voice called out my name from the 
 corner of the carriage, half-hidden as was the figure 
 of the speaker in the fog and gloom. The infuriated 
 Shelleyan, or rather (for I yield to no one in my 
 admiration of Shelley, it is only to the manner of 
 it that I take exception) let me say, Shelleyolater, 
 took me roundly to task, first, for not replying to 
 his letter, the contents of which he repeated. I 
 merely replied that I presumed as he was born 
 some considerable time after Shelley's death he 
 would scarcely set up a claim to omniscience as to 
 the manner in which Shelley employed every day 
 of his life, and that although it was perfectly true 
 that the Shelleys did not permanently reside in 
 Marlow until 1817, I could certainly see no possible 
 object in Miss Clairmont's telling me of this ex- 
 pedition to look for a house there just previously 
 to the Geneva meeting, if such an event had never 
 taken place, when my irate interlocutor made himself 
 supremely ridiculous by the surely unprecedented ob- 
 jection on the part of a man who is supposed to be one 
 of " light and leading," or in any case of learning, by 
 making, I say, the extraordinary objection to Miss 
 Clairmont's account of her visit with Byron to the 
 Shelleys, and the incident of the French prisoners, 
 that "the idea of French prisoners being sent to 
 Marlow was absurd." "Why" (I again quote) 
 "should they be sent to Marlow?" That is a 
 question I cannot profess to answer ; but as many 
 much less omniscient people than Macaulay's 
 
 xiii 
 
"school-boy" know, French prisoners were sent to 
 all sorts of out-of-the-way places, and particularly 
 along the river, and that a number of them were 
 sent to Marlow under the circumstances I (as the 
 mouthpiece of Miss Clairmont) relate, is notorious ; 
 and to the present day the remains of the chains 
 by which they were attached can be seen in the 
 walls which divide the quaint old garden of "The 
 Crown " from the stable-yard. 
 
 Tantaene animis coelestibus irae ! 
 
 What utter nonsense the paltry passions of envy and 
 jealousy can make a man talk, even one supposed to 
 be learned ; but I at least will be generous, and not 
 mention this particular celestial's name. Oddly 
 enough, however, I rather fancy he is a member 
 of the Omar Khayyam Club, which even now, 
 as I write this in the sweet scented air of this 
 summer of summers a little farther up stream, 
 is holding high festival — one of its periodical 
 high festivals — at the Crown Inn. Perchance, 
 therefore, by this time " mine enemy " has taken 
 the opportunity de se renseigner — at least, let us 
 hope so. 
 
 I may add to this, that Miss Clairmont explained 
 to me that, on the occasion of the visit she and 
 Byron paid to the Shelleys, at Marlow, the latter 
 were actually living at Bishopsgate, farther down 
 the river ; but that Shelley's intimate friend, Thomas 
 Love Peacock, who also shared the singular fate 
 of nearly all his intimates, and lived to extreme 
 old age, was stopping at Marlow, and constantly 
 came over to see them ; while Shelley, who was a 
 superb walker, and devoted to the river, which gave 
 the inspiration to some of his finest poetry, often 
 
 xiv 
 
accompanied him, not only to Marlow, but to much 
 more remote parts of the river. On this occasion 
 the two were on a visit of a couple of days or so 
 to Peacock — a kind of prospecting expedition — as 
 he was very anxious that they should also take up 
 their abode in that charming little town, which, as 
 a matter of fact, they did the following year. I need 
 not add that Peacock's name became subsequently 
 familiar to all with more than an outside acquaint- 
 ance with English literature, and that he was one 
 of the finest classical scholars of this century — indeed 
 his ultra-correct, classical taste even led him to the 
 extreme of disapproving somewhat of Shelley's 
 magnificent lyric drama. The Prometheus Unbound. 
 The reason why the Shelleys did not present 
 him to Byron is, I should say, obvious, even to 
 the clique to which I have alluded. 
 
 Another strange complaint made by Shelleyolaters 
 against me is that I have given it to be understood 
 that Shelley and his sister-in-law (as I will call 
 Miss Clairmont for the nonce) were — what shall I 
 say? How shall I put it? My natural timidity 
 comes in here again — well, not absolutely on such 
 platonic terms as might be desired. I beg your 
 pardon, my dear Shelleyolaters ; I made no such rash 
 statement or insinuation. I have been merely the 
 humble reporter of what Miss Clairmont said to 
 me ; and if you choose to put nasty ungenerous 
 constructions upon this, that is no fault of mine. 
 You will remember, if you have attentively perused 
 my first article, that my ears were soundly boxed 
 for a moment's aberration of faith in this respect. 
 Miss Clairmont told me that those relations were 
 always tout ce qu'il y a de plus platonique ; and if I 
 
 XV 
 
did not always believe what a lady told me, that 
 was surely a very practical incentive to faith. But 
 one of my Shelleyolater critics really makes me 
 smile a little at his naivete, because he says that 
 the insinuation (or rather more than an insinuation) 
 made by Byron in his letter to Hoppner as to 
 Shelley's relations with Miss Clairmont could not 
 possibly have any truth in it, because, Shelley denied 
 it with indignation in a letter which is extant. But, 
 my dear Shelleyolater, men who are gentlemen 
 have a way of denying these things, it is the only 
 kind of lie that beseems a gentleman's lips ; besides 
 Shelley's indignation, if you will kindly refer to his 
 letter, was not caused by the suggestion that he 
 might be on terms of greater intimacy with Miss 
 Clairmont than desirable in a well-regulated house- 
 hold, but by the suggestion that she had had a 
 child by him which had been sent to the Florence 
 Foundling and this was quite a mistake, so far in 
 any case, as Shelley was concerned. The rights of the 
 story are known to myself, and I do not intend to 
 say anything further thereon until 1901, when owing 
 to the publication of the Hobhouse Memoirs I shall 
 be at liberty to deal with Clairmont matters in full, 
 eight years earlier than my promise to the lady 
 would otherwise have permitted me. I must say 
 this much, however, that all these Shelleyolater 
 critics seem singularly ignorant of the feminine 
 disposition. Women rarely make pointblank state- 
 ments, especially about so delicate a thing as 
 love ; they are not logical, bless their sweet hearts ! 
 My critics would appear to wish them as prosaic 
 as if love were to be ladled out, like tea or bacon, 
 by the pound. 
 
 xvi 
 
In any case, everything connected with Shelley 
 seems to bear the same ethereal hallmark as his 
 poetry. 
 
 It has been remarked several times to be singular 
 that I should, at the early age of twenty, have been 
 upon sufficiently intimate terms with Miss Clairmont 
 to have gained her confidence to the extent I did, 
 and that none of the residents in Florence at the 
 time should have succeeded in doing so ; but, as 
 regards my age, that was probably a good deal in 
 my favour, for I may say without vanity now that 
 I was a decidedly good-looking boy in those days, 
 with dark curly locks clustering over a marble brow, 
 as the old novels put it, instead of as now a wisp 
 of dingy grey fringing a wide expanse where all is 
 brow. Old ladies often will make pets of boys 
 when a man of forty would not be in the betting, 
 to use a sporting phrase. 
 
 As to the residents in Florence, they were much 
 too taken up with their lawn tennis (which had then 
 just come in) and afternoon tea-parties and scandal 
 to think much of the old associations of the town, 
 or of the survivals of a great past who might still 
 live there. And they were used to celebrities of all 
 kinds ; it was not so very long before that a genius 
 contemporary with Byron and Shelley and Keats, 
 whom some, ridiculously enough ! put on a level 
 with them, had passed away in Florence : Walter 
 Savage Landor. 
 
 Miss Clairmont, in any case, persistently refused 
 to receive almost anyone, which whetted my desire 
 to speak face to face with this wonderful survival 
 of the past. Such people as she did know looked 
 upon her as a very amiable, if rather eccentric, old 
 b xvii 
 
lady, and thought little else of the matter, though 
 the one thing which surprised all was her still 
 marvellous beauty. 
 
 I may mention that I first learned that such a 
 lady still lived, while reading the World news- 
 paper in the English Club at Pau, and shortly 
 afterwards travelled from thence to Florence for 
 the express purpose of making her acquaintance. 
 With Mr Severn, of course, my relations were 
 quite different. I called upon him three times, that 
 was all. He was a dear old man ; but as regards 
 him I have nothing to add to what I have 
 already said in my article entitled " Keats and 
 Severn." The main piece of novel information 
 I have been able to place before the public as 
 regards Mr Severn or Keats is that the news, 
 through the publication of the Fanny Brawne 
 correspondence, that the death of Keats was caused 
 by this infatuation, was as much of a surprise (and 
 in his case shock) to Mr Severn as to the rest 
 of the world. 
 
 I have only to add that I have divided the book 
 into four chapters, so as to present a more connected 
 whole than if the actual "review" form were pre- 
 served, but the first two chapters were originally 
 articles in the numbers of the Nineteenth Century for 
 November 1893 and January 1894, with the same 
 title as that under which they now appear. The 
 Keats and Severn paper appeared in The New 
 Review (now defunct) while under the editorship of 
 Mr Archibald Grove, and the last and most im- 
 portant of the whole series, "The Secret of the 
 Byron Separation," in the at present moribund 
 Twentieth Century in 1895. 
 
 xviii 
 
Under the promise I gave Miss Clairmont, I am 
 precluded from writing more in connection with 
 her confidences until 1901 — that year which Matthew 
 Arnold has prophetically said will witness a general 
 stocktaking of the poetry of the century with a view 
 to an award of the poetic crown. The great critic 
 foretold Byron as the successful competitor from 
 the shades ; and perhaps he was right. To my mind 
 (and perhaps, having known, as I did, the last two 
 links, except Trelawney, which bound the present 
 generation to these three wonderful poets, I have a 
 right to speak) — to my mind, then, Keats, supreme 
 , artist as he was, is not entitled by the body of his 
 work to rank with the other two, and my opinion 
 as to its quality I have given in my fourth chapter. 
 Between the other two it would be almost an im- 
 possible task to decide, so different are their claims ; 
 but I think that unless some new dazzling poetic 
 star should spring up on the horizon between now 
 and 1 90 1 (and there is no time to lose), the century's 
 poetic crown must be awarded to one or other, or 
 that they must be dually crownpd as the poetic 
 dioscuri of the nineteenth century. Apart from 
 their work the glamour of their lives is such 
 that their names will never fade from men's 
 memories. When other poets of the age shall 
 have become mere names, the memory of the 
 divine singer who found beautiful death, so longed 
 for, among the wine -dark waves of that tideless 
 sea whose shores were the dim empires of 
 forgotten ages, and the soldier bard who gained 
 the oft-desired hero's death in that Greece which 
 had first fixed his young fancy, will be still quick 
 and thrilling. 
 
 xix 
 
Until 1 90 1, therefore, my pen must be idle on 
 this subject, and then when all restrictions are 
 removed, and on the dawn of a new century, I shall 
 have my final word to say. 
 
 WILLIAM GRAHAM. 
 
 September 1898. 
 
 XX 
 
CHATS WITH JANE CLERMONT 
 
 It is years ago now, and almost seems like some 
 deep, sweet dream of bygone ages, so coloured is 
 the reminiscence by the shades of two poets, since, 
 when a boy in my early twenties, filled with enthu- 
 siasm for Byron and Shelley, I journeyed from the 
 extreme south-west of France to Florence to see 
 Jane Clermont — the once brilliant and espikgle Jane 
 Clermont, who had witched the two greatest poets 
 of our country with her loveliness and her charm. 
 No doubt youthful ambition as well as natural 
 curiosity impelled me, for I knew well how difficult 
 of access the lady was. I knew that, though 
 Trelawney, the Guiccioli, and others, who had taken 
 part in the life-drama of the mighty poets (that 
 short and stormy life -drama, interspersed at in- 
 tervals with oases of pure delight and pleasant 
 companionship), had proved ready enough of access, 
 this lady alone had resolutely declined to see anyone. 
 None of the numberless Shelleyan and Byronian 
 biographers and critics had succeeded in obtaining 
 a hearing from the once arch enchantress and now 
 religious recluse from that world of which she had 
 once been one of the gayest worldlings. And the 
 A I 
 
more I thought of this, the more did I, Shelley and 
 Byron mad, determine that, co'Ate que coUte, I would 
 see her. 
 
 And so it befell that one spring day in 
 1878 I found myself, after much manoeuvring 
 and correspondence and intervention of priests, 
 strolling on my way to the abode of Jane 
 Clermont. It was one of those divine spring 
 mornings, when all nature seems to burst forth 
 into a revel of awakening life, so characteristic 
 of the Italian spring, and so different to ours, with 
 its softer, subtler beauties, equally lovely though 
 they may be. The city of Lorenzo and Savonarola 
 glowed in the golden light, and Shelley's de- 
 scription of Italy's awakening spring, in his letter 
 to Leigh Hunt, was irresistibly brought back to 
 my mind. I arrived at last at the old dark Italian 
 house, and, on inquiring for the lady who was 
 the object of my visit, was shown into an old- 
 fashioned sixteenth-century room, which served as 
 sitting-room, and informed that the signora would 
 be with me presently. Meantime, I passed my 
 time in looking round the room : it was a quaint, 
 dark, old Italian room, furnished in ultra - Italian 
 style, but not in the style of the Italy of to-day, 
 rather that of the thirties or forties ; and on the 
 walls were two Madonnas and several crucifixes, 
 beside one of which, by a strange irony, hung a 
 portrait of Shelley — Shelley, the arch poetical 
 iconoclast ! What would he have said to " Claire " 
 
amid such surroundings ? At last a lady entered, 
 and a strange thrill passed over me as the vision 
 of so many of my boyish dreams stood before 
 me in flesh and blood, and Byron and Shelley 
 became as men I had known myself. 
 
 " Good-morning," she said, with a sprightly smile, 
 all out of keeping with those eighty years of life. 
 " So, you seem determined to see me ? " 
 
 " Madame, I have travelled here from the other 
 side of France to do so," I replied. " It would 
 indeed have been hard had you persisted in your 
 denial." 
 
 " Ah, curiosity, curiosity ! " the lady replied. " I 
 think our mother Eve bequeathed that quality in 
 quite as bountiful measure to her sons as to her 
 daughters. Well, my young friend, I condole with 
 you, coming here, no doubt, with dreams of Shelley 
 and Mary and their poor Claire (who was, I may 
 say without vanity now, a beautiful woman once) 
 and finding a wretched, worn-out old creature on 
 the threshold of the unknown. 
 
 Oh life, oh time ! 
 
 On whose last steps I climb, 
 
 as our dear Percy said." 
 
 I protested indignantly. 
 
 " Madame ! you are beautiful now as ever ; and 
 there is no age for those who have known Shelley, 
 and whom he loved. I am young now, but never, 
 if I live to a century, shall I have a greater privilege 
 
 3 
 
than this, to see the Constantia of Shelley, whose 
 voice was as sweet as the poet's song." 
 
 She smiled sweetly at my white heat of boyish 
 fervour, and told me to be seated. 
 
 What I had said as to beauty was true enough. 
 She was a lovely old lady : the eyes were still 
 bright, and sparkled at times with irony and fun ; 
 the complexion clear as at eighteen, and the 
 lovely white hair as beautiful in its way as the 
 glossy black tresses of youth must have been ; the 
 slender willowy figure had remained unaltered, as 
 though time itself had held that sacred and passed 
 by — a true woman of the poets. Well, now, could 
 I imagine the glorious beauty of fifty and sixty 
 years back, and well could I appreciate the jealous 
 rancour and malice of La Guiccioli. 
 
 " And so you persuaded the good father to 
 intercede with me," she said. " Oh, what a 
 Machiavel ! It seems you actually had the audacity 
 to tell him you were trembling on the verge of 
 the faith, and thought an interview with me 
 would turn the scale." 
 
 And she laughed with a very silvery . laugh. 
 
 I was a little surprised, for I had been given 
 to understand that Jane Clermont was a very 
 fervid religieuse, and replied with a smile, looking 
 round the room, " I thought the counsel of such 
 an exemplary divote would solve all my doubts 
 and lull all my troubles with the 'eternal croon' 
 of Rome." 
 
The lady was down upon me with that sharpness 
 which amused the Shelleys, but which the spoiled 
 Byron detested, and, no doubt, led to the eventual 
 separation. 
 
 "When you make quotations, my young friend," 
 she said, " you should always take care to mention 
 the original source ; however, ' eternal croon ' exactly 
 represents the influence of Rome on storm-beaten, 
 chequered lives like mine. There comes a time 
 when one is glad not to have the trouble of 
 reasoning — indeed, to have it forbidden — and to 
 resign oneself to blind faith as to sleep." 
 
 I smiled, and replied, " I can believe this, madame, 
 of some people, but surely not of the critical, witty 
 Jane Clermont, who seems much the same now as 
 in the days of Shelley." 
 
 " Oh no ! My poor old mind has undergone 
 many a shock since those days," said she. " I feel 
 that I must have something to lean upon. Roman 
 Catholicism is such a comforting religion, and I 
 receive so much comfort from that dear father." 
 
 It seemed to me that the lady's religion was not 
 very deeply ingrained, and it struck me as par- 
 ticularly strange ; one of her greatest complaints 
 against Byron in the past having been that he 
 brought her daughter up in the very religion of 
 which she was now, in exterior at least, such an 
 enthusiastic practitioner. Of course, however, I 
 could not allude to this extremely delicate subject, 
 and I contented myself with remarking : 
 
 S 
 
"What would Shelley say could he revisit the 
 glimpses of the moon, and see his beloved Claire 
 an abhorred Christian?" 
 
 " I don't know," she replied. " I think Shelley 
 would have forgiven me anything ; and I am not 
 sure that the thought of him did not lead to the 
 thought of Christ. How strange it all seems now, 
 when at last he is appreciated as perhaps the 
 greatest poet of all time, to think how I used to 
 box his ears and tease his life out ! " 
 
 A glint of sunshine passed, and the sweet Italian 
 breeze blew in at the open window. 
 
 " What a heavenly day ! " she exclaimed. " How 
 these perfect Italian days remind me of him, and 
 of Mary ! It seems almost impossible that such an 
 abyss of years can have passed since that awful day 
 when I first heard the news from Spezzia. And 
 this is the same Italy, the same Italy," she continued, 
 dreamily ; " and yet how different from the Italy 
 that he knew! but the same Italy; and I live here 
 still because it is sanctified to me by his memory." 
 
 " As you are to me," I replied. " I feel, I think, 
 the same sweet strangeness in looking upon you 
 that you must in looking upon Florence, and then 
 back through the years. Do you remember those 
 lines of Browning " 
 
 But she interrupted with : 
 
 " Did you see Shelley face to face, 
 And did he stop and speak to you.' 
 How strange it seems, and new ! 
 
 6 
 
Is that what you mean ? '' she said. 
 
 "Yes, madame," I replied. "I feel in talking 
 with you as though I were speaking with someone 
 who had been loved by the gods. I cannot ex- 
 plain to you the strange, weird feeling that I 
 experience." 
 
 " How he would have loved a morning like this ! " 
 she exclaimed, turning from the open window, with 
 a bright smile and a soft sigh. " I can see him 
 now running in like a boy ' drenched with the joy 
 of spring-time,' to use his own expression. He 
 loved spring best of all the seasons." And then, 
 looking at me with a smile, she said : 
 
 " Ah ! primavera gioventu del anno ; 
 Ah ! gioventu primavera del vita. 
 
 That man was not like any other. There did not 
 seem to be any separation in him from nature ; he 
 was as a part of it." 
 
 And then we fell-to talking about Shelley ; and 
 so fascinating was the subject that, though I had 
 paid my visit by appointment at eleven, it was 
 nearly one by the time I had an opportunity of 
 departing on my way ; and then the lady insisted 
 that I should remain to her d/feiiner, which she 
 took at one. A charming little lunch we had, by 
 an open window embosomed in flowers. 
 
 Although Miss Clermont had, as I knew, lost 
 most of the money which Shelley had left her in 
 the Lumley Italian Opera House disaster, yet she 
 
 7 
 
had evidently still sufficient to keep her in perfect 
 comfort, and even luxury. The d^jeHner was served 
 in a fashion which showed plainly that my hostes? 
 was accustomed to the good things of life ; and the 
 Chianti was a dream. 
 
 At last, I rose to wish my kind hostess adieu. I 
 had not heard half what I had wanted to hear, but 
 my position was a very delicate one. With a man 
 it would have been different : there are so many 
 things that one can ask of one's own sex that it 
 would be impossible to ask or even mention to a 
 lady. I had never alluded to the name of Byron, 
 and our talk of Shelley had been merely in the 
 general way above described. I was intensely 
 grateful and flattered by the charming courtesy 
 with which I had been received ; but disappointed, 
 for I had hoped to have heard more. 
 
 However, I had seen and conversed with the 
 beloved of the gods, and that was something that 
 no one else had done. 
 
 " Good-bye, madame," I said. " I cannot thank 
 you sufficiently for your kindness, and the honour 
 you have paid me. Believe me, I shall never 
 forget either." 
 
 But, to my surprise and delight, she said, " Au 
 revoir, but not adieu. You have come all the way 
 from England to see me, and do you think I am 
 going to let you run away like this ? " 
 
 "I would not be the first, madame," I meekly 
 replied. 
 
 8 
 
" Perhaps not," she said ; " but I feel I can depend 
 upon you. I have been keeping great watch on 
 you all the time" — and again that merry, silvery 
 laugh on which old age seemed to have no power 
 — "and I know that there are dozens of questions 
 I could see you were dying to ask, but tact pre- 
 vailed. No, I would never see anyone ; for " (and 
 a blush coloured the still beautiful tracery of the 
 skin) " I do not wish to be made, nolens volens, 
 the subject of a Byron-Shelley controversy. If, 
 however, you will treat me as a friend, and promise 
 me that you will, if you feel inclined to write, 
 publish nothing of me until ten years after my 
 death, and certain things that I will tell you not 
 till thirty years afterwards, I will make a clean 
 breast of everything to you. Will that suit you, 
 signor?" she asked, with another bewitching smile. 
 
 " I can only say, madame," I replied, " that you 
 will confer on me the greatest pleasure that I have 
 ever received, or ever will receive. I give my 
 promise, and you may depend upon the promise 
 being absolutely kept." 
 
 " I know 'that," the lady replied, " or I would not 
 have made the offer I did. Then I shall expect 
 you here every day while you are in Florence. I 
 go out very little, but usually either between eleven 
 and one in these lovely spring mornings, or about 
 five, to have the benefit of the Italian evenings, 
 which are equally sweet." 
 
 It was agreed that I should call for her the next 
 
 9 
 
afternoon at five, and that we should go for a drive 
 in the Lung Arno. 
 
 On returning to my hotel I made a note 
 of the various matters about which I wished to 
 converse with her. First : I wished to know the 
 circumstances relating to her original meeting with 
 Byron, and the growth of the intimacy. Second : 
 As to whether there had been any acquaintance 
 between Byron and Shelley prior to their meeting 
 at Geneva, and whether that meeting had been in 
 any way pre-arranged, both of which have always 
 been moot points. Third : I wished to ascertain 
 her feelings as to Byron and Shelley respectively, 
 and particularly the latter, as to which there had 
 always been so much gossip, beginning with Byron 
 and Hoppner, and colour to which had undoubtedly 
 been lent by Shelley's legacy of ;!^i 2,000. Fourth: 
 I wished to ascertain the general character and 
 personal manner of the two men from the lips of 
 one who had possessed, perhaps better than anyone, 
 opportunities of judging them — opportunities which 
 her quick satirical power of observation had un- 
 doubtedly not allowed her to throw away. I 
 looked forward to these further opportunities of 
 conversation with the liveliest pleasure; for, apart 
 from the absolutely novel information as to these 
 fascinating personalities and their entourage, I 
 saw clearly that I should obtain, and the 
 weird delight of conversation with this survival 
 from the past — that strange, enchanting past of 
 
 10 
 
Leman and of Italy — a past of over sixty years 
 back, but more real than was to-day, so clothed 
 and transfigured was it by the dazzling light of 
 poetry; besides all this, there was in the lady 
 herself a charm which old age could not kill — 
 a charm that must once have been all-powerful. I 
 looked forward to next day's drive almost as much 
 for that reason as for what I should hear. 
 
 There were no signs of old age about this woman 
 of the poets, except the white hair ; the voice was 
 as clear as a bell, the hearing and intellect as 
 acute as ever, and the eyes as bright. It was a 
 rare privilege. 
 
 The next day, at five, I called in the carriage 
 for Miss Clermont, and we drove together along 
 the Lung Arno. 
 
 " It must seem strange and dream-like to you," 
 I said, "driving along this road, which you must 
 have known so well with Shelley and Mary, with a 
 wretched latter nineteenth-century man." 
 
 " No doubt the downcome is great," she replied, 
 with that wicked smile which youth had passed on 
 to age undiminished in malice and in mirth ; " but 
 yes, as you say, it seems all like a dream : perhaps 
 after all, as Shelley said, life is only a dream. I 
 seriously rather tend to believe that. The past 
 seems so much more real than the present. Do 
 you know those words of Goethe's ? — 
 
 Was neu geschah das seh' ich wie im weiten, 
 Und was verschwand wird mir zur Wirklichkeiten. 
 
 II 
 
They are the only words I know which exactly 
 express what I mean ; but you will feel just the 
 same when you are my age." 
 
 " Ah, madame ! I trust that will not be," I said. 
 " Over you the years pass by, as by one sacred to 
 the gods, as though time himself had enjoined 
 them to pass only in play ; and when death comes 
 at last, he will come, oh, so softly ! But the years 
 do not deal thus with others, and I should have 
 no glorious memories — memories annihilating time 
 — to look back upon." 
 
 " Ah, but I long for death ! " she said. " Death 
 represents to me all that is beautiful and to be 
 desired. The mere objective view of it is pleasing 
 to me — blissful, changeless rest. Ah ! my child, 
 may you never grow to want rest, rest, rest, as I 
 do ! But I do believe what we call death has 
 vastly deeper meanings than mere repose," she 
 continued. " I believe, with Shelley, that it is 
 but the gateway to worlds and worlds of iniinite 
 possibilities, and not for one single moment do 
 I ever doubt that I shall meet my beloved one 
 again. To speak of annihilation in connection with 
 Shelley seems mere rank absurdity. I do not 
 believe anyone who once knew that man could 
 do so." 
 
 "Then, holding these ideas, what need for the 
 ' eternal croon ' ? " I said. 
 
 The lady replied Socratic-like by another question : 
 
 " Why take opium or haschish ? " 
 
 12 
 
" Tell me now of Shelley and Byron," I requested. 
 
 At the last name, the first time I had mentioned it, 
 a momentary frown contracted her brow. 
 
 " Of course," she said, " you know how unpleasant 
 any mention of that man is to me, and I appreciate 
 your delicacy in making no allusion to him until I 
 had promised to tell you everything." 
 
 " But surely he was a great man, and a noble 
 character, despite his faults," I said ; " and you are 
 too large-minded to bear hate beyond the grave." 
 
 " I bear no hate," was her reply, " only absolute 
 indifference, and a great deal of contempt in some 
 respects ; and the subject is naturally unpleasant. I 
 see you quite misunderstand matters, as probably 
 most people do. Hate follows often very close on 
 the heels of love ; but I never loved Byron." 
 
 And before I could reply she stopped my mouth 
 with those " snowy fingers " of Constantia, which 
 were youthful yet, saying : 
 
 " Listen ! and I will tell you the whole story. It 
 is perhaps as well that it should be told at last, and 
 then you can, if you please, make the right facts 
 known after the time I have told you to wait has 
 elapsed. The real facts never have been known yet, 
 and none of the biographers have been right." 
 
 This is the story she told me. 
 
 "In 1815, when I was a very young girl, Byron 
 was the rage. When I say the rage, I mean what 
 you people nowadays can perhaps hardly conceive. 
 I suppose no man who ever lived has possessed the 
 
 13 
 
extraordinary celebrity of Lord Byron in such an 
 intense, haunting, almost maddening degree. And 
 this celebrity extended all over the Continent to as 
 great an extent as in England ; and, remember, in 
 those days there were no railways or telegraphs.'' 
 
 I interpolated here : " Even now, when there are 
 railways and telegraph-wires everywhere, none of 
 our writers are much known abroad. It is very 
 curious, sometimes, when mentioning some well- 
 known English writer's name to a foreigner, to find 
 he has never heard it, although one had thought the 
 renown European. I suppose Tennyson is the only 
 present English writer whose fame is European." 
 
 " Yes," replied she ; " but Tennyson has never had 
 the same kind of fame as Byron. His has been 
 a steady, equable light ; Byron's was a short, fierce, 
 blinding glare : and, as I say, all Europe was so 
 enthralled with the magic of the man's very name, 
 that the sensation he made even discounted, to 
 some extent, the sensation of Waterloo. It was a 
 troubling, morbid obsession, the influence he exer- 
 cised over all, and especially over the youth of 
 England of both sexes. The young poetasters used 
 to imitate his dress and appearance as far as they 
 could, and the girls made simple idiots of them- 
 selves about him. Numberless letters used to come 
 to him daily, often of the most absurd description, 
 from the languishing fair. He usually converted 
 them into cigar-lights : at that time he had rather a 
 fancy for cigar-smoking, which he gave up later on. 
 
 14 
 
" Well, at the time when he was at the very height 
 of his fame, and I was a young girl, filled with all 
 kinds of fancies, encouraged instead of checked by 
 the circle in which I lived — Godwin and my sister 
 (as I always was taught to call her), Mary Shelley, 
 and Shelley himself, who floated in and out of the 
 house with his wild notions and sweet ways, like 
 some unearthly spirit ; in the days when Byron was 
 manager of Drury Lane Theatre, I bethought myself 
 that I would go on to the stage. Our means were 
 very narrow, and it was necessary for me to do some- 
 thing, and this seemed to suit me better than anything 
 else ; in any case, it was the only form of occupation 
 congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement. 
 I think it was Shelley who first of all suggested my 
 applying to Byron, and it is very probable that the 
 suggestion came in that way, for Shelley was Byron- 
 mad at that time, and Byron's verses were always on 
 his lipsylndeed, Shelley up to the last was a most 
 enthusiastic admirer of Byron, although I believe it 
 is the fashion among certain critics nowadays to say 
 the reverse. His admiration of the man wore off, no 
 doubt, and for the same reasons that mine did, and 
 the fact of knowing the man as well as he did no 
 doubt coloured his admiration of the poet, which 
 was once idolatry ; but his admiration ' on this 
 side idolatry,' as Ben Johnson said of Shakespeare, 
 remained unchanged/ I called, then, on Byron in 
 his capacity of manager, and he promised to do 
 what he could to help me as regards the stage. 
 
 IS 
 
The result you know. I am too old now to play 
 with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, 
 and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent, so 
 famous that people, and especially young people, 
 hardly considered him as a man at all, but rather 
 as a god. His beauty was as haunting as his fame, 
 and he was all-powerful in the direction in which 
 my ambition turned. It seems to me almost need- 
 less to say that the attentions of a man like this, 
 with all London at his feet, very quickly completely 
 turned the head of a girl in my position ; and when 
 you recollect that I was brought up to consider 
 marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely 
 sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, 
 you will scarcely wonder at the result, which you 
 know. Whatever may have been my faults, I have 
 never been given to cant, and I do not intend to 
 begin now at eighty. A few months after my 
 first meeting with Byron the final crash came, and 
 he left England. The time during which I knew 
 him in England was the time of the avalanche of 
 his misfortunes, when he had disappeared from the 
 world, when London was raging against him, and 
 he saw almost no one but me. 
 
 " Shortly before Byron left England, in April 
 1816, I went with Shelley and Mary to Geneva. 
 No doubt you have read about our previous peculiar 
 expedition, the year before, the Waterloo year," 
 she added, with a laugh. " How we traversed France 
 in a donkey-chaise. Oh dear, dear ! What a happy, 
 
 16 
 
funny time it was, and what queer places we stopped 
 at sometimes ! " 
 
 " Yes ; you must have had great fun," I replied. 
 " I have often thought how glorious it would have 
 been to have been one of the party. Tell me now, 
 please, a thing which no one seems to have settled. 
 There is a house in Marlow which has the inscrip- 
 tion on the outside to the effect that Shelley lived 
 there, and was visited there by Lord Byron, above 
 a quotation from Shelley's Adonais. Is this the 
 case? Did Shelley know Byron before they met 
 in Geneva, and did Byron ever visit him there? 
 All the biographers seem to insist that they never 
 saw one another before the meeting in Geneva, and 
 that Shelley only took the house after returning 
 from Geneva, whereas Byron never returned to 
 England again." 
 
 "Quite right," she replied. "But we spent a 
 great deal of the summer and autumn of 1815 
 on the river, although it was not their head- 
 quarters ; in fact, it was on account of the fancy 
 that Shelley took to Marlow, and to the house, in 
 the Waterloo year, that we settled there at the 
 very end of the year following. 
 
 "Dear old place, how well I remember it, and 
 the sweet garden, too! Tell me, is that there 
 still?" 
 
 " Yes, yes," I replied. " Many a time I have 
 made pilgrimages to Marlow for the purpose of 
 lying on the mound at the end of the garden 
 B 17 
 
through a summer afternoon, because they told 
 me that Shelley wrote and read there. Is that 
 true ? " 
 
 " Quite true," she replied. " He would spend 
 hours on that mound. How well I can picture 
 his graceful, boyish figure reclining there with his 
 favourite Plato, or Sophocles, or Spenser, with the 
 beautiful English sunlight playing on him ! Oh, 
 what lovely days we had on that dear river 1 
 Mary and Shelley, of course, lived by it, and I 
 used to run down every now and then, and lived 
 with them on returning from Geneva. Ah, how 
 well I can remember that coach and that sweet, 
 breezy English country between London and 
 Marlow ! I have seen much beautiful scenery 
 since, but never anything to surpass Marlow and 
 Medmenham, and The Bisham and Quarry woods. 
 We lived entirely in the open air, picnicking in our 
 boats and in the woods. Shelley wrote Alastor, 
 I remember, at that time, and a great part of The 
 Revolt of Islam, and almost entirely in the open 
 air. Do people go much along the river now ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, madame, they do indeed ! " I said : 
 " but it is a very different matter now. Marlow 
 is only an hour from London by rail, and the 
 river from Kingston to Oxford swarms with cheap 
 trippers, while stucco villas are springing up every- 
 where ; but it is very lovely still, and some parts are 
 quite unspoiled, Marlow being one of them, I am 
 happy to say." 
 
" Is the old inn there still — The Crown ? " 
 "Most certainly," I replied. "When, in fits of 
 Shelley-mania, I make my pilgrimages to Marlow, 
 I always stop there. Is it not a sweet, quaint, 
 old place? I do not know how it appeared in 
 the days when you were at Marlow, but to me, 
 a being of this bustling, feverish railroad age, it 
 seems the quintessence of rest and peace. Many 
 is the drowsy day — those river days which, as 
 Tennyson says, ' are always afternoon ' — that I 
 have dreamed away there." 
 
 " And have you reserved all your enthusiasm 
 for Shelley, for the old house and the mound, 
 and reserved none for the inn?" 
 
 " Well, I must say," I answered, " I never thought 
 much of Shelley in connection with it. To begin 
 with, I knew he was a water-drinker, and he seems 
 far too ethereal a creature to connect with the 
 good English ale which has always been the pride 
 of The Crown. There are other great geniuses 
 whom one readily connects with old English inns, 
 but Shelley is hardly one of them." 
 Jane Clermont laughed merrily. 
 " But we girls ' had no objection ' to an occa- 
 sional 'pot of ale,' as your dear friend Byron put 
 it (for I can see you are an idolater at that shrine) ; 
 we often had our meals in the inn, and were 
 constantly in and out. I remember there was a 
 big dog always about in the garden we made a 
 great pet of I can see Shelley now coming from 
 
 19 
 
the river into that little inn-parlour, and his comical 
 face of disgust when he found us taking anything 
 of an alcoholic nature and meat food, and the 
 landlord's good-humoured banter of the poet, who 
 would live on lettuces and lemonade. Why, it 
 was really at that inn that the first meeting be- 
 tween Byron and Shelley took place, in August 
 1815." 
 
 " Indeed ! " I exclaimed, with astonishment ; " that 
 will certainly endow it with a new interest for 
 everyone. Tell me how was that?" 
 
 " In this way," she continued. " I had told 
 him much of Shelley, and he delightedly fell in 
 with my proposal to accompany me one day 
 when I had arranged to visit the Shelleys at 
 Marlow, where they were then stopping, a few 
 days. We started early one morning — a most 
 unusual thing for Byron to do, for he went to 
 bed about the time when Shelley left his, but 
 this time he made an exception — and we arrived at 
 Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour. They told 
 us at the house that Shelley and Mary were on the 
 river, but had left word that they would be in the 
 inn at two o'clock, when they expected to meet me. 
 Byron refreshed himself meantime with a huge mug 
 of beer — I remember well thinking how horrified the 
 worshippers of the ethereal poet would have been — 
 and hobbled after me through Marlow, which he had 
 not seen before. We very soon returned to the inn, 
 as his lame leg made walking almost an impossibility. 
 
 20 
 
A few minutes afterwards in came Shelley and Mary. 
 It was such a merry party that we made at lunch 
 in the inn parlour : Byron was in the spirits of a boy, 
 and Shelley was overjoyed at meeting his idolised'^ 
 poet, who had actually come all the way from London 
 to see him. The conversation varied from maddest 
 fun and frolic to grave subjects of 'fate, free-will, 
 and destiny,' and Shelley was great on the contrast 
 between the beauty of the scenery about us and what 
 he considered the degraded condition of the English 
 peasantry. ' Imagine scenes like these ! ' I remember 
 him saying, 'peopled by beings fit to inhabit them, 
 as, by the uprooting of a few tyrannous customs 
 and debasing superstitions, another generation might 
 make them.' • ' Pooh ! ' replied Byron, ' your poetry, 
 my dear Mr Shelley, is lovely ; but your ideas are, i— 
 •if you will pardon me, Utopiany' You may do with 
 mankind what you please, but you will never make 
 it anything else than the unsavoury congeries of 
 dupes and thieves that it is and always will be. 
 You might as well talk of implanting philanthropic 
 sentiments in the mind of a monkey, or tender 
 sentiments in that of a tiger, as of developing man 
 into an angel, which is practically what you suggest. 
 Indeed, man is a great deal worse than either. He 
 is the only brute which kills from aimless brutish- 
 ness.' I have never forgotten those words," she 
 added ; " they give the keynotes to the two men's 
 characters." 
 
 The lady then repeated to me fragments from 
 
 21 
 
many conversations between Byron and Shelley, 
 without any of the pretensions made by some con- 
 temporaries of both to absolute accuracy, but with 
 probably far more claim to it than most, for she had 
 a marvellous memory. I am afraid I was constantly 
 teasing her for conversations at different times 
 between the two great poets, and she always replied, 
 with a smile : 
 
 "You must remember I did not note down all 
 they said at the time, as you say you do with my 
 immortal words, but this is what was said, as 
 far as I can remember, and I think I am not far 
 wrong." 
 
 Perhaps at some future time I may be inclined 
 to give some of these dialogues to the world ; for if 
 she did not note them down at the time, I certainly 
 did do so, as they came from her lips, on returning 
 each evening to my own abode, with the words 
 fresh in my memory, and showed her the following 
 day what I had written. 
 
 Byron, she said, on the occasion of his visit to 
 Marlow remained the night at the inn, and left next 
 day for London by the coach. Early the following 
 year all was arranged for the meeting in Geneva. 
 At last, therefore, this matter is set at rest, as it 
 could have been by me any time since Jane 
 Clermont's death, had I not given the before- 
 mentioned promise to her. 
 
 " Did Shelley and Mary altogether approve, then, 
 of this intimacy ? " I asked. 
 
 22 
 
" Most certainly," she replied, briefly. " I have 
 already told you — what you know, of course, 
 already — what the Shelleys' opinions on these 
 matters were, or what Shelley's were, because 
 Mary docilely followed his lead in these things ; 
 and in a lasting union, as he hoped it would be, 
 between his sister-in-law, as he always called me, 
 and a man whom he at that time considered 
 •^ almost as a god, he saw nothing but what should 
 ardently be desired. He thought that I would 
 be to Byron what Mary was to him. Alas, alas ! 
 little did any one of us understand what Byron 
 really was then." 
 
 " But Shelley married Mary as soon as he 
 could?" 
 
 " Yes," she replied ; " to gratify Godwin's wish. 
 
 Of course, as you know, Godwin, as described in 
 
 "^ The Revolt of Islam, was his idol ; but he none the 
 
 less, and always, distinctly disapproved of marriage 
 
 as an institution." 
 
 And now our drive was over. We passed through 
 the city of flowers, dome and cupola gilded by the 
 soft light of the setting sun ; and further conversation 
 was postponed until next day. 
 
 Next day it was arranged that I was to call again 
 for Miss Clermont for a drive, explore Florence by 
 myself in the afternoon, and dine with her in the 
 evening at seven. So at eleven o'clock I called, 
 and we had a lovely drive, sauntering later through 
 the Medici galleries, and I parted with her at her 
 
 23 
 
door, at which I again presented myself at seven. 
 I found this time that I was not the only guest, 
 for a charming and beautiful young lady, a great 
 favourite of Miss Clermont's, was also present — 
 an English girl of Scottish parentage. The Byron- 
 Shelley subject was dropped for the nonce, and we 
 talked of Italy and the Italians. 
 
 •" I have lived so long in Italy," said Jane 
 Clermont, " ever since I lost my money in that 
 idiotic Opera House affair in London, before either 
 of you were born, that I almost feel an Italian 
 myself" 
 
 " You certainly look one," I replied ; " that struck 
 me at the very first. You must surely have some 
 Italian blood in your veins." 
 
 " Not that I am aware of," she said ; " but one 
 never knows. Unless one belongs to some historic 
 family it is difficult to say what blood one has or 
 what one has not." 
 
 Notwithstanding her recluse life, Madame Cler- 
 mont evidently kept herself well au courant with 
 what was going on, and we spent a most enjoy- 
 able evening, talking about all sorts and conditions 
 of things. Mr Gladstone was evidently her great 
 latter-day hero as a man of action, and again and 
 again she recurred to the subject of Tennyson as 
 a poet. She was also well acquainted with Mr 
 Swinburne's works, and on my remarking that he 
 was the most musical of all our poets, surpassing 
 in absolute musical cadence, as distinct from 
 
 24 
 
rhythm pure and simple, Shelley or Tennyson 
 themselves, she asked me to recite the verse of 
 his I considered most musical. I remember I re- 
 peated this : 
 
 " If you were I and I were you — 
 How should I love you — say? 
 How should the rose-leaf love the rue ? 
 The day love nightfall and her dew? 
 Though night may love the day.'' 
 
 " That, I think, madame," I said, " is for absolute 
 melody — melody ringing clear as a bell — unequalled 
 in the language, unless it be by one or two of 
 Keats's odes." 
 
 "Then you do not consider even Shelley equal 
 to Swinburne as a melodist ? " she asked me. 
 
 "No; I do not," I replied. "As an absolute 
 melodist — I mean a master of word-music as dis- 
 tinct from other qualities — I consider Swinburne 
 unequalled. As a poet I hold Shelley infinitely 
 superior to anyone living. I personally consider 
 him, as a poet, the king of all. No poet of any 
 time or land is worthy to sit upon that throne. A 
 pity he wasted so much of his short life over 
 matters that did not relate to his art at all." 
 
 "Ah, but you are wrong there!" she replied. i- 
 " Had it not been for his intense love of mankind, 
 that fervid zeal of his which could not content 
 itself with poetry alone, he would never have been 
 the great poet you admire./ 
 
 25 
 
" Perhaps not," I replied ; " but surely there is a 
 good deal in his works, especially in The Revolt of 
 Islam^ more suited to the lecture-room than to the 
 poem. How different when he steps into that 
 dazzling realm of pure poetry! How different is 
 Epipsychidion, or The Ode to the West Wind, or to 
 The Skylark!" 
 
 And she broke in with a voice that was as silvery 
 as Mr Gladstone's * is now : 
 
 "With thy clear calm joyance 
 
 Languor cannot be : 
 Shadow of annoyance 
 
 Never came near thee : 
 Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety." 
 
 "Ah, madame!" I said, "but the most beautiful 
 of any is to Constantia singing. If I could only 
 have heard Constantia singing, I should have asked 
 for nothing else from life." 
 
 "Ah!" she said, with a little half-regretful, half- 
 amused laugh, "poor Constantia can sing no more 
 now, and she is following her voice to the mysterious 
 beyond. But here is someone who will supply the 
 place of Constantia." 
 
 And then a strange thing happened. 
 
 The young lady took her place at the piano, and 
 began to sing a touching Scottish song — I forget 
 
 f> * The articles forming this book were begun in 1893 and ended in 
 1895. 
 
 26 
 
the name, but I remember the last verses so well 
 by what took place : 
 
 " Coidd ye come back to me, Douglas, Douglas ! 
 In the old likeness that I knew, 
 I would be so tender, so loving, Douglas, 
 Douglas, Douglas ! tender and true. 
 
 Never a scornful word should pain you, 
 
 I'd smile as sweet as angels do, 
 Sweet as your smile on me shone ever, 
 
 Douglas, Douglas ! tender and true. 
 
 Stretch out your hand to me, Douglas, Douglas ! 
 
 Rain forgiveness from Heaven like dew. 
 As I lay my heart on thy dead heart, Douglas, 
 
 Douglas, Douglas ! tender and true." 
 
 When these verses were sung with that clear, 
 sweet voice, we both noticed that our dear hostess 
 had completely broken down. She was crying 
 bitterly, as if her heart would break, but oh so 
 gracefully! — not like an old lady might cry, but 
 like some young girl with her first love sorrow. 
 
 " Don't mind me, dears," she said. " I 'm in one 
 of my silly moods to-night. I'm only a miserable 
 old woman who feels very lonely at times. I think 
 you know what memories that song brought back," 
 she added, looking at me ; and then turning to her 
 young friend, "Sing something else, darling. Her 
 voice is so sweet, is it not, Mr Graham ? " 
 
 " I almost feel that I am listening to Constantia 
 singing," I replied. 
 
 And then this young lady, who would have nought 
 to do with aught but pathetic ballads, began on 
 
 27 
 
that divine song of Villon's, Oii sont les neiges 
 d'antan ? set to a soft, sweet melody, and the 
 voice rose and fell with a dreamy cadence. 
 
 " Ah ! where are they indeed," said our hostess, 
 "the great men I have known, and the burning 
 words I have heard, and the stormy times? Oil 
 sont les neiges (T antan ? " she repeated, musingly. 
 " What a dream life is, to be sure ! " 
 
 During my stay in Florence we met constantly, 
 for I was given mes entries without restriction, and 
 where I had expected to meet an old and morose 
 devote, I found a lady so witty and so piquante 
 that one absolutely forgot her age. But I did not 
 wonder at her earning the reputation she had, for 
 she was absolutely world-weary, and, with the ex- 
 ception of a pet priest or two (whom she laughed 
 at, moreover), she would see no one ; and, as I have 
 already said, her powers of satire, and even mimicry, 
 remained unimpaired. I could well understand 
 the shortness of her connection with the sensitive, 
 spoiled Byron, who had been accustomed to pose as 
 a God to the womankind of London. Her powers of 
 mimicry amused me immensely. I had not, and 
 have not, the most graceful gait in the world ; 
 indeed, my so-called walk partakes more of the 
 nature of a shuffle, arising from a peculiar, not 
 precisely malformation, but weakness in the knees, 
 and this she hit off in the most amusing manner. 
 I should, perhaps, apologise for introducing this 
 piece of personality, but that it suddenly flashed 
 
 28 
 
across me at the time that perchance I had hit 
 upon the whole secret of Byron's intense aversion 
 to her, following on a romantic passion. Byron's sen- 
 sitiveness as to his lameness is, of course,, notorious, 
 and it is well known how the devoted Fletcher said 
 to Trelawney, at the end of all at Missolonghi, 
 pointing to the corpse's limbs : " All my lord's 
 misfortunes are due to that." 
 
 I asked her plainly, " Did you ever mimic Byron's 
 lameness, madame ? " and she replied, " No, I don't 
 think so," but added, " I may have done so, though, 
 sometimes to others. We were all often hurried 
 about our expeditions, and he generally hobbled 
 up late." 
 
 That remark, I thought, might mean a good deal. 
 
 Sitting one day by the Arno, I asked her the 
 reason of her prejudice against Byron and her 
 strong affection for Shelley. 
 
 " As I have already said," she replied, " I have no 
 prejudice against Byron. He behaved atrociously to 
 me ; but that was my own fault — I ought to have 
 known better — or perhaps misfortune would be 
 the better word, for I was too young to have any 
 knowledge of character. All those reports about 
 rancour were set about by La Guiccioli. Naturally 
 a woman does not like to have her child taken 
 from her, and to be left almost without means. 
 I suppose you are as crass as most men, and think 
 that I loved Byron?" 
 
 I made no reply. 
 
 29 
 
" My young friend, no doubt you will know a 
 woman's heart better some day. I was dazzled ; 
 but that does not mean love. It might, perhaps, 
 have grown into love ; but it never did." 
 
 " Have you never loved, madame ? " I asked. 
 
 A delicate blush suffused the cheeks, and this 
 time she made no reply, gazing on the ground. 
 
 " Shelley ? " I murmured. 
 
 " With all my heart and soul," she replied, with- 
 out moving her eyes from the ground. 
 
 " Perhaps," I said later, " Byron's bad conduct 
 had something to do with this ; he seems to have 
 been very acute." 
 
 " I have said that he told lies about Shelley,'' 
 she replied, "things without a word of truth," she 
 added with feminine tautology. "Why do you 
 smile?" 
 
 "At my thoughts, madame," I said. 
 
 "And what may they be?" 
 
 " Ah ! you cannot force me to tell them, im- 
 perious as you are. Surely one's thoughts are 
 free?" 
 
 " I do command you ! " she insisted. 
 
 " Well then, madame, if you command, I must of 
 course, obey. I was thinking of a line of Shake- 
 speare's." 
 
 "And the line?" 
 
 "'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.'" 
 
 " You impertinent boy ! If you do not believe 
 what I tell you, why traverse Europe to see me ? " 
 
 30 
 
" There are things, madame," I said, " which it 
 is the duty of every man to believe when told him 
 by a lady, and I have conquered my scepticism. 
 I remember you told me Shelley was a devoted 
 student of Plato." 
 
 Two smart boxes on the ear were the only reply 
 I received to this. A sorry return, indeed, for 
 obedience and faith. 
 
 It was impossible to obtain a good word for 
 Byron from this lady, though, to do her justice, 
 she showed no rancour, and I must admit I gradu- 
 ally began to feel my hero's stature dwarfing ; but 
 I was young then and impressionable, and, since, 
 I have restored him to his old position in my 
 affections. 
 
 " He was utterly selfish," she said ; but she could 
 not deny that he gave about a third of his money 
 away to the poor. 
 
 " Well, he did not show much generosity to that 
 unfortunate Leigh Hunt," she insisted ; and on my 
 replying that, after all, Leigh Hunt must have been 
 rather a vulgar cbckney bore, she riposted with, 
 " It is, after all, natural that you should take up 
 the cudgels for Byron, for he was a thorough Scot ; 
 his brilliancy and good looks he inherited, to a great 
 extent, from the ' gay Gordons,' his mother's family, 
 and his love of the bawbees and his love of dogmatic 
 religion were both intensely Scottish. He had 
 ' scotched, not killed the Scotsman in his blood,' as 
 he himself said in Don Juan, with a vengeance. 
 
 31 
 
He even wanted to secure both this world and the 
 next in some canny Scotch fashion. He would 
 talk religion and predestination and other exploded 
 doctrines with any old Presbyterian parson by the 
 hour, without the remotest idea of practising any 
 religion whatsoever ; though, to do him justice, he 
 was not in the least afraid of death. In fact, he 
 was absolutely reckless of life." 
 
 "Well, you must admit that the final scene, the 
 fight for Greece, was splendid ? " 
 
 " I don't know that there was anything particularly 
 splendid about it," she replied. " He was tired to 
 death of La Guiccioli, whom he treated in a way 
 very few women would have stood, notwithstanding 
 the rapturous memoirs she wrote of him some years 
 ago ; and he simply invested a great deal of money 
 in the Greek cause with the idea of being made 
 a king, which, as Trelawney says, he undoubtedly 
 would have been if he had lived, notwithstanding 
 his stern republicanism. 
 
 "Byron was a great poetic genius and an ex- 
 tremely able man, and, in his way, a thorough man 
 of the world, but he was utterly selfish, utterly false, 
 and utterly spoiled and vain, while, as the French say, 
 he was always playing to the gallery. That is my 
 opinion, anyhow, and you may take it for what it 
 is worth." 
 
 I took it for what it was worth. Byron had 
 treated her badly, as Shelley had treated Harriett 
 Westbrook. Under the circumstances, I think she 
 
 32 
 
was more just than the majority of women would 
 have been. 
 
 In reply to questions from me as to the exterior 
 manner and appearance of the two men, she said that 
 Byron was a great deal of a dandy, though latterly 
 more of a foreign than an English dandy/'his stay 
 . abroad having much more denationalised him than 
 Shelley's had him. Byron had become very Italian 
 in his habits. The manners of both were perfect — 
 the easy, unassuming manner of well - born and 
 brought -up English gentlemen — though Shelley's 
 was simpler. 
 
 I asked her how they would compare with the 
 same class nowadays. "Well," she replied, "you 
 see I know so few of my countrymen now, but I 
 should say just the same." There was, however, she 
 said, a great difference between the manner of the 
 two men, for though neither put on what is .nowa- 
 days vulgarly but expressively called " side,'yShelley 
 X was perfectly simple and natural, while Byron's 
 manner, though it could be charming to a degree, 
 was tinged with a vein of Don Juanesque reckless- 
 ness. /In fact, she said, "the stanzas of that poem 
 convey a very good idea of Byron's manner." 
 
 Byron's great charm, she said, was his voice, which 
 was as melodious in its subtle variety of cadence as 
 music itself 
 
 My interest in this lady, on account of her relations 
 with the two great poets, grew into a very warm 
 attachment for herself, and the parting was very 
 
 C 33 
 
painful to me. It is painful even now to look back 
 upon that fair spring morning, when life was spring- 
 time too, and the kind words as I almost broke 
 down : " Oh ! what a silly boy. You can come and 
 see me again next spring, and anyhow life is only a 
 dream. You will meet me in the after-world with 
 Shelley — and I hope not with Byron," she added, 
 with her humorous smile. " Come, kiss me, and say 
 good-bye like a man. No ; not good-bye, au revoir. 
 Au revoir, dear, in this world or the next. I am sure 
 it is only au revoir. Meantime, you must forget all 
 about me." 
 
 " I shall never forget, madame," I replied, with a 
 choking in the throat as I kissed those lips which had 
 been kissed by Byron and by Shelley. And I never 
 shall. But that spring-time never came, and I am 
 waiting for the after-world ; for soon after that dear 
 lady passed 
 
 "To where beyond these voices there is peace." 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CHATS WITH JANE CLERMONT — CONTINUED 
 
 The subject-matter dealt with in these conversa- 
 tions must, of course, be limited by the promise 
 of which I made mention in my previous article 
 — to publish only information relating to certain 
 things which were specified at the time. Many 
 years have yet to pass ere I may be enabled to 
 write in full of the life of Miss Clermont. Ten 
 years from her decease, whenever that might take 
 place, was, as I have already said, stipulated upon 
 before she would allow me to publish anything 
 relating to her, and even that was made dependent 
 on the death, meantime, of Sir Percy Shelley, a 
 death which has only comparatively recently oc- 
 curred ; thirty years being the time I promised 
 to wait before publishing clearly specified matter, 
 intensely interesting, but of a nature which I must 
 not even hint at here. 
 
 Before proceeding further, I have some words to 
 say relating to questions raised by reviewers of my 
 first article, questions which the courtesy and ap- 
 preciation with which I have been treated impose 
 upon me the obligation of answering. 
 
 35 
 
First, the question of my orthography as regards 
 the lady's name. This has already been answered 
 by me in the Times, and the proof of the accuracy 
 of my spelling of the name Clermont can be seen 
 by a glance at the British Museum catalogue.* 
 
 I must here, however, admit two little slips of 
 my own. One is the passage in the letter referred 
 to, where I speak of the profusion of Christian 
 names which the lady was wont to delight in, 
 being shown in the letter to Byron. There I am 
 wrong. The proof of her proneness to romantic 
 nomenclature is to be found in another and later 
 document than the letter to Byron. In the later 
 document she signs herself Clara Mary Constantia 
 Jane Clairmont, the Constantia being, of course, a 
 remembrance of the celebrated poem To Constantia 
 Singing. In the letter to Byron she signs herself 
 simply Claire, the first syllable of her surname 
 spelt as some of my critics would have it, and 
 both of these facts decidedly tend to bear out my 
 suggestion that she preferred the perhaps more 
 romantic Clairmont to Clermont. But we find 
 the name spelt variously, as Clairmont, Clermont, 
 Charlemont, Clairemont, and Claremont. At the 
 time I knew her she used to prefer to be styled 
 Clara rather than Claire. Clearly a most wayward 
 and romantic young lady, and she preserved many 
 
 * Subsequently to the information gained for me by Sir D. E. Colnaghi, 
 referred to in the third Chapter, I altered the spelling of the word, and 
 it will be found spelt Clazrmont in Chapters III. and IV. 
 
 36 
 
of her youthful characteristics to the last, which to 
 a great extent constituted her charm. One can 
 well understand her dislike in youth to the homely 
 nomenclature of Mary Jane, and it is under these 
 names she figures in Shelley's will. She herself 
 evidently preferred them when "washed down" by 
 a profusion of more romantic designations. 
 
 And now let me set at rest a matter as to which 
 there has been a good deal of dispute — namely, 
 Miss Clermont's age when she first met Byron. 
 Miss Clermont was born in 1798; consequently, 
 when she met Byron in 1815, she was seventeen. 
 I am quite aware that in saying she met Byron in 
 1 81 5 I am exposing myself to the assaults of 
 various Byroniah writers who maintain that the 
 Clermont connection did not take place until after 
 the cessation of intercourse with Lady Byron ; but 
 they are wrong. By the way, I think it is as well to 
 point out here a slight error made by Mr Garnett, the 
 able and courteous keeper of printed documents in the 
 British Museum, in his short notice of Miss Clermont. 
 As one of my reviewers has well said, nearly every- 
 one who has written on this subject has fallen into 
 some error of chronology. Mr Garnett is perfectly 
 correct as to the date of the lady's birth, but he 
 speaks of her later on as nearly two-and-twenty in 
 1 8 16. I asked Mr Garnett personally for an ex- 
 planation of this, and he told me he had, in the 
 first instance, the idea that she was born in the 
 same year as Edward Williams, who met his death 
 
 37 
 
with Shelley. But even then Mr Garnett would 
 have been wrong as to Miss Clermont's age in 1816, 
 for Edward Williams was born in 1792 — the year, 
 by a strange coincidence, of both Shelley's and 
 Trelawney's births. Trelawney himself relates this 
 in his " Reminiscences of Byron and Shelley," in 
 the course of a conversation taking place between 
 Shelley, Williams, and himself Miss Clermont, 
 therefore, had Mr Garnett been correct in his first 
 belief as to the date of her birth, would have been 
 twenty- four, and not twenty -two, in 18 16, when, 
 according to Mr Garnett and others, she first met 
 Byron — a view which I have already said I hold 
 (in fact, I have shown) to be erroneous, and Miss 
 Clermont was really the cause of Byron's divorce ; 
 but that leads to matters upon which I must not 
 at present deal. Mr Jeaffreson is the only writer 
 of Byronia who suspects what I have said to have 
 been the case, and Mr Garnett, in his notice just 
 alluded to, calls the idea an absurd one. I do not 
 in the least apprehend why the idea should be 
 " absurd " ; in any case, it is the fact. Mr Garnett 
 therefore corrected his first slip, and forgot to 
 correct his second, which, even from his original 
 idea of the chronology, would have been wrong. 
 
 The next point upon which I should like to say 
 a few words is this : Several of my reviewers have 
 put the question, " How far is Miss Clermont's testi- 
 mony to be accepted ? " They say that she was 
 old, and given to romancing. I merely reply this : 
 
 38 
 
It is ridiculous, with the spectacle of an octogen- 
 arian premier in the full plenitude of his powers 
 before us, to argue that age need necessarily in any 
 way affect the memory or mental powers ; and, as 
 to the strictness of a certain clique of Shelleyan 
 idolaters, they accept Jane Clermont's testimony 
 when it fits in with their idolatrous conceptions, 
 and reject it when it does not, which is scarcely 
 logical. As to the tendency to romance, I do not 
 believe Miss Clermont was at all given to that 
 practice ; but, in any case, I think it will be granted 
 that the conversations I am now about to quote, 
 and also those which have already been published 
 in this Review, show a remarkably fair, unprejudiced, 
 and logical mind. When there is an object, I can 
 conceive a person lying, but not without an object. 
 I can see no reason whatever to doubt the absolute 
 veracity of all Miss Clermont told me. It may, np 
 doubt, be painful to the Shelley idolaters to be told 
 that the expedition to Switzerland was pre-arranged 
 between the Shelleys, Byron, and Claire, and they 
 appear to prefer to believe that "Shelley and 
 Mary," as they love to style their innocent little 
 "babes in the wood," should be led to Geneva by 
 the wicked sorceress, Jane Clermont, they all the 
 while remaining in total ignorance of her relation 
 to Byron ; but any man or woman of the world 
 would, I should be disposed to believe, think Jane 
 Clermont's version of the story obviously the 
 correct one. 
 
 39 
 
I will now pass on to a conversation referring to 
 Shelley's will, and here again I may say that in 
 this case, reason and common-sense are distinctly on 
 the side of Miss Clermont, and against Trelawney, 
 who, as I have always understood, never had a 
 good word to say for anyone except Shelley ; but 
 I may add that I do not believe Shelley intended 
 to leave as much as he did for his sister-in-law's 
 exclusive use. He had made the will during 
 Allegra's lifetime, and would have revoked the 
 second legacy after her death had his own death not 
 come so soon and so unexpectedly on the heels of it. 
 
 The following conversation will give her views 
 on the subject, and also gives very excellent and, 
 I venture to say, impartial views of both La 
 Guiccioli and Trelawney. 
 
 Entering the drawing-room one lovely spring 
 morning, I found Miss Clermont at her guitar — 
 a guitar on which she was playing when Shelley 
 was inspired to write the wonderful lines cited 
 below — touching the strings to some old melody, 
 and half accompanying the now feeble notes in 
 a subdued voice, but not so subdued but that 
 one could detect the petted singer of Florentine 
 salons of a generation — even two generations — 
 before. It was a perfect picture : the beautiful, 
 thick hair falling over the shoulders, the clear- 
 cut profile of that face, as beautiful now as ever, 
 and the eyes which seemed lost in dreams, as 
 those slender fingers strayed over the strings — 
 
 40 
 
the same picture that inspired Shelley more than 
 sixty years before. I stood a moment on the 
 threshold, silent, and the servant (they all loved 
 her) made some whispered remark of admiration 
 to me, and then I repeated the wonderful lines : 
 
 "Thus to be lost, and thus to sink and die- 
 Perchance were death indeed ! Constantia, turn ! 
 In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie. 
 Even though the-sounds which were thy voice, which burn 
 Between thy lips, are laid to sleep ; 
 Within thy breath and on thy hair like odour it is yet, 
 And from thy touch like fire doth leap. 
 Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet ; 
 Alas ! that the torn heart can bleed and not forget." 
 
 " I have heard Constantia singing," I murmured. 
 " I have often said I would give my life for that." 
 
 She turned round, with that wonderful smile of 
 hers, like that of a coquette of eighteen. "Ah, it 
 is you, is it ? What a power of transfiguration you 
 have ! "she said. " Why, that was written at Marlow, 
 dear Marlow! in — let me see — in 1817. You have 
 heard an old woman mumbling. My voice is a 
 ghost. I was pestered to death once by all the 
 Florentine drawing-rooms to sing! All over Italy 
 my voice was known, thanks to Percy. He always 
 took such pains about my instruction in singing. 
 But how can you say you have heard Constantia 
 singing, now ? You have only heard the thin, reedy 
 notes of Constantia's ghost." 
 
 " Constantia is always Constantia, madame," I said. 
 " Time cannot wither " 
 
 41 
 
But she interrupted, laughing, " Shakespeare said 
 that of Cleopatra in her forties. I 'm afraid he 
 would not have been equally complimentary to me 
 in my eighties. But my forties were my best time, 
 too. It was in my forties, and in the forties of this 
 century, I had most money, in any case. On the 
 old baronet's death I inherited ;^ 12,000 by Percy's 
 will, and then I settled down in London, after 
 having led a very unsettled life ever since Percy's 
 death. I was until then a regular rolling-stone, 
 wandering from place to place, all over Europe. 
 I was a long time in Russia, in Paris — every- 
 where." 
 
 " Do you ever hear of Trelawney, madame ? " I 
 asked. 
 
 " I know why you ask that question," she re- 
 plied, with a laugh. " Trelawney, I am told, says 
 that Shelley did not intend to leave me more than 
 ;^6ooo — that the second legacy was a mistake. 
 That is nonsense ; Shelley was a very good busi- 
 ness man. It is, of course, the fashion to consider 
 him as a being quite too ethereal to care for mun- 
 dane matters — in point of fact, a kind of inspired 
 idiot. But that is entirely a mistake. ''^No one 
 ^ could be more practical than Shelley, if he liked. 
 He had a most logical mind, and was, perhaps, 
 the first classical scholar in Europe, of his time/ 
 No ; I know nothing of Trelawney : he never was 
 my friend, you know ; and it seems to me he gives 
 himself airs, and always has done, of knowing a 
 
 42 
 
great deal more of Shelley, and Byron too (but 
 particularly of Shelley), than he has any right. 
 Why, he only knew Shelley for six months." 
 
 " How he hates Byron, madame ! " I said. 
 
 " Well, Byron snubbed him, you know. He said, 
 'Tre was an excellent fellow until he took to 
 imitating my Childe Harold and Don Juan! This 
 got to Trelawney's ears, and he never for- 
 gave Byron for it. Trelawney made himself quite 
 ridiculous when I lived in London, I remember. 
 He absolutely lived, or in any case dined out, on 
 the strength of his acquaintance with Byron. It 
 was always ' Byron said this,' ' Byron did that.' I 
 remember Thackeray takes him off rather well 
 somewhere. I want you to write about me in due 
 time," she said, " though not for ten years after my 
 death. Give me that time," she added, with a 
 smile, " to rise to another sphere altogether. It is 
 only fair that I, who have been maligned by one 
 set of Shelley enthusiasts, should be placed in my 
 true light before the world ; though not a word 
 during Sir Percy Shelley's lifetime. It seems a 
 queer thing, by the way, that the one person whom 
 Shelley loved best on earth, should be constantly 
 held up to opprobrium by his idolaters." 
 
 "Well, well, madame," I replied, "we all know 
 the reason of that, and the inspiration of Field 
 Place ! That legacy was probably unwelcome to 
 some." 
 
 "You are right there," the lady replied. "What 
 
 43 
 
an idiot I was to lose nearly all the money in that 
 Lumley's opera-house business ! I 've always had 
 a mania for music and the stage. It was through 
 the one fancy that I first met Byron, and through 
 the other that I lost my money. I don't know 
 which was the greater disaster." 
 
 I laughed. " Poor Byron ! " I said, " I 'm longing 
 to hear just one good word for him." And after a 
 good deal of badinage between us she went on 
 to say : 
 
 " Byron and Shelley were as far asunder as can 
 be imagined in their estimate of women. Byron 
 considered them as men's inferiors ; he held an 
 absolutely Oriental view of women. He was fond 
 of saying that he did not think they had any right 
 at the table with men, and ought to be shut up in 
 seraglios, as they are in the East. No doubt a 
 good deal of this was affectation, for a man who 
 had travelled as much as he had was a rarity in 
 those days, and he was very fond of airing his 
 Eastern experiences, but much of it was the real 
 expression of his feelings." 
 
 " No wonder you and he did not hit it off long 
 together," I replied. 
 
 " No," she said ; " Byron never could agree 
 with any woman of much independence of 
 thought." 
 
 " The Countess Guiccioli had a good deal of 
 intellect, I suppose, had she not, madame ? " I 
 inquired. 
 
 44 
 
" Oh, to a certain extent she had, but you know 
 what Italian women are! Their education is not 
 of a nature (and still less was it so at that time) 
 to develop a woman's capacities at all. They are 
 just like children — rather vicious children, though. 
 La Guiccioli was, moreover, ridiculously infatuated 
 with Byron. That book of hers which appeared 
 a few^ years ago is simply absurd ! If she had 
 been describing an angel, instead of a man who, 
 even his greatest admirers admit, was full of blight- 
 ing faults, she could not have said more." 
 
 " She became a leader of Parisian society after 
 Byron's death, as the Marquise de Boissy, did she 
 not, madame ? " 
 
 "Yes," replied Madame Clermont; "but she was 
 a perfect female Trelawney with her Byronic re- 
 miniscences, as Dumas describes in ' Monte Christo.' 
 It was a standing joke when I was in Paris in the 
 thirties and forties ; people used to draw her out 
 about Byron for the fun of the thing. La Guiccioli 
 was always devoted to Byron's memory. An 
 Englishwoman would have revolted at the treat- 
 ment she received, but she was as faithful as a dog 
 to him." 
 
 " Did he treat her badly, then ? " I asked. 
 
 "Well, that depends upon what you call treating 
 a woman badly ; but from all I have heard he 
 grew very tired of her latterly, and would have 
 severed the link altogether but that he was too 
 closely bound up with the family generally ; her 
 
 45 
 
brother and he were great friends, and he accom- 
 panied Byron to Greece. Byron never behaved 
 with any brutality to her, but he gave her ample 
 cause for jealousy, and showed her in plain words, 
 very plainly, that he was tired." 
 
 " Her book certainly struck me as absurd," I 
 said. "As you say, if Byron had been an angel 
 from heaven she could not have spoken of him 
 in higher terms. I have always been told," I 
 saidj "that La Guiccioli was possessed to her last 
 breath of a burning jealousy of you." 
 
 " I believe she was ; but I never knew why, for 
 I certainly cared nothing for Byron. I endeavoured, 
 through Shelley, to effect a reconciliation with him 
 on account of my child's future. Shelley went to 
 him, and stopped some days there, when Byron 
 and La Guiccioli shared openly the same house 
 (to the great scandal of her countryfolk, who 
 said 'Byron had hitherto behaved so well'), in 
 order to try and persuade him to come to an 
 arrangement. La Guiccioli was charmed with 
 Shelley, as all women were, and insisted on his 
 staying considerably longer than he had intended ; 
 but it was all to no avail. Byron was as obstinate 
 as a mule when he once set his mind on a thing, 
 and in this case I feel sure that he was egged on 
 by La Guiccioli to send away my child to a con- 
 vent, both out of spite, to annoy me, and also 
 because she hated to have the child near her." 
 And the lady's eyes filled with tears. 
 
 46 
 
" Well, madame," I replied, " after all, Allegra 
 was brought up in the same faith that you have 
 yourself now adopted." She paid no attention to 
 this. 
 
 " Of course," she went on, " there was a reason 
 that Byron used as excuse for his vile conduct in 
 thus robbing me of my child? That vile note at 
 foot of my letter to him, which he sent on to 
 Hoppner, and which has been since unearthed, 
 explains it. But it was a lie." 
 
 As I made no reply, she continued, " I presume 
 you think that there can be no smoke without fire ? 
 Well, I will tell you the whole truth now, and you 
 may judge for yourself." 
 
 Nothing more, however, shall be written by me 
 on this subject, so highly distasteful to me, until 
 1909, and not even then had not Miss Clermont 
 requested me to give what I know to the world 
 after the lapse of time before mentioned. 
 
 One of the most interesting things Madame 
 Clermont told me related to the visit Byron paid 
 to the Shelleys at Marlow in her company, in 
 the summer of the Waterloo year. I made men- 
 tion of this visit in my previous article, but the 
 exigencies of space did not permit of my including 
 the following most interesting and characteristic 
 incident. 
 
 " At that time," she said, " both at the Crown 
 Inn at Marlow and at other inns along the river, 
 a number of French prisoners-of-war from Waterloo 
 
 47 
 
were confined, and at The Crown they were 
 shut up in the stalls and loose -boxes in the 
 stables." 
 
 " They escaped afterwards, I was glad to hear," 
 said Madame Clermont ; and she told me the 
 following story : 
 
 " Byron, the Shelleys, and I went to see them. 
 Byron and Shelley, of course, as red radicals, 
 sympathised both with the men and with their 
 cause. Byron was a great worshipper of Bona- 
 parte, and, though Shelley was not that, he hated 
 the British Tory Government of the day much 
 more than he hated Napoleon. Some of the men 
 were sul'y and surly, and we could not get a 
 word out of them, and no wonder, for popular 
 feeling ran very high then against France, and 
 there were many in and about Marlow who had 
 lost husbands and brothers and sons in the war. 
 Therefore, the poor Frenchmen did not meet with 
 much sympathy. People were a good deal rougher 
 then, too, than they are now in their ways of doing 
 things, and though they were not badly treated, 
 the prisoners' lot was by no means what it would 
 have been nowadays. The landlord himself, how- 
 ever, was very kind to them. They were all fcffld 
 of him. It was a great joke with him when we 
 were in Marlow next year and- the prisoners had 
 escaped, how one of them, the wag of the band, 
 left a line for the innkeeper, ' Merci mille fois 
 pour votre gracieuse hospitality.' The jovial 
 
landlord's account of the matter was very- 
 amusing. 
 
 " ' I don't understand their lingo,' he said to 
 Shelley, whom I can so well picture now, with his 
 great gazelle-like eyes and his humorous smile 
 (for Shelley had a good deal of humour, though if^ 
 never comes out in his poetry) as he listened. ' I 
 don't understand their lingo, and no one does here- 
 abouts. But a nephew of mine from London came 
 down here one day, and told me what it meant. 
 I dzei laugh to be sure ! ' 
 
 " The man who sent this dzUei doux, I remember, 
 was one of the two we paid most attention to ; 
 the other was a hard-faced veteran of a hundred 
 Napoleonic fights, but the wag was an extremely 
 good-looking, soldierly fellow. 
 
 " Byron said to him, ' Eh bien, mon brave, est-ce 
 que c'6tait un beau combat ? ' and the man's eyes 
 glistened with excitement as he shouted in a voice 
 of thunder, ' Si c'^tait a refaire je le referais. Vive 
 I'Empereur ! ' and one and all took up the chorus 
 with a mighty shout which almost shook the 
 stables. 
 
 "We caught the contagion, and both of us girls 
 and Shelley and Byron shouted with one voice : ' Vive 
 I'Empereur!' How ridiculous it was! The whole 
 of England was glowing with the Waterloo triumph, 
 Marlow no exception to the rest of the country, I 
 can assure you. Out came the landlord, with his 
 usually rosy, jovial face quite pale now. Had we been 
 
 D 49 
 
ordinary visitors he would probably have ordered us 
 out of the place there and then, and we should have 
 had to take the next coach back to London — feeling 
 ran so high. But all the world knew Lord Byron, 
 and though ' fallen on evil times and evil tongues,' as 
 he was fond of saying himself — a comparison which 
 always made me laugh, for anyone more unlike 
 what Milton must have been it would be difficult 
 to conceive — his name was still as that of 'a God 
 in the land.' 
 
 "The landlord came running out. 'For Gawd's 
 
 sake, my lord,' he said, ' don't shout out that d d 
 
 cry ! Why, if anyone heard it in the village I 'd be 
 murdered,' and he called out, as a protest, ' Hurrah 
 for Wellington ! ' 
 
 " ' You d d old rascal ! ' said Byron, as we all 
 
 shrieked with laughter. ' Bring along four pots of 
 ale for us, and one for each of these gentlemen of 
 France, and we'll drink to Napoleon.' 
 
 " ' It 's as much as my life 's worth to let you drink 
 to Boney ! ' the terrified landlord exclaimed, gazing 
 at Byron, as if the devil, tail, horns, hoofs, and all, 
 were there, and, indeed, the ill reports of ' the wicked 
 Lord Byron' had reached even Marlow. 
 
 " But, as was said about Byron's friend, Moore, 
 our worthy host dearly loved a lord, and Byron, 
 flinging him a sovereign, and seizing him with 
 those strong arms of his, said : ' If the liquor is 
 not here in three minutes, I '11 fling you among 
 these tigers.' And a roar of laughter came from 
 
 SO 
 
the prisoners, for even among those soldiers of the 
 Grande Armie the name of Byron was known, and 
 ' Vive le Lor' Beeron ! Vive le Lor' Beeron ! ' was 
 the cry now in those stables of the Crown, where 
 heroes were stalled worse than horses. 
 
 "The landlord arrived with two trays of pint 
 tankards. The excitement of the men — the con- 
 tagious excitement of French soldiers, brought on 
 by the magnetism of Napoleon's name and the 
 excitement of Byron's presence, too, his name and 
 his fame ; his unearthly beauty as he stood there, 
 like an inspired Apollo — was indescribable. The 
 soldiers raged like lions in their stalls, shouting 
 alternately, ' Vive Lor' Beeron ! Vive I'Empereur ! ' 
 — even Napoleon was for a moment second to that 
 other great, though mispronounced, name. 
 
 "The landlord stood by with his waiter, both 
 with frightened faces. To call in those days 'Vive 
 I'Empereur ! ' was like calling ' Hurrah for the 
 devil ! ' but Byron, bidding them hand round the 
 tankards, seized one himself ' Now, Shelley,' he 
 shouted, ' drink up ; none of your infernal lemonade 
 this time ! Vive I'Empereur, mes braves ! ' he 
 thundered, and emptied his tankard to the dregs. 
 And a roar that must have echoed far beyond the 
 other bank of the river sprang from the lips of 
 each soldier, tankard in hand, ' Vive Lor' Beeron ! 
 Vive I'Empereur.' 
 
 " Byron strolled off with us afterwards (or rather 
 limped off, I should say) with that calm, con- 
 Si 
 
temptuous expression on his lips which they almost 
 always wore. 
 
 " 'What a magic,'- he said to me, 'that man's name 
 has ! ' all oblivious of the magic of his own. ' He 
 is one of the madmen who have made men mad 
 by their contagion' — a remark which not long 
 afterwards I had the pleasure of reading word for 
 word in verse in the third canto of Childe Harold. 
 
 " ' You are a wonderful actor,' I replied. ' What 
 a pity that your birth prevented your taking to the 
 stage ! You would have rivalled Kean.' " 
 
 I once asked Miss Clermont a question which 
 seemed rather to amuse her, but which seems to 
 me to have a good deal of weight in the estimate 
 of any man's character, and that was as to whether 
 Byron or Shelley smoked. 
 
 "Shelley,'' she said, "never did. 6yron at one 
 time, when I first knew him, was a great smoker, but 
 afterwards abandoned the habit almost altogether. 
 On rare occasions, however, he would renew it, and 
 when he did, it was usually to excess." 
 
 Talking about one of the haunts sacred to the 
 memory of the two poets. Miss Clermont remarked, 
 
 " What a charming place Pisa is ! Strange that 
 it should have gone so out of fashion among the 
 English now ! Then it was the most popular 
 English colony in Southern Europe." 
 
 " The Western Riviera is rather supplanting 
 Italy," I said. 
 
 " Ah, but there is no place in the world like 
 52 
 
Italy! See how all of us who have once felt its 
 charm come back again!" 
 
 " ' That Paradise of exiles, Italy ! ' as Shelley 
 called it," I replied. 
 
 " Yes," she said ; " nearly all who knew it in those 
 days, who were there in our time, have gravitated 
 back. But I am the last of all left, except Mr 
 Severn, Keats's friend. It is significant of Italy's 
 charm that the three greatest poets of the century 
 should all have been there at the same time, and 
 singular that all should have died within three 
 years of one another. 
 
 " How strange it is," she continued : " the long- 
 evity of all who knew the three great poets, whose 
 own lives were so short — Keats, Shelley, and Byron 
 — the eldest dying at six -and -thirty, Shelley at 
 nine - and - twenty, and Keats at five - and - twenty. 
 Trelawney, who was born the same year as Shelley, 
 is still alive at far over eighty; I am eighty; and 
 Peacock died a very old man ; Mr Severn is more 
 than eighty ; Keats's sister, I believe, is still alive ; 
 and the false Fanny Brawne," she said, with a 
 little laugh, "whom I knew in London, only died 
 about 1865." 
 
 " Can you give me an introduction to Mr Severn, 
 madame ? I am anxious to see him, if I go to 
 Rome." 
 
 " None is necessary," she replied. " He is a 
 delightful old man, and will be only too glad to 
 see an admirer of his beloved Keats." 
 
 S3 
 
" What beautiful constancy and affection that is 
 of his! Keats died the year before Shelley, 1821, 
 and Mr Severn keeps his memory still as bright 
 as ever." 
 
 " Well," she continued, with a half-sigh, half-smile, 
 " I suppose Mr Severn and I will both soon rejoin 
 our beloved ones. ' A soul of gold,' as Shelley 
 called him. Do you admire Keats yourself? You 
 do not think him equal to Shelley, as some say, 
 do you ? " 
 
 I laughed. " Most certainly not ! madame. Keats 
 died far too early to give one an idea of what he 
 might do in mature years, and to compare him 
 with Shelley is ridiculous, for the quantity of work 
 he has done altogether is not a tithe of Shelley's, 
 and what there is reminds me very much of a 
 luxuriant but unweeded garden. Nothing can be 
 more cloying than his earlier poefry, with his ' dear 
 delights ' and ' darling essence,' and ' cheating 
 dove-like bosoms.' I quite agree with Byron in 
 his contempt for all that part of ' the Mannikin's ' 
 work as he called him. But, on the other hand, 
 the Odes are absolute perfection. Nothing can 
 surpass the beauty of that rich golden haze of 
 vague, sweet mystery and dream which surrounds 
 them like a nimbus. It seems almost incredible 
 that the same man who could write the repulsive 
 trash that I have been speaking of, could also 
 compose those divine lines, instinct with all the 
 mystery and melody and glamour of old romance 
 
 54 
 
— lines which alone would make a man im- 
 mortal : 
 
 Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." 
 
 "Was not that a strange presentment of his 
 own death that Shelley had?" Miss Clermont re- 
 marked. "Was it not strange that in describing 
 Keats's or Adonais's death, he exactly described 
 his own?" 
 
 "That is, I always think, one of the most won- 
 derful psychological cases in history," I replied. 
 
 " It is a strange thing," I remarked, " that that 
 most interesting episode you have told me about 
 Marlow and the French prisoners should never 
 have been related before by any of the Shelley 
 and Byron biographers." 
 
 "Oh, no, not at all!" she replied. "All the 
 contemporaries who wrote of Byron and Shelley 
 only came into our circle after that, in Italy. 
 Tom Medwin and Trelawney, Hunt and the rest 
 — Mary became far too prim and proper to write 
 abptft a scene like that, living as she did in 
 /highly respectable Sussex county society. Mary 
 always had a great respect for ' Mrs Grundy.' " 
 
 " Shelley must have tried her a good deal, then," 
 I said. "What did she think of that poem begin- 
 ning (and to whom did it allude) — 
 
 The serpent is shut out from Paradise, 
 
 The wounded deer must seek the herb no more 
 
 In which its heart-cure lies"? 
 
 55 
 
Miss Clermont did not appear altogether to care 
 for this allusion to a tendresse for another Jane, and I 
 directed my conversation to a more personal channel. 
 
 "Poor Mary!" I replied. "Fancy such a dis- 
 turbing element in the house ! It cannot be 
 altogether bliss to have a lovely sister and an 
 arch-charmeuse under the same roof with a husband 
 who speaks the language of the gods, whose 'food 
 is love and fame.'" 
 
 "Well, it was not my fault that men fell in love 
 with me," she replied, with that strange half- shy, 
 tantalising smile which irradiated her face with a 
 flood of youth, and put it out of one's power for 
 some minutes to realise that this was a woman of 
 eighty. 
 
 I asked her the question if Byron had ever been 
 in France, saying that I had always understood 
 he had not, but that in his conversations Medwin 
 relates an anecdote of Byron and Rogers among 
 the catacombs in Paris. 
 
 "Absolute imagination," she replied. "Dear old 
 Tom Medwin had the most vivid imagination ; 
 ' Bamming ' he called that sort of thing, a slang 
 word much used in those days. Byron was never 
 in Paris in his life." 
 
 Of the Shelley entourage. Miss Clermont appeared 
 to like her namesake, Jane Williams, the best. A 
 charming woman, she said ; both Shelleys were 
 devoted to her. This lady's grief at the terrible 
 news of the disaster which involved the death of 
 
 56 
 
both Shelley and her husband, Miss Clermont 
 described to me as pitiful to witness. 
 
 "All you ladies," I remarked, "seem to have 
 formed a kind of adoring circle around Shelley." 
 
 " Yes," she said ; " Shelley had an irresistible 
 attraction for all women ; his nature was so pure 
 and noble ; the tone of his poetry whenever a woman 
 is , mentioned is of an almost unearthly purity. 
 Instead of holding with Byron that woman is 
 inferior to man, he looked up to woman as some- 
 thing higher and nobler. Many of his poems 
 express this feeling most forcibly^- 
 
 The desire of the Moth for the Star, 
 The desire of the night for the morrow, 
 The devotion to something afar." 
 
 " I can imagine Shelley," I said, " almost like a 
 pretty girl himself I am sure that poetical epistle 
 to Maria Gisborne is most ladylike." , 
 
 She replied indignantly, " Not at all ; -'there was ^ 
 no lack of manliness about Shelley. He was utterly 
 without any sense of fear ; always in the open air, 
 yachting, or taking strong physical exertion. He was 
 the finest walker of any man of the Byron-Shelley 
 clique, and could tire out almost any of the 
 others." y'' 
 
 I again preserved a discreet silence. All the 
 ladies of the clique seem to have enjoyed a 
 passionate feeling for Shelley, and had I ventured 
 
 57 
 
to differ with Madame Clermont after this, I should 
 very soon have received my congi. 
 
 There is one subject on which her evidence was 
 absolutely opposed to that of any of the biographers 
 except Mr Jeaffreson, who, with his usual acuteness 
 and flair, seems to have suspected the truth. She 
 gave me distinctly to understand that at the 
 beginning of the Byron connection she had a 
 pretty clearly defined idea of becoming eventually 
 Lady Byron, and on this subject we had a great 
 deal of conversation which cannot be reported here. 
 Her evidence, also, was quite opposed to what I 
 may call the "Shelley-and-Mary-babes-in-the-wood 
 theory." She told me clearly that the Shelleys 
 knew all about her relations to Byron, both before 
 and during the Genevese epoch. Indeed, Miss 
 Clermont gave me a kind of semi-romantic, semi- 
 comical account of how the news was first brought 
 to the Shelleys by her, before either they or Byron 
 left England. She burst into the house one day, 
 she said, shortly after the first interview with 
 Byron, and exclaimed, to quote her own words : 
 " Percy ! Mary ! the great Lord Byron loves me ! " 
 " Percy " was quite pleased at thus forming a kind 
 of brother-in-law of his mighty brother bard, and 
 I, I am sorry to say, laughed ; as, indeed, did the 
 lady when she told me the episode. 
 
 The following few particulars may be given — it is 
 impossible to give more — of Miss Clermont's career 
 
 58 
 
subsequently to the deaths of Byron and Shelley. 
 She first went to Vienna for a time, where her 
 brother, Charles Clermont, was residing. After that 
 she spent some time in Russia, and later on became 
 a governess in Italy to the descendants of her old 
 friend. Lady Mountcashel. Her position, however, 
 in that family was quite a unique one, Lady Mount- 
 cashel's daughter always looking upon her with 
 adoring admiration. I have many interesting 
 particulars, both of this epoch and of her life in 
 Russia, also in Paris (where she spent some years) 
 and in London, where she settled on coming into 
 Shelley's legacy, the greater part of which she lost, 
 as explained by herself On returning after this 
 loss to settle finally in her beloved Florence, she 
 took, in the first instance, a villa at S. Domenico, 
 below Fiesole ; subsequently to that she lived in 
 Via Valfonda, and up to her death she inhabited a 
 house in the Via Romano. 
 
 Jane Clermont's body was buried in the Municipal 
 Cemetery at Trespidano, some four or five miles out 
 of Florence. She had told me that she wished it to 
 rest with that of her child Allegra, but no doubt this 
 was not possible. It was a touching wish, and would 
 have been a touching end to that long, chequered 
 life had all that was mortal of Jane Clermont come 
 to rest at last with the beloved and never-forgotten 
 child — though the source of so much bitterness in 
 the past — who predeceased her mother by nearly 
 sixty years. 
 
 59 
 
And now, before concluding, let me say a few words 
 to clear up some great misconceptions that have 
 always prevailed as to the relations of this lady and 
 Byron. Byron did not treat her badly according 
 to his lights. I have said this to her herself, as 
 plainly as one can say unpleasant things to a lady, 
 and I repeat it here. It is a peculiarity of the femin- 
 ine disposition to construe slights into crimes, and 
 to dwell and brood over matters that men would 
 pass by unnoticed. Yet though Miss Clermont 
 — and my readers can see it for themselves — 
 though she obviously disliked Byron, I am bound 
 to say she never spoke of him with injustice. 
 Surely the Shelleyolaters should be the last to argue 
 that he treated Jane Clermont badly, seeing that 
 both Shelley and his wife revolved as constantly in 
 his orbit as they possibly could, even abandoning 
 an invitation to Florence for some months in order 
 to continue so revolving at Pisa. 
 
 As to the "vile note" that Miss Clermont spoke 
 of to me, the confidences she made me afterwards 
 (but which, as I have said, cannot be published until 
 1909) as completely exonerated Byron as Shelley, in 
 my opinion. 
 
 The whole history of the discordance between the 
 two was this : Byron was a man of genius ; and, like 
 most men of genius (and a great deal more than 
 most), he had a vast deal of the woman in his com- 
 position ; while Jane Clermont was a woman to the 
 very marrow of her bones. Need I say more? It 
 
 60 
 
was a question of a woman's ambition, a woman's 
 egotism, a woman's vanity warring with a woman's 
 ambition, a woman's egotism, a woman's vanity. I 
 do not say that these qualities are more developed 
 in women than in men, but they are differently 
 developed. 
 
 A once spoiled pet of the drawing-rooms, a hot- 
 press darling of the publishers, meets with a beautiful, 
 fascinating, but spoiled and capricious girl — Italian 
 in appearance and disposition (notwithstanding her 
 strictures on Italian women), though English in 
 depth. She wishes to use the man and his fame as 
 a lever, and on finding that she cannot get all she 
 wants — ^well, she begins to show her less amiable 
 side ; and he, equally or more spoiled, and with a 
 fame perhaps unequalled in history, becomes furious ; 
 then love (or whatever approach to love there ever 
 was between them) very quickly changes to intense 
 aversion on both sides. As to Byron's subsequent 
 conduct, it was quite in consonance with the free 
 love tenets of his friend Shelley, who, as I have 
 already said, never showed the slightest resentment 
 against his leaving Jane Clermont when and how 
 he pleased. 
 
 " Women are but the margin of our lives 
 The course goes on unheeding." 
 
 That was obviously Byron's motto. When they 
 interfered with his life, they went to the wall : 
 witness his wife; witness Jane Clermont; witness, 
 
 6l 
 
even to some extent, La Guiccioli. To him, after 
 the first heats of passion, women were pretty play- 
 things and no more. Now, Jane Clermont's whole 
 ambition was for glory, and display, and sensation. 
 Amiable, generous, and dowered with a magnetic 
 charm as she was to the last, she always felt that 
 fiery longing to excel, to be great, to be prominent 
 in some way or other. She had turned to Byron in 
 youth, not from love of him, but from love of his 
 fame, for love of sensation. She was dazzled by 
 his glory as one is dazzled by the beams of the sun 
 in his zenith ; but her sun passed on, as the sun 
 itself passes on over rich and poor with indifference ; 
 and then came the one love of her life — Shelley — 
 Shelley with his soft, tender ways, and divine words ; 
 and the rest has been told. At the last came a 
 longing for rest, and "the eternal croon of Rome" 
 only half supplied that rest. One day I passed her 
 pet priest as he was leaving the house, and found 
 her much agitated. 
 
 " What is the matter, madame ? " I asked, gently. 
 
 And the priest's influence seemed but slight, for 
 she replied fiercely, though in that voice of golden 
 accents, looking at me, a boy of twenty then, with 
 a sort of envy, " O God, dear, to be your age ! to 
 begin life again ! if I could only have another 
 chance! I know I have it in me to be great, but 
 I have missed it — missed it somehow ! " And then, 
 with that firm belief in a future world, this wonderful 
 woman of many moods said, with a steady glance of 
 
 62 
 
those keen, piercing eyes of hers : " I shall have 
 another chance in another world. The priest's talk 
 is jargon. All these shows are only shadows." 
 
 My last sight of her stands pictured clear and 
 distinct from beyond the long lapse of years — waving 
 one white hand to me from the window, with that 
 never-forgotten smile on her lips. 
 
THE SECRET OF THE BYRON 
 SEPARATION 
 
 Nothing in the whole course of biographical litera- 
 ture is so replete with interest, has possessed, and 
 seems likely to possess, such a strange haunting 
 fascination as the life of Lord Byron, and no part 
 of that wonderful career has so baflSed and per- 
 plexed the world as the epoch of his married life, 
 and the causes leading up to the separation. 
 
 The secret of this separation (for, notwithstanding 
 occasional averments to the effect that it was merely 
 due to the ordinary causes of incompatibility of 
 temper, it has been almost universally held that 
 there was a secret) has excited the feverish curiosity 
 of at least three generations, and is still exciting 
 the curiosity of a fourth. 
 
 It so happens that I, a man born thirty-four years 
 after Byron's death, am able to solve this enigma 
 of the century, and I am the only living man who 
 can do so. I shall do so now. 
 
 In two articles, entitled "Chats with Jane Cler- 
 mont," which appeared in the Nineteenth Centufy at 
 the end of 1893 and the beginning of 1894, I re- 
 ported conversations I had the privilege of obtaining 
 with Miss Jane Clairmont, the sister by affinity of 
 
 64 
 
Mrs Shelley, shortly before her death, and throwing 
 an entirely new light upon several aspects of Shelley 
 and Byron literature — such as upon the first meet- 
 ing between the two poets, on which point the 
 information received by me was most striking and 
 novel ; the pre-arrangement of the Geneva meeting, 
 and other matters which had until then perplexed 
 all students of Shelleyana and Byroniana. 
 
 The articles met with a most generous reception 
 from both public and Press, and undoubtedly, apart 
 from the literary value of the revelations made by 
 Miss Clermont to me, the sharp, incisive style in 
 conversation of that marvel of old ladies, imparted 
 a charm to all matter of which she treated, that 
 same fascination which attached to her person from 
 youth to extreme age ; but in these conversations 
 I was, as I explained, obliged to omit matter of 
 the most vital interest — matter more interesting 
 even than anything I included — at the special 
 request of the lady herself 
 
 Part, and to many the most interesting part, of 
 that information I am about to relate in this paper 
 — namely, the portion which gives the secret of 
 Lady Byron's absolute determination to separate 
 from her husband, and the reason accounting for 
 her obstinate refusal to return to him. I am show- 
 ing for the first time to the public what was the 
 keynote of Byron's life ; am plucking, as it were, 
 the heart out of his mystery. 
 
 In breaking on this subject a silence which I 
 E 65 
 
have for years observed, it cannot be said that I 
 am in any way committing a breach of faith to 
 trust. My promise to Miss Clairmont was as 
 follows : — Not to write in any way of the dis- 
 closures she made to me, until ten years after her 
 death, and then only in the event of the death 
 of Sir Percy Shelley taking place previously. That 
 promise I have more than kept, for Miss Clairmont 
 died in 1879, and the death of Sir Percy Shelley 
 took place as far back as 1890, while I did not 
 publish the first of my articles until November 
 1893. My further promise was not to publish 
 certain matter relating to Miss Clairmont until 
 thirty years after her death, and that promise I 
 shall also keep to the letter, as regards a great 
 portion of the matter, and publish nothing on the 
 subject until 1909, provided I am in that year 
 upon this planet at all ; but, after much matured 
 consideration, I have arrived at the conclusion that 
 I am at liberty to use my discretion in reference 
 to that part of Miss Clairmont's confidences which 
 relates to the Byron separation, in which, as will 
 presently be seen, she played the most prominent 
 part. 
 
 There is really no reason why all that the lady 
 told me should not be given to the public now, 
 for there is not a single living person whom such 
 disclosure could harm, while I have information 
 at my disposal regarding the celebrated Byron- 
 Hoppner correspondence, which completely clears 
 
 66 
 
Shelley from a most atrocious charge, and fixes 
 the responsibility, such as it was, upon the right 
 shoulders ; but still a promise is a promise, and I 
 suppose must be kept, even if it be unreasonable. 
 As regards the present subject, however. Miss 
 Clairmont was certainly unaware when requesting 
 me to make the promise, or in any case she had 
 forgotten the fact, that the Hobhouse papers — at 
 present under seal in the British Museum — will see 
 the light with 1901, and the long sought-for secret 
 will in any case be revealed then ; so I am merely 
 anticipating matters by less than six years. 
 
 I will, therefore, now give the reason for this 
 famous separation — this separation which has given 
 rise on one side to some of the finest poetry ever 
 penned, in The Dream and elsewhere, albeit in- 
 sincere and misleading at times, and at others 
 absolutely maniacal in fury, and on the other side 
 to the atrocious and vile calumnies repeated to 
 Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, with which the author 
 of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " disgraced her literary fame ; 
 calumnies, the offspring of a diseased, revengeful, 
 malignant, and half-unhinged mind ; calumnies, 
 which would justify the worst that Byron ever 
 found to say against his wife, which render it 
 impossible to think of the woman who could utter 
 them without a shudder, and fully to appreciate 
 the feelings of his daughter Ada, who inherited 
 so much of her father's temperament, on learning 
 at last, through Colonel Wildman, successor to 
 
the lands and halls of the Byrons at Newstead, 
 what a heritage of fame was hers, on discovering 
 in fact that immortal father, the memory, almost 
 the knowledge, of whom and of whose works 
 had been sedulously kept from her. 
 
 The story is so touching and so little known 
 that it is well worthy of relation here. A little 
 over a year before her death, Ada, then Lady 
 Lovelace, paid a visit to Newstead, and, on Colonel 
 Wildman quoting a passage to her from her father's 
 works, asked the name of the author. Colonel 
 Wildman, in answer, pointed to the painting of 
 Byron on the great library wall. The disclosure 
 burst on this nervous, delicately-strung lady, of the 
 true Byron temperament, with the force of a revela- 
 tion, and for some time Lady Lovelace could 
 hardly command herself under the shock of tender, 
 tumultuous feeling thus aroused. Subsequently, she 
 became a diligent student of her father's works, 
 and of everything in any way connected with him 
 whose memory she cherished for the remainder of 
 her life as a sacred thing. But the thought 
 that she had all her life been deprived of the 
 knowledge and love of that glorious being, who 
 had doubtless even passed away thus early from 
 a world which he would have glorified as much 
 by his deeds as by his words, out of bitterness of 
 heart caused by the severance from her, while she 
 all the while had been kept in complete ignorance 
 both of him and of his works — this bitter thought 
 
 68 
 
preyed on her mind, and in a little more than a 
 year from the time of this discovery — as it really 
 was — of her own father, Lady Lovelace also 
 passed away to the silent land. But during her 
 illness she wrote to Colonel Wildman imploring 
 him who ruled in the Byrons' place that her body 
 might be buried by that of her father. " Yes," 
 she said ; " let it be buried there, not where my 
 mother can join me, but by the side of him who 
 so loved me, and whom I was not taught to love ; 
 and this reunion of our bodies in the grave shall 
 be an emblem of the union of our spirits in the 
 bosom of THE ETERNAL." 
 
 And thus were the prophetic words of Byron 
 fulfilled to the letter. 
 
 " My daughter ! With thy name this song begun — 
 My daughter ! With thy name thus much shall end ; 
 I see thee not, I hear thee not, but none 
 Can be so wrapt in thee ; thou art the friend 
 To whom the shadows of far years extend ; 
 Albeit my brow thou never should'st behold, 
 My voice shall with thy future visions blend, 
 And reach unto thy heart, when mine is cold, 
 A token and a tone, even from thy father's mould. 
 
 Yet, though dull hate as duty should be taught, 
 
 I know that thou wilt love me ; though my name 
 
 Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught 
 
 With desolation, and a broken claim : 
 
 Though the grave closed between us, 'twere the same, 
 
 I know that thou wilt love me ; though to drain 
 
 My blood from out thy being were an aim. 
 
 And an attainment, all would be in vain, — 
 
 Still thou would'st love me, still that more than life retain." 
 
 69 
 
And in the loss of her daughter's love, and in the 
 passionate awakening in that daughter of love for 
 her father, Lady Byron paid, perhaps, the price of 
 her icy coldness and hard, unforgiving cruelty to 
 the uttermost farthing. But the unlovely nature 
 was only goaded on by this, goaded on from cold, 
 implacable resentment to hellish unspeakable malice 
 and infamy. Fortunately, the utter flagrant madness 
 and absurdity of Lady Byron's statements to poor 
 credulous Mrs Stowe was exposed in the Quarterly 
 Review at the time the morbid and vulgar American 
 writer gave them to the light of publicity ; but it 
 remains for me to end for ever all foolish and 
 monstrous rumours, and to reveal the true facts to 
 the world. 
 
 Byron himself said on several occasions that the 
 causes of the separation were too simple to be easily 
 discovered, and Trelawney, in his interesting " Last 
 Days of Shelley and Byron," seems to have held 
 the same opinion. But this is only true in a limited 
 degree, and then only as relating to the period 
 before the journey of Lady Byron to Kirkby Mallory 
 — for there must have been a very powerful reason 
 to cause a lawyer of eminence, who at iirst advised 
 Lady Byron to patch up matters with her husband 
 and return to her home, only a fortnight later to 
 declare a reconciliation impossible. The reason for 
 this has never yet been divulged ; and it is this 
 alone that constitutes the mystery of the Byron case. 
 To deal with the wretched quarrels of the Byrons' 
 
 70 
 
married life is mere trifling with the matter. The 
 story of the events leading up to the Byron separa- 
 tion has been fully told by various writers ; but it 
 is necessary here to recapitulate them in order of 
 sequence, so that the reader may bear in mind the 
 chronological outline of the occurrences of which 
 I am about to treat. 
 
 For several months after the marriage all went 
 well ; but in about August or the beginning of 
 September, quarrels broke out, and from that time 
 until January 15th, 1816, the two led what is 
 expressively called "a cat-and-dog life." The birth 
 of a child in November 181 5 made matters if 
 anything rather worse, for Byron was greatly dis- 
 appointed at the addition to the family circle not 
 proving of the sex he had wished. He had taken it 
 for granted, in the most amusing way, as is evident 
 from his letters, that it was to be a son, and duly 
 resented the disappointment occasioned on the 
 presentation to him by Lady Byron of a girl. On 
 January 15 th Lady Byron travelled, then, to her 
 parents at Kirkby Mallory, in Leicestershire, in the 
 full persuasion that her husband was mad. Never- 
 theless, all arrangements had been made that he 
 should rejoin her at Kirkby Mallory in a few weeks, 
 and remain there until Lady Byron should be in 
 the first stage of her progress to maternity, when 
 she promised, no doubt, to behave better and let it 
 be a son this time. In those days people had not 
 the privilege of possessing an Ibsen, and were not 
 
 71 
 
in such dread of matters hereditary as are we of 
 to-day. Moreover, Lady BjTon and her parents 
 also were of opinion that, by judicious treatment 
 and humouring, Lord Byron's mind would recover 
 its tone ; and Lady Byron wrote him humorous, 
 playful, affectionate letters, both on the day of her 
 arrival, and on the day following, addressing him 
 as " My dear Pippin." 
 
 Meantime, however, her ladyship was taking 
 measures to make quite sure of the insanity of the 
 poet ; and on the very day after she wrote the 
 second letter she received a report from Le Manu, 
 an apothecary who had examined Byron surrepti- 
 tiously (that is to say, without Byron having the 
 slightest idea of his drift), that he could note no 
 signs of insanity in her husband, and that his extra- 
 ordinary behaviour and excitability were merely 
 the result of over-taxing the brain, worry from his 
 creditors, and trouble and excitement generally. 
 
 This put an entirely new complexion upon 
 matters, so far as Lady Byron was concerned, and 
 she vowed never again to share the same house 
 with a man who, without the excuse of insanity, 
 could }'et treat her in the manner Byron had done ; 
 but she wished to make perfectly certain that Le 
 Manu was right before definitely committing herself 
 to a separation. Not a minute did Lady Byron lose 
 in taking the necessary steps to either confirm or 
 disprove his opinion, and on January 19th, 18 16 — 
 the very day after receiving Le Manu's letter — she 
 
 72 
 
started for London to consult Dr Baillie, who 
 shared twin honours with Dr Abernethy — also 
 a Scotsman — as head of the medical profession of 
 that day. Both physicians were noted for their 
 brusquerie, and are referred to ironically in con- 
 nection with this in Don Juan as " Mild Baillie " 
 and "Soft Abernethy." 
 
 In case Dr Baillie's account of her husband 
 should tally with that of Le Manu, Lady Byron 
 had fully made up her mind to take the legal 
 opinion of Doctor Lushington. For the convenience 
 of both medical man and lawyer she had drawn out 
 the famous statement of reasons, made such fun of 
 afterwards by Byron, for believing him to be 
 mad. 
 
 And here was the whole case as it then stood. 
 
 Now comes a touch of humour, one of those 
 touches which are by no means lacking in the whole 
 business, and, indeed, alternate with tragedy all 
 through Byron's life. The lawyer and the doctor 
 managed to find a pretext for visiting Byron, and 
 were treated with the scantiest of scant politeness, 
 indeed, only just escaped a very ignominious and 
 forcible ejection from the house ; and not unnaturally 
 either, for Lord Byron, of course, wholly unwitting 
 of their purport, very properly resented the number 
 of apparently silly, aimless, and impertinent ques- 
 tions asked of him. He alludes to this in a letter 
 written years afterwards, and the visit is also the 
 subject of the sprightly verses, so broadly humorous 
 
 73 
 
that one can never read them without laughing, 
 in Don Juan. 
 
 "But Inez called some druggists and physicians, 
 And tried to prove her loving lord was mad ; 
 But as he had some lucid intermissions, 
 She next decided he was only bad — 
 Yet when they asked her for her depositions, 
 No sort of explanation could be had, 
 Save that her duty both to man and God 
 Required this conduct — which seemed very odd." 
 
 Byron's demeanour during this interview was, 
 notwithstanding the short work he made of his 
 extraordinary interviewers, of a nature to render it 
 quite certain that he was not mad, and the lawyer 
 and the doctor returning to Lady Byron with this 
 intelligence, quite confirmatory, as has been seen, 
 of what she had already been told, that lady betook 
 herself at once to Doctor Lushington to ask his 
 opinion as to whether a separation was practicable. 
 Doctor Lushington replied that a judicial separation 
 could, no doubt, be obtained, but that the circum- 
 stances were not such as to warrant him in advising 
 his client to incur all the scandal and publicity of 
 this course, and the consequent sacrifice of domestic 
 happiness which might still quite well be hers — with 
 a little give and take, bear and forbear on both sides ; 
 and he recommended that Lord Byron should be 
 seriously remonstrated with, both by her and his 
 own relatives (both Captain George Byron and 
 Augusta, Mrs Leigh, his sister, were entirely on the 
 wife's side), and that then Lady Byron should return 
 
 74 
 
to her husband, and they were — as the story-books 
 say — "to live happy ever afterwards." Such was 
 the sensible and paternal advice of this excellent 
 counsel. Lady Byron was half-disposed to act upon 
 it. Her simple old father was very wroth, and 
 vowed that his daughter ought never to return to 
 a sane man who had treated her so ; but his 
 daughter, as history and biography have only too 
 well proved, had a decided will of her own. More- 
 over, she was, after all, sincerely attached to her 
 husband, and detested the horrors, scandal, and 
 publicity of a judicial separation. She returned 
 with her father to Leicestershire, and spent a fort- 
 night there in wretched indecision ; when something 
 occurred which led her again to seek the advice 
 of Doctor Lushington, and this time he advised 
 her precisely the reverse of what he had previously 
 counselled. 
 
 Before, as has been seen, he had strongly recom- 
 mended a re-union, but now he said a re-union was 
 impossible. More than this. Sir Samuel Romilly, 
 the counsel retained by Lord Byron for the defence, 
 on learning that his wife was determined to sue for 
 a separation, threw up his brief, and returned the 
 money, on hearing the additional facts submitted 
 to Doctor Lushington, and declared that he would 
 take neither part nor lot against Lady Byron, who, 
 he considered, was entitled to the relief afforded by 
 separation. 
 
 What was the reason for this change of front ? 
 
 ;5 
 
We all know the generous disposition of the lights 
 of the law ; chivalrous to Quixotism ; and how apt, 
 as a class, they are to throw over briefs and return 
 money, if their sensitive souls be not satisfied of 
 the justice of a cause ; but in this case the reason 
 must have been very powerful. What was it ? All 
 manner of answers — answers that might almost be 
 counted by the thousand — have been made to this 
 question. Hints of unnameable vices, of unnameable 
 crimes, even, have been freely offered. Murder, 
 even, has been suggested ; but nothing possible — or 
 impossible, I should say^has been left unsuggested 
 for the last seventy -nine years, except the right 
 solution, which I am about to give. The most noted, 
 of course, of the solutions has been the equally 
 hideous and absurd story of Mrs Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe, above alluded to ; but that has been amply 
 demolished already, as I have said ; and, even if 
 true, it would be fully as disgraceful to the woman 
 who could tell it to silly Mrs Stowe, as if absolutely 
 false— as it is. For the woman who could live for 
 years on terms of intimacy, and even affection, with 
 another of her sex, of whom she could believe such 
 a thing possible, would be as unspeakable as the 
 woman who could invent such a tale. 
 
 To deal with the true reason for this most cele- 
 brated of all connubial severances, I must transport 
 myself back long years ago now — to the last years 
 of the decade before last. I must transport myself 
 to a quaint, dark, old Florentine drawing-room ; 
 
 76 
 
and a vague, longing pain — a longing for I scarce 
 know what — steals over me now. 
 
 Nicht irdisch is des Thorens Trank noch Speise. 
 
 How well I can picture the scene! It stands 
 more clearly than my life of yesterday before me 
 now — when I learned first this secret of Byron. 
 
 I see a lady — old, I suppose ; but she never seemed 
 old to me, with that wondrous youth which seemed to 
 baffle time, lighting up the mobile. Southern face — 
 for, as I always told her, she was in appearance, as in 
 disposition, an Italian — an Italian with the deep soul 
 of an Englishwoman — I see her, as she speaks in that 
 low, sweet, musical voice, with which time had dealt 
 as gently as with all else concerning her. The only 
 thing on which the relentless destroyer had set his 
 mark was on the hair, and there he had only touched 
 in play, for the locks were as luxuriant as in the 
 old golden days by Lake Leman, when the burning 
 words of passion were poured into that ear like a 
 white sea-shell from the lips of a poet whose strains 
 have thrilled the world as the world has never been 
 thrilled before or since — words such as no woman 
 on earth can hear now. The locks had been changed 
 from glossy black to a glistening white, every whit 
 as lovely — that was all. For the lady was Jane 
 Clairmont, — Jane Clairmont, loved in the old time 
 by Byron, loved passionately by sunny Thames 
 stretches, and blue Genevan waters, and deep Alpine 
 recesses, until the cold wind of discord blew upon 
 
 77 
 
that love, the sudden extinction of which has ever 
 been another unsolved mystery, partly explained 
 by me already, but to be more fully explained now. 
 It was Jane Clairmont— beloved by Shelley to his 
 latest breath — who spoke thus now to a boy of 
 twenty, seated on a little ottoman at her feet, and 
 listening with all the enthusiastic interest and 
 ardour of youth to the wonderful new things this 
 wondrous survival of the past had to tell, this still 
 beautiful lady of the witch-like charm, upon whose 
 lips the lips of Shelley and Byron had rested. 
 How entranced the boy was at all this flood of 
 remembrance, gazing up to that sad, poetic face, 
 with the coquettish, wilful curve of the lips, and the 
 enchantress smile which showed upon them from 
 time to time, taking away in an instant sixty years 
 from her eighty of life. How strange to think that 
 I was that boy ! That all the fate reserved for him 
 was to develop into the present writer, with youth 
 and illusions, which alone make life worth living, 
 gone for ever. 
 
 Eheu fugaces ! Posthume, posthume Labuntur 
 anni. 
 
 " What brought on the Byron separation, dear ? " 
 the lady said in response to a question I had put 
 to her. "Well, as Byron said, the causes of the 
 quarrel were very simple, too simple to be easily 
 found out. The two quarrelled like cat and dog." 
 
 " Yes, madame," I replied ; " but I mean, what 
 made Lady Byron decide she would never go back 
 
 78 
 
to her husband, and led to the extraordinary 
 change of opinion on the counsel's part?" 
 
 " Oh, Byron was a very bad man, you know ! " 
 Miss Clairmont replied. "No doubt, other reasons 
 occurred which led Lady Byron to take a stronger 
 view of the case than she had first done." 
 
 I somehow felt I was being trifled with, and, 
 looking up, I noticed that mysterious demi-sourire 
 on the lady's lips, and I smiled back in return. A 
 sudden thought flashed across me as I reflected 
 despairingly that evidently Miss Clairmont was not 
 disposed to be communicative, and I expressed the 
 thought. 
 
 " Byron himself attributed his married misfortunes 
 and the mischief made between him and Lady 
 Byron to a namesake of yours, madame. Was she 
 any relative ? I have often wondered as to the 
 coincidence of names. And yet, if she were, it 
 is strange that none of the Byronic writers have 
 said anything on the subject." 
 
 " Certainly she was — a connection by marriage 
 with an uncle of mine, I should say ; I am thankful 
 to say there was no nearer relation." 
 
 "Byron's verses to her fame in a sketch are 
 certainly not complimentary," I remarked. 
 
 " That is the most ferocious thing he ever wrote," 
 Miss Clairmont replied ; " but I must say the old 
 wretch fully deserved anything that could be said 
 against her. She was the cause of all the trouble, 
 and it was all through hatred of me." 
 
 79 
 
I started at these words, feeling that now I was 
 on the brink of a great disclosure, if I could only 
 induce this reticent lady to speak. 
 
 " All through hatred of you, madame ! " I said. 
 " But what had you to do with it ? " I asked, 
 innocently. 
 
 She smiled again, with that part-playful, part- 
 wicked, part contemptuous smile of hers, like the 
 smile of a spoiled beauty, radiant in the insolence 
 and pride of young loveliness — the smile which 
 must have worked such deadly effect on the heart 
 of Byron long years back, and replied : 
 
 " Well, I suppose I was the immediate cause of 
 Lady Byron's resolve." 
 
 At last ! At last I was about to hear the solution 
 of the great mystery ! 
 
 " Tell me, madame," I said ; " I will be very good, 
 and say nothing for as long as ever you like." 
 
 And having made me give the promise before 
 referred to, and holding one of my hands in that 
 delicately-moulded hand of hers with the snowy 
 fingers of Constantia, as I sat on the ottoman at 
 her feet, she proceeded in that gentle, flute-like 
 voice, with the perfectly modulated cadence, showing 
 the once-renowned singer, to tell me the following 
 strange story. After that, other disclosures throwing 
 the most vivid light upon the characters both of 
 Byron and Shelley were related to me, and we sat 
 together until the sweet Italian dusk, and then the 
 divine Italian night, populous with stars shining 
 
 80 
 
over dome and cupola and ancient mansion of fair 
 Florence, surprised us. 
 
 " I have told you already," the lady said, " of how 
 I met Byron first, and of how the whole world was 
 then dazzled by his glory — dazzled by it almost as 
 much as by that of Napoleon — I with the rest. I, 
 a beautiful girl — for I was beautiful then — I can 
 say it now without vanity," she added. 
 
 " You may say it of yourself now, without vanity, 
 madame," I protested ; but, with an imperious wave 
 of the hand, she silenced me and went on : 
 
 " I was a roniantic girl. Espiegle they used to 
 call me — that word has died out now, has it not?" 
 she asked here. 
 
 " There are no Constantias belonging to this age, 
 madame, to turn the heads of^ the world's greatest 
 men, and the word has fallen out of use." 
 
 She smiled, and continued : 
 
 " Mrs Clairmont, who, as I have said, was married 
 to my uncle, found out my connection with Byron 
 in this way. She had all her life been a meddle- 
 some busybody and mischief-maker ; had hated 
 Byron from the very first, and had determined 
 from the day of his marriage to do him an injury, 
 and upset any chances of married happiness the 
 two might have. She hated me, too, for I was a 
 girl with a sharp tongue, and rather prone to be 
 sarcastic, and to make fun of people." 
 
 " In those respects I think you still unchanged, 
 madame," I said. 
 
 F 8i 
 
She laughed, and rephed : " Well, if so, it does 
 credit to my powers of endurance, for I am sure 
 I have gone through enough ; but, in any case, 
 such was my disposition then, and my charming 
 aunt hated me accordingly. When Byron's con- 
 nection with Drury Lane Theatre began she thought 
 her opportunity come at last. She used to hang 
 about the stage doors of the theatres, and actually 
 went the length of employing spies with a view to 
 finding out if he cultivated any relations with the 
 actresses. Nothing, however, could she discover ; 
 and then a really fiendish idea occurred to her. 
 On several of her visits to our house the question 
 as to what I should do in life was discussed. It 
 was clearly necessary for me to do something, as 
 my father's — I mean Mr Godwin's— means were very 
 small, and all that I could see or had any inclina- 
 tion for in the way of a career was the stage — either 
 the opera or the drama. Mrs Clairmont, hearing of 
 , this, and of my idea of calling upon Lord Byron 
 at Drury Lane, saw at once an opportunity of 
 gratifying her spite in case things turned out as 
 they did — and she estimated Byron's character 
 
 correctly " 
 
 The lady hesitated a little at this juncture, and 
 I ventured to interrupt, remarking : " It would 
 appear to me, madame, that you and Byron were 
 ideally suited to one another. You seem to me to 
 have just the mixture of poetic responsiveness and 
 quick, sarcastic observation and satirical power that 
 
 82 
 
Byron should have adored. Your very appearance 
 is that of a Byron heroine." 
 
 Miss Clairmont laughed. " Was, you flatterer, was, 
 perhaps," she said. " Ah yes ; he did adore me 
 once, passionately no doubt for a time ! But Byron 
 grew to hate me ; and I returned his hate with 
 interest, for he was the curse of my life, though 
 now I can look back through the past without 
 bitterness." 
 
 " And yet, madame," I urged, " those enchanting 
 days at Leman among the forests and the moun- 
 tains ; those days spent with the deathless poets, 
 the remembrance of those golden days of passion 
 and all the glamour of romance which must have so 
 intoxicated both souls ; even a life would be well 
 lost for such remembrances." 
 
 " A pretty background," she replied dreamily, as 
 though her thoughts were far away in some other 
 world ; " but life has been so long, so wearisome, 
 after all," she said ; then — as if suddenly awaking 
 from a reverie — "a woman's life is not intended 
 merely to serve as part of a mtse en sc&ne for the 
 tableaux of a poet's career, however great he may 
 be ; my life was worth as much as his." She said 
 this with much bitterness. "Do you, too, think, so 
 young as you are, with him who said : 
 
 Women are but the margins of our lives : 
 The course flows on unheeded?" 
 
 she asked, looking at me keenly. 
 
 83 
 
I thought it better to turn temporarily the con- 
 versation into a more jocose channel, for I could 
 see that these recollections were becoming very 
 painful to her. 
 
 " Heaven forbid, madame," I said. " I should like 
 them to take up all the text, for they are all we 
 know of angels." 
 
 " And the margin ? What would you have as 
 margin?" she asked. 
 
 "The margin should be made up of dreams," I 
 replied. 
 
 She laughed merrily, then, with that low, melodious 
 laugh that used to bring the tears to my eyes when 
 I thought of how her innate fortitude and courage 
 had survived in that clear, sweet laugh all misfortune 
 and disappointment. 
 
 " Why do you laugh, madame ? " I asked. " That 
 is cruel of you, when I have just been comparing 
 your sex to the angelic hosts." 
 
 " It was a picture that came across my mind," 
 she said, " of you in the future as an old Pasha with 
 'a garden of fair women,' as Tennyson calls them, 
 around you, with an opium pipe between your lips, 
 enjoying 'the margin,'" she replied. "The fair 
 women, I suppose, you would like to gaze at you 
 in adoration the while until you came back from 
 dreamland. Such, no doubt, is a true representa- 
 tion of your sex's idea of woman's proper place.'' 
 
 " Oh, madame, how can you say that ? " I re- 
 monstrated. " Think of Petrarch, and the years 
 
 84 
 
and years of his Platonic adoration for the cold 
 Laura." 
 
 " Oh, pray do not instance that nincompoop," 
 replied this wilful lady. "There never existed a 
 man for whom I have more contempt. Sighing, 
 and suing, and billing and cooing all those years 
 to a woman with ten children, who, after all, would 
 not as much as allow him to kiss her hand." 
 
 "Oh, as to the limits," I replied, "you must 
 remember we only have Petrarch's word for that. 
 Petrarch was doubtless un monsieur comme il faut, 
 and would not tell tales out of school. Besides, 
 is it not of the very essence of Platonic love that it 
 is a system of progression? 
 
 A hand may first, and then a lip, be kissed," 
 I quoted. 
 
 "You wicked boy, I will not allow you to talk 
 scandal of the immaculate Laura, though, in my 
 opinion of that lady, I must say I am at one with 
 Byron. Do you remember his quotation ? — 
 
 If Petrarch's Laura had been Petrarch's wife, 
 Would he have written sonnets all his life ? 
 
 " Probably the claims of her little Petrarchs, if 
 she had presented him with as many as she did, 
 in fact, to her legitime, would have been a distinct 
 impediment to the muse, and Petrarch rightly pre- 
 ferred the chaste security of Platonic love." 
 
 " Doubtless, doubtless, madame," I replied, and 
 quoted : 
 
 85 
 
" The noblest kind of love is love Platonical, 
 To end with or begin with ; the next grand 
 Is that which may be christened love canonical, 
 Because the clergy take the thing in hand. 
 The next sort to be mentioned in our chronicle, 
 As flourishing in every Christian land. 
 Is when chaste matrons to their other ties 
 Add what may be termed marriage in disguise." 
 
 This interlude of chat and laughter having 
 diverted Miss Clairmont's mind from melancholy 
 thoughts which had previously beset her, she 
 resumed her narration. 
 
 " Mrs Clairmont," she said, " found out by means 
 of her own, all about myself and Byron, and told, 
 in the first instance, Lady Noel about it, and she 
 told Lady Byron. Yet it was through this woman 
 that I first met Byron.'' 
 
 " I thought that you called on him at Drury 
 Lane," I said. 
 
 " So I did," the lady replied ; " but if it had not 
 been for Mrs Clairmont I should never have paid 
 that visit. She introduced Lady Noel, Lady Byron's 
 mother, to my stepfather, Godwin, and a kind of 
 literary set in which I mixed, and some of the set 
 Lady Noel used to visit, and occasionally met at 
 the houses of her friends. I was one of these, and 
 I was first presented to Lady Noel and to Lord 
 and Lady Byron at a reception by Mrs Clairmont, 
 who had accompanied Lady Noel there. She was 
 a special companion of Lady Noel, and used to 
 accompany both her and Lady Byron everywhere. 
 
 86 
 
Byron paid me great attention on that occasion, and 
 that gave me the idea of calling on him with a 
 view to obtaining a part, as he had been good enough 
 to talk a great deal about how I seemed to him to 
 be born to be a great actress, and so on. He never 
 made the slightest effort to do anything for me on 
 the stage after I had called on him. Such was the 
 worth of Byron's promises." 
 
 " I suppose he grudged such a gem to the vulgar 
 interests of the world, madame," I replied. 
 
 " A pretty way of putting it," Miss Clairmont 
 replied. " But allow me to tell you, my young 
 friend, what I had occasion to tell Byron — that 
 talk is remarkably cheap, and that, as the Spaniards 
 say, it butters no parsnips." 
 
 " Did you fall in love with him at first sight, 
 madame?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, don't ask such leading questions," Claire 
 replied, laughing heartily this time. " You ought 
 to be a cross-examining counsel. I suppose I did, 
 though ; he was a gloriously handsome man at that 
 time, with a soft, insinuating, irresistible manner, 
 and a voice like music itself And a fame — and 
 a fame — but I have told you of that. Why, the 
 women, the greatest women of the time, too, were 
 even brought to him to be presented, instead of 
 his being presented to them — as if he were a king. 
 If I fell in love, however," she added, " in another 
 year I had completely fallen out of it, knowing 
 his disposition better. Well," she went on, " I 
 
 8; 
 
have told you of my visit to Byron at the theatre, 
 and about the ideas of free love in which I had 
 been brought up by Mr Godwin, and which were 
 exemplified by Shelley and Mary." 
 
 Miss Clairmont gave me distinctly to understand 
 that though she had met Lord Byron in the first 
 instance during 1815, the connection between them 
 was not suspected until after the departure of Lady 
 Byron to Kirkby Mallory ; but, before — and this 
 contains the secret of the whole matter — Lady 
 Byron returned to town to consult Dr Lushington 
 for the second time. Moore, in his life of Lord 
 Byron, says that Lady Byron had no cause for 
 offence on grounds of infidelity until after the 
 period of the separation, and Moore would be 
 right as regards what was actually known if 
 by the separation he meant the departure of 
 Lady Byron for Leicestershire ; but, as has been 
 seen, there was no intention of separating on her 
 part when she first left London ; indeed, she was 
 continually expecting her husband to join her, and 
 had written him warm and affectionate letters. Un- 
 doubtedly, however. Lady Byron could adduce this 
 liaison as further evidence against her husband 
 when she consulted Dr Lushington for the second 
 time. And not only had she been told of the 
 liaison by Mrs Clairmont while at Kirkby Mallory, 
 but, on her second visit to town, an incident took 
 place which put the fact beyond all manner of 
 doubt. 
 
 88 
 
I prefer to relate this culminating point of the 
 story in my own words from a natural feeling of 
 delicacy towards my old friend. The disclosures 
 made by Mrs Clairmont, through hellish malice 
 and snake-like, poisonous hate to Lady Byron, 
 appalled that lady with their suddenness and 
 brutality, and she hastened up to London to see 
 Dr Lushington ; but it was her first intention 
 to confront Byron and ask for the truth or false- 
 hood of Mrs Clairmont's assertion from his own 
 lips. She called at the house in Piccadilly, but 
 heard that he had gone to Johfi Murray, the 
 publisher's, in Albemarle Street. To Albemarle' 
 Street Lady Byron accordingly proceeded. Lord 
 Byron was not at Mr Murray's ; but, on issuing 
 from the shop, she saw him entering another house 
 in the same street with an extremely pretty, 
 piquante brunette, whom she well knew to be 
 Jane Clairmont. 
 
 Lady Byron, with her usual self-command, told 
 her coachman to drive on to her solicitor's, who 
 advised inquiries to be instituted to make security 
 doubly sure. It was ascertained, therefore, that 
 Lord Byron had, for some short time past, been 
 in the habit of making use of these rooms to meet 
 Miss Clairmont. Byron pleaded, in a letter to his 
 wife, which may probably be found among the Hob- 
 house papers, that this intimacy did not begin until 
 after Lady Byron had left him to his own devices ; 
 but Mrs Clairmont, with fiendish malignity, suggested 
 
 89 
 
that it had gone on for some months, and, having in 
 view Byron's conduct towards his wife, this other- 
 wise additional and overwhelming fact induced 
 Dr Lushington to pronounce the opinion he did, 
 and Sir Samuel Romilly to throw up his brief for 
 the defence ; a course he probably adopted, less 
 from any feeling of chivalry, than from a distaste 
 to expose himself to part of the storm of obloquy 
 which had already begun to rage against Byron. 
 
 There, then, is the secret of the Byron separa- 
 tion. The publication of the Hobhouse papers 
 will probably prove that I am in the right in 
 giving it as a reason ; and even if I had not, as 
 I have, absolute confidence in what Miss Clairmont 
 told me, everything tends to show that it is the 
 true one. Among other proofs I may mention the 
 date of Allegra's birth ; for had that child been 
 the result of an intercourse only began in Geneva 
 — as so many silly Byronists and Shelleyans seem 
 to wish to have been the case and to resent the 
 other view (though what it can matter to them I 
 must say I fail to see) — that child would have 
 been prematurely born by, in any case, a month, 
 which she certainly was not ; not to mention the 
 gross improbability of a man like Byron living 
 upon terms of Platonic affection for months with 
 a girl of Jane Clairmont's views. However, I am 
 quite content to accept Miss Clairmont's word. Her 
 interest (if there were any question of interest in 
 the matter at all) would have rather been to lead 
 
 90 
 
me to believe that she did not yield to Byron's 
 solicitations until meeting him again in Geneva, 
 and thus give herself the benefit of posing as coy 
 and reluctant. But she was far too honest for 
 that, and told me plainly that neither she nor 
 the Shelleys saw anything wrong in the connection 
 (as, indeed, the Shelleys, in view of their own 
 connection, could hardly do), that they were all 
 three apostles of free love. 
 
 The reasons why this explanation has always 
 been withheld are very obvious. In the first place, 
 Mrs Clairmont had prevailed upon both Lady Noel 
 and Lady Byron to keep her name out of the 
 matter, in order that she might not be exposed 
 to Godwin and the others of the family as a rela- 
 tion capable of playing so detestable a part ; and 
 Byron's intimate relationship with the Shelleys 
 gave another good reason for his silence as to the 
 affair, while Moore and the contemporary Byronian 
 biographers have glossed over the Jane Clairmont 
 episodes altogether as much as possible, out of con- 
 sideration for the feelings of Godwin, a brother man 
 of letters. I must say, however, that it seems to 
 me very strange that no writers on Byron should 
 have suspected the relationship between the two 
 Clairmonts. One would have thought that the 
 mere coincidence of name (by no means a common 
 one in this country) would have led to research 
 into the question of their possible connection. 
 Possibly the various manners of spelling the name 
 
 91 
 
may have prevented this ; and the elder and 
 highly objectionable lady seems occasionally — 
 notably in Lady Blessington's " Memoirs " — to have 
 been known as Mrs Charlemont. 
 
 With the question of the orthography of the 
 name I have dealt in a number of the Times 
 during the November of 1893. 
 
 Besides clearing up the Byron separation mystery, 
 another result of the light I am enabled thus to 
 throw on Byron's life explains the inveterate 
 antipathy which grew up between himself and Jane 
 Clairmont The reasons for this I have, to some 
 extent, explained elsewhere ; but the fact that Miss 
 Clairmont was really the cause of the separation 
 from his wife, and especially from his child, whom 
 he so passionately longed to rejoin, and the way 
 in which, through the chatter of the English 
 colony at Geneva, the matter leaked out, despite 
 Byron's precautions, both by action at the time, 
 and in writing subsequently, to keep the liaison 
 secret, induced him, in that irrational feminine 
 manner, which was a great defect in the poet's 
 character, to regard the once passionately admired 
 beauty as an enemy, and an obstacle to the 
 re - union with his wife and re - establishment in 
 England. 
 
 Consequently, before the Shelleys and Claire 
 had left Geneva, a breach had taken place between 
 the latter and Byron. No doubt, had Claire taken 
 more pains to conciliate this man of the impulsive, 
 
 92 
 
self-willed disposition, the liaison might have lasted 
 much longer ; for in disposition she far more re- 
 sembled Byron than La Guiccioli, than whom in 
 beauty she was vastly superior also. But the very 
 likeness of their dispositions led to the premature 
 disunion. I remember once mentioning my astonish- 
 ment to Miss Clairmont that Byron could leave a 
 woman of her charms for the foolish, credulous, 
 dumpy Guiccioli, and remain with the latter so 
 long, and she replied : " La Guiccioli endured things 
 from Byron I should have disdained to endure from 
 a demi-god." 
 
 Before closing this article, the information given 
 in another letter to the Times, which I now quote, 
 will probably be of interest to the reader. A good 
 many people have been under the impression that 
 Miss Clairmont's body was buried by that of her 
 daughter Allegra, in Harrow Churchyard, whither 
 Byron, with great trouble, transported Allegra's 
 remains. But this is quite a mistake, as my letter 
 shows : 
 
 ^'January yh, 1894. 
 
 " Chats with Jane Clairmont. 
 
 " Sir, — As you so kindly allowed me to make use of a 
 portion of your valuable space once before, when dealing 
 with some friendly reviews of my first article on above 
 subject, which took some exception to my orthography of 
 the lady's name, perhaps I may once more venture and ask 
 permission to add some highly interesting information 
 
 93 
 
which our esteemed Consul-General in Florence, Sir D. E. 
 Colnaghi, has had the great kindness to procure for me. 
 
 " There has always been a mystery as to where the body 
 of Jane Clairmont was buried, and I was led to believe that 
 it was at Trespiano, in the Municipal Cemetery, although 
 the lady herself had expressed to me personally an ardent 
 and pathetic wish that her mortal resting-place should be 
 that of her daughter Allegra, who died in 182 1. 
 
 "Sir D. E. Colnaghi has, however, after great trouble, 
 for which I cannot be grateful enough to him, ascertained 
 that the grave is in the cemetery of S. Maria, in the 
 Commune of Bagno a Ripoli, about three and a half miles 
 from Florence. 
 
 " There is a marble slab on the grave, and under the 
 names, surmounted by a cross, are the words : 
 
 ' ' ' She passed her Ufe in sufferings, 
 Expiating not only her faults, but 
 Also her virtues.' 
 
 No more touching, no truer, words were ever writ. But 
 this information throws a new light on the much-disputed 
 nomenclature of Jane Clairmont. Shelleyan and Byronian 
 authorities have held Constantia to be a mere nom de 
 fantaisie; but apparently this is not the case, for all four 
 names to which I alluded in my first letter to the leading 
 journal — viz. Clara, Mary, Constantia, Jane — appear on 
 the tomb. — I am. Sir, yours faithfully, 
 
 " William Graham." 
 
 During her last years Miss Clairmont shared her 
 home writh a niece, by name Paula Clairmont ; and 
 this lady, w^ith vsrhom I fancy she was latterly not 
 on the best of terms, met with a terrible death 
 some ten years ago by a fall into a glacier. 
 
 In conclusion, I would merely remark that, though 
 94 
 
it must at least be admitted that I have in this 
 article cleared up the great Byron mystery, it may 
 be said by some that I have still left unexplained 
 the reason of Lady Byron's absolute refusal to be 
 reconciled to Byron. But in that I maintain there 
 is no mystery whatever. Byron worshipper as I 
 am (and I confess that the very name of the man 
 and the fire of his verse affect me even now with 
 the same mesmerism which " thrilled the boys and 
 killed the girls " when the century was young, while 
 I detest the very name of Lady Byron), still, I 
 must be just, and I must admit that Byron's conduct 
 as regards his wife after the separation, though 
 intelligible in a man of his passionate vehemence 
 and incontinence of emotion, was indefensible. The 
 witty verses quoted from Don Juan, apropos of 
 Inez — who, of course, was merely Lady Byron 
 transported to Spain — were not precisely of a 
 nature to induce more affectionate and forgiving 
 feelings towards him any more than were the 
 terrible incantation in Manfred and The Dream, 
 in the latter of which, out of malice against his 
 wife, he led the whole world to believe he had 
 never loved her at all. At intervals — from the 
 separation until the Blessington episode, which 
 induced gentler feelings — Byron girded constantly 
 against Lady Byron, whom, nevertheless, he really 
 loved in his way, and passionately desired to rejoin 
 eventually on account of his child. The long array 
 of successive mistresses, of whom, of course, kind 
 
 95 
 
friends brought her the story, did not tend to mend 
 matters. Jane Clairmont was the reason of the 
 separation, but was no impediment to the re-union, 
 except, perhaps, as she herself told Byron in a 
 letter which is extant, that Lady Byron might draw 
 a moral from his treatment of Allegra as to his 
 desirability for assuming parental duties towards 
 his legitimate daughter. As a matter of fact, 
 however, his treatment of Allegra, if not of the 
 mother, was very creditable, and it is extremely 
 improbable that this weighed at all. There is no 
 mystery whatever as regards the continuance of the 
 separation ; the only strange thing would have been 
 had Lady Byron consented to pardon during his 
 life, as long as it lasted. If she had, she would 
 have acted as not one woman in a thousand would 
 have done. In 1823, as I have said, he began to 
 assume a very conciliatory tone ; and, no doubt, 
 had Byron returned from Greece as liberator and 
 king, as undoubtedly, had he lived to attend the 
 Salona Congress, would have been the case, he 
 would have been welcomed with affectionate love 
 by his wife, and with a passionate enthusiasm by 
 his country, throwing even the enthusiasm that 
 greeted the author of Childe Harold into the 
 shade. It is Lady Byron's conduct after his death, 
 not during his life, that I so strongly condemn and 
 execrate. 
 
 But her calumnies and all other foolish inventions 
 and lies I have now set at rest ; and perhaps my 
 
countrymen and his will feel that some gratitude is 
 due to me for one thing at least that I have done — 
 to have swept away these foul vapours, and to have 
 placed the character and career of — after Shakespeare 
 in the opinion of many — our greatest poet, in its 
 true light before the world. 
 
KEATS AND SEVERN 
 
 Among the memorable friendships of literature, 
 there is one which shines out pre-eminently from 
 all the others, even as that of Orestes and Pylades, 
 of Damon and Pythias, among the friendships of 
 old time. Indeed, the only friendship I can think 
 of to equal this in full completeness is that of our 
 dramatic dioscuri, Beaumont and Fletcher. But 
 that alliance in life and art of two souls, "twain 
 halves of a perfect heart " ; this remembrance gleam- 
 ing through the mists of ages with serene glow of 
 friendship rendered deathless, falls yet far short in 
 charm of the marvellous attraction that the mere 
 cursory recollection of the love of Severn for Keats 
 must exercise on all with any appreciation for devotion 
 unswerving, fidelity unchangeable, womanly tender- 
 ness, and love passing the love of woman. Through 
 Keats, Severn became immortal ; but was the former's 
 crown of poetry, were the lyre on his tomb, and the 
 deathless laurels which only came after death ; was 
 the tribute of song to his memory and for his grave 
 — by his mighty contemporary, Shelley — were all 
 these greater distinctions than this, the glory of 
 his friend, so to have enshrined his memory in the 
 hearts of the nation with the greatest literature on 
 
 98 
 
earth, that, whenever the mention of one of its 
 greatest poets is made, cheeks must flush and eyes 
 must rnoisten at the story of heroic devotion ; that 
 whenever the name of Adonais is spoken, the 
 name of Severn must find place beside it — a name 
 that Shelley could regret he had not known of 
 earlier? He would then have enshrined him in-^ 
 the deathless name -roll of Adonais. "But Mr 
 Severn," said he, "can dispense with reward from 
 such 'stuff as dreams are made of.' His conductor 
 is a golden augury of the success of his future 
 career. May the unextinguished spirit of his 
 illustrious friend animate his pencil and plead 
 against oblivion for his name." 
 
 Shortly before the death of Mr Severn, during 
 a journey across Italy, I called upon him. The 
 trio of revolutionary poets of the early days of 
 the century possessed a peculiar attraction for 
 me, and my interviews with the last survival 
 but one of the Byron and Shelley circles only 
 whetted my desire to learn more. And in Keats 
 there was an undiscovered world ; a world not so 
 full, perhaps, of moving incident and romance 
 stranger than any romance in fiction, but posses- 
 sing equal attraction in the vague, unfulfilled, though 
 splendid promise of a life cut short so early; that 
 weirdness and mystery of so young yet so splendidly 
 full a life, so perfectly self-orbed and developed a 
 nature, which gave rise to those memorable words 
 of our greatest woman poet : 
 
 99 
 
" But Keats's soul, the man who never stepped 
 In gradual progress like another man, 
 But turning grandly on his central self 
 Insphered himself in twenty perfect years. 
 And died not young (the life of a long life 
 Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear 
 Upon the world's cold cheek to make it bum 
 For ever) ; by that strong excepted soul, 
 I count it strange and hard to understand 
 That nearly all young poets should write old." 
 
 And scarcely less than my desire to hear of 
 Keats was my longing to behold, in ilesh and 
 blood, this glorious friend of the "inheritor of un- 
 fulfilled renown." 
 
 It was a handsome old man, though a very old 
 man indeed, who approached me on entering that 
 room in Scala Dante, and after cordially greeting 
 me, remarked, with a cheery laugh, " You are prob- 
 ably only just in time to see me ; in a very short 
 time now I am due to join my friend Keats and 
 the rest of my generation." And indeed it was 
 true enough, for he only lived for a few months 
 longer than Miss Clairmont, whom I had just left ; 
 Trelawney, the last of the band, living into 1881. 
 "Well, well, I have had enough of it, for I am 
 nearer ninety than eighty now, and it is time to 
 say Nunc dimittis. For us artists, too, there is no 
 place to live or die in like Rome." 
 
 "You appear much attached to Rome, Mr 
 Severn," I said. "Has the memory of your 
 friend been the reason of your living so much 
 there?" 
 
 100 
 
"Partly, no doubt, but not altogether," replied 
 he. "Rome has all my life possessed a profound 
 attraction for me ; and since I led Keats there, I 
 have spent nearly all my time in Rome. I was 
 British Consul from 1861 to 1872, you know. 
 Rome is like a human being to me : what I love 
 most in the world. I knew well how Keats would 
 revel in the art treasures, and I hoped sanguinely 
 that the climate would cure his complaint, or in 
 any case protract his life long enough to allow of 
 the accomplishment of greater work than he had 
 ever done." 
 
 " Could that have ever been, Mr Severn ? " I 
 questioned. " Could anything surpass ' The Odes ' ? " 
 
 " Perhaps not," was the reply. " But I hoped for 
 more from him than five perfect odes ; and perhaps 
 they, and some others of his briefer poems, are the 
 only portions of his poetry that can be properly 
 described as ' perfect.' I took the same pride in 
 Keats," he added, with that sweet, amiable smile 
 of his, " that I would have done in a young 
 painter who promised great genius but wanted 
 development." 
 
 " How many painters," I thought to myself, " would 
 endeavour thus to push a contemporary because 
 'they promised great genius'? Would they not 
 rather do all in their power to keep them back 
 in this world of envy, hatred, malice, and all un- 
 charitableness ? " 
 
 " I think Keats's great attraction for me," Mr 
 
 lOI 
 
Severn went on, "was his appreciation and sym- 
 pathy for my own art, and this grew and grew 
 with the years. He showed a decided talent for 
 painting himself; but, of course, poetry was para- 
 mount to everything with him. But I may at 
 least claim the hearty thanks of the lovers of the 
 sister art for one thing : you would have never 
 possessed the Ode to a Grecian Urn but for me. 
 He saw the urn with me, and it was a favourite 
 subject of conversation with us." 
 
 "The lovers of literature have even more cause 
 than that to reverence your name, Mr Severn," I 
 said. " That name shall be spoken with reverence 
 ages hence, ' In states unborn, and accents yet 
 unknown.' " 
 
 The old man's eyes softened. '' I was only a 
 man who loved his friend," he replied, simply. 
 
 I asked him if Keats appreciated music as much 
 as painting. 
 
 " Keats appreciated all that was beautiful," he 
 replied ; " but he had no educated feeling for 
 music." 
 
 " His feeling for music, I suppose," said I, " was 
 something like that of the Duke in Twelfth 
 Night : 
 
 That strain again ; it had a dying fall : 
 Oh ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet South 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets. 
 Stealing and giving odour. 
 
 The same love that he had for watching the daisies 
 
 1 02 
 
and buttercups growing in the meadows, or the 
 trees in the forest, or the rustling of the wind 
 through the leaves, or the taste of cool, delicious 
 wine on the palate, or the sense of beauty however 
 conveyed — not the sense that could have ever made 
 him appreciate a Palestrina or a Wagner. One 
 regrets so bitterly that he could not have lived 
 longer,'' I continued ; " but perhaps, after all, had 
 he done so, he might have done no better work. 
 These decrees of the Great Unknown Power are 
 doubtless for the best. His life seemed so rounded 
 and complete, as Mrs Browning has so beauti- 
 fully said. No doubt, no more was intended or 
 possible in this life ; and Shelley's gorgeous pic- 
 tures in Adonais of the after -world are true, 
 after all." 
 
 " There was certainly no possibility of further life 
 in this world," replied his old comrade. " I did 
 not know it then ; but I know it now. The recent 
 publication of his letters to Fanny Brawne puts a 
 complexion on the case I never realised before. 
 Keats suffered from a disease that I never sus- 
 pected, which must have gnawed at his springs of 
 life. I often wondered why the clear air of Rome 
 worked no improvement. No ; it was not the 
 review in The Quarterly (though the idea gave rise 
 to a clever couplet by Byron, and an immortal 
 poem by Shelley) which caused his death. But I 
 do not believe with others that it was merely his 
 disease either, for I think that life might long have 
 
 103 
 
been prolonged with care. Tubercles were not 
 developed before leaving England, and the doctors 
 held out hopes ; but I saw at the time there was 
 something which I could not then understand, fight- 
 ing against my care and labour. That man died 
 of love, if ever man died of love." 
 
 I smiled. "You may well add, 'if ever man 
 died of love,' Mr Severn," I said. " Shakespeare 
 has said : 
 
 Men have died and worms have eaten them : 
 But not for love." 
 
 "What Shakespeare puts into the mouth of a 
 character need not necessarily mean Shakespeare's . 
 own belief," Mr Severn replied. " But I grant that 
 such deaths are infrequent. Here was certainly 
 one, though. The physical disease was there, no 
 doubt, but life might have been long protracted but 
 for that." 
 
 "Did Keats never allude to this cankerworm in 
 any way to you?" I asked. 
 
 " Not a word ever passed his lips," he replied. 
 " Perhaps it might have been far better had it done 
 so ; it would have eased his mind, and, knowing the 
 Brawnes as I did, I could have given him good 
 advice. Poor Keats made terrible mistakes in the 
 one love affair to which his heart was given. How 
 could he have imagined that a girl like that, flighty 
 and flirty, could keep pace and time with the fiery 
 poetical ideas, the feverish jealousy, the restless sus- 
 
 104 
 
picions, and the supersensuous, supersensitive feelings 
 he describes sometimes in prose equal to his poetry ? 
 Bah ! It was Lord and Lady Byron, Shelley and 
 Harriett Westbrook over again. What riddles men 
 are to all but themselves, and in another way to 
 themselves also ! What riddles ! what riddles ! " 
 And the old man, resting his chin on his hand, 
 gazed out of the window into the depths of that 
 blue Italian sky — that same sky that Keats had so 
 longed to see, and saw only in time to die beneath 
 its canopy — and a chill hand seemed to press upon 
 my heart as the terrible apparent aimlessness, the 
 awful loneliness of life, realised themselves with a 
 sudden flash. Here was this glorious old fellow, 
 who had been faithful unto death ; had been the 
 last and only one by his immortal friend's death- 
 bed ; had smoothed down those Hyperion locks in 
 the death agony, but had been astray, astray till 
 now, as to the causes of that death ; and now the 
 close-guarded secret, which he had never even sus- 
 pected, was revealed just as his time to go had 
 come. 
 
 Mr Severn had, of course, known of Keats's affec- 
 tion for and semi-engagement to Miss Brawne ; but, 
 as he said, he had always deemed him of too broad 
 a nature to become the victim of a hopeless passion 
 for one. And, indeed, the whole tone of Keats's 
 writing, both in poetry and prose, tends to support 
 this view. But what a mystery is human nature! 
 This man with the light, jocund, frank temperament 
 
 lOS 
 
when in health, with the fierce, suspicious tempera- 
 ment when suffering from the ravages of his cruel 
 disease, but in either case a man apparently without 
 a secret, had passed out of the world, had passed out 
 of it while in the arms of his best and truest friend, 
 and had borne this secret with him, only to be 
 revealed sixty years afterwards. Whether it should 
 have been ever revealed is, of course, as a matter 
 of good taste and feeling, extremely questionable, 
 though, no doubt, in the interests of English 
 literature, it was well. Lord Houghton more than 
 suspected Keats's secret ; but it was the letters, 
 published shortly before Mr Severn's death, which 
 proved the matter. Until then, more or less, the 
 old tale which Byron has rendered popular by 
 a gibe and a rhyme, too good to abandon, even 
 although Keats's friend had told him of its falsity, 
 still held sway : 
 
 " Jack Keats, who was killed off by one critique, 
 Just as he really promised something great 
 
 If not intelligible — without Greek — 
 Contrived to talk about the gods of late. 
 
 Much as they might have been supposed to speak. 
 Poor fellow ! His was an untoward fate. 
 
 'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, 
 
 Should let itself be snuffed out by an article." 
 
 These lines have rung in the ears of the thousands 
 of his readers, whose number has gone on increasing 
 year by year, and have done more to prejudice 
 opinion against Keats than anything else. The 
 very ardour for fame was caused, in great measure, 
 
 1 06 
 
by the poet's wish, not only to distinguish himself, 
 but to amass money, and thus render himself more 
 a match for the girl to whom his whole heart was 
 given, but whom, with money lost and health gone, 
 there seemed no prospect of making his, save by a 
 bold bid for fame — fame which even that pretty, 
 light-headed, middle-class girl could appreciate. It 
 is true, therefore, that the cruel article affected him, 
 but not from inordinate vanity or sensitiveness, as 
 Byron supposed, but because it rang, as he thought, 
 the death-knell of his love hopes. 
 
 In reference to this same article, I may here clear 
 up a point which has been much mooted. The 
 authorship thereof has been ascribed alike to 
 Brougham, to Lockhart, and to Gifford, the editor 
 of The Quarterly, himself But I have the best 
 reasons for believing, from my conversations with 
 Mr Severn, and from other evidence, that it was 
 really written by Croker — who was never even 
 suspected ; Croker, who seems to have been the 
 bete noir »f everyone of liberal tendencies connected 
 with literature, both at that time and during the 
 next generation ; Croker, the vilified of Macaulay, 
 the very Hounhymn of Benjamin Disraeli, and the 
 Sir Pandarus of Troy, of Vanity Fair, otherwise 
 Wenham : and yet Croker, the highly-esteemed of 
 the Duke of Wellington, and all the Tory Govern- 
 ment and aristocracy of the day. He has, in all 
 conscience, enough to bear on his shoulders as it is, 
 if the views of him taken by the three great writers 
 
 107 
 
just mentioned in any way approach to the truth. 
 But I am afraid I must add the responsibility for 
 the Keats article, such as it is, to his burden. It 
 was indeed natural enough that Croker, the arch- 
 Conservative of the old crusted pattern, should 
 detest this friend of republican Leigh Hunt ; that 
 this worshipper of the Regent, and contributor to 
 The Quarterly, as conservative in literature as in 
 politics, should view with abhorrence a young 
 upstart, who was, at the same time, a kind of poetical 
 pupil of the man who passed two years in prison 
 for lampooning the Regent, and who set all the old 
 school of poetry at ridicule and defiance. If even 
 Byron, the Radical, who, romancist as he was, could 
 yet profess to follow, in theory at least, the old 
 school of writing ; if he could speak of " flaying 
 the mannikin alive," then how much more Croker? 
 Keats rushed upon his fate, as regards the Tory 
 reviews, when he wrote that poem to Hunt, on 
 Hunt's release from prison. 
 
 On the occasion of a second conversation with 
 Mr Severn, I asked him as to the friendship be- 
 tween Keats and Shelley. 
 
 "Well, you can scarcely call it friendship," he 
 said ; " they hardly knew one another well enough 
 for that. Shelley was, of course, a passionate^ 
 admirer of Keats ; and through Adonais, and that 
 splendid fragment of Shelley on Keats's lines for 
 his own tomb : 
 
 io8 
 
Here lieth one whose name was writ on water. 
 
 But ere the breath that could erase it blew, 
 
 Death in remorse for that fell slaughter — 
 
 Death, the immortalising winter flew 
 
 Athwart the stream : time's printless torrent grew 
 
 A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name 
 
 Of Adonais. 
 
 — through that verse and Adonais, the names of 
 Keats and Shelley have come down to posterity 
 coupled together. But Keats, on his side, by no 
 means reciprocated the enthusiasm of Shelley. 
 This has been alluded to before, but the true cause 
 has, I feel sure, not been arrived at. It has been 
 put down to Keats's independence of character, 
 rendering him suspicious and impatient of Shelley's 
 'Superior social position ; and, no doubt, this may 
 have had something to do with Keats's hesitation 
 to accept Shelley's offers of hospitality, but it 
 certainly would not have affected his literary 
 estimate ; for no man could better separate the 
 man, in his adventitious circumstances, from the 
 artist than Keats. He was a warm admirer of 
 Byron, for instance, notwithstanding his own 
 poetic bent lay in quite another direction, and 
 notwithstanding Byron's violent abuse of him. 
 No ; it was another feeling than this altogether. 
 The two natures were essentially dissimilar. Keats 
 was an artist pure and simple. Shelley was far 
 more than this : he was, or thought he was, a 
 reformer, bitter and uncompromising, of the whole 
 existing social order, burning with a fierce 
 
 109 
 
proselytising ardour; while Keats was perfectly 
 content with the world as it was, only desiring 
 calm and leisure and health to cultivate his beloved 
 art, to which he gave his whole soul ; and more 
 than once he found fault with Shelley for not 
 being, as he said, ' more of an artist.' Both were 
 drunk with the sense of beauty ; but Shelley was 
 far more universal, and imbued with a far deeper 
 spiritual sense. In their very virtues the two 
 could hardly be expected to sympathise ; both 
 were kind-hearted and generous to a degree, but 
 Keats's sympathy for ordinary human nature had 
 nothing to say to Shelley's transcendental longings 
 and poems and Archimedean endeavours. Moreover, 
 Keats had that great qualifying element, a sense of 
 humour, which was entirely lacking in Shelley." 
 
 Here, however, I must differ with Mr Severn. 
 As has been clearly proved by many anecdotes 
 which have come down to us about him, and as 
 was clearly stated to me by Miss Clairmont — as 
 I have mentioned in an article on the subject 
 recently — Shelley had a decided sense of humour, ^ 
 though of a somewhat elfish and uncanny stamp, 
 a good deal resembling Byron's. In fact, I have 
 personally come to the conclusion that Shelley was 
 as much indebted to Byron for his humour, as 
 Byron to Shelley for his metaphysics. The 
 ridiculous incident which so amused Keats, as his 
 letter to Leigh Hunt proves — the incident of the 
 Hampstead coach and the old lady and Hunt : 
 
 no 
 
" For God's sake let us sit upon the ground / 
 
 And tell strange stories of the death of kings," 
 
 is sufficient proof of his sense of humour ; and 
 there are many other such proofs. No doubt, as 
 Mr Severn himself said, had the two lived longer, 
 they would have grown to appreciate each other 
 fully. /Shelley's wonderful amiability, unselfishness, ^ 
 and that perfect tact of his, born of those qualities, ^^ 
 would have disabused Keats of any mistrust. 
 
 " In the case of Miss Brawne," Mr Severn re- 
 marked, "it was a case of 'pride cometh before a 
 fair with poor Keats, evidently, for just before 
 meeting her he had written to his brother, saying 
 how his love for beauty in the abstract prevented 
 his fixing his affections upon the individual. 
 Shelley was, after all, far more general in this 
 respect, notwithstanding his spirituality.'' 
 
 " Ein uebersinnlicher Freier ? " I said, interroga- 
 tively, with a smile. 
 
 "Well, I don't quite say that," Mr Severn re- 
 plied, smiling also, " and I am quite sure you 
 Zuld not have dared to say it to Miss Clairmont ; 
 t somehow I cannot conceive of Shelley fixing 
 his affections on any one woman for long. He 
 was clearly altogether so much less of the world, 
 so much less flesh and blood than dear Keats. "^ 
 
 " I understand what you mean." I replied, 
 y^helley looked upon the world and all the 
 universe as merely the outer shell of a vast spiritual ^ 
 organism, and when he found himself tricked by 
 
 III 
 
the outer semblance he wearied and sought else- 
 where — for whatever his search might be.. To him 
 J. everything — the wind, the sea, the waving forest, 
 the beauty of woman, the charm of art, was an 
 expression of something beyond/^something that 
 could never be revealed until 
 
 The painted veil which those who live 
 Call life 
 
 was lifted. Keats, too, has some of this spiritual 
 sense, but not nearly so deeply grafted. For him 
 the things which make the beauty of life, for 
 which, as he again and again says, he alone lived, 
 are enough in themselves. He has no wish to lift 
 the ' painted veil,' no curiosity for a world beyond ; 
 when he speaks of death it is only as some kind 
 / of voluptuous rest or swoon. Shelley is by far the 
 "^"greater poet, Mr Severn." 
 
 But the staunch old man would not give in to 
 this. " Keats died much younger," he said. " Had 
 he lived for the remaining five years, which would 
 have brought him to Shelley's age at his death, 
 who knows what he might have done?" 
 
 " I do not believe he would have done better 
 work," I said. " I believe Mrs Browning was 
 right. Of course, I have no right to speak to one 
 who knew him intimately ; but his mission seems 
 to me to have been complete, his life rounded to 
 fulfilment, his work over. Had Shelley been able 
 to accomplish his desire of 'keeping Keats's body 
 
 112 
 
warm, and teaching his mind Greek and Spanish,' 
 Keats would, no doubt, have produced poems of 
 a more correctly classical nature. We should have 
 had no new Hyperion, perhaps, nor Odes." 
 
 It may be interesting, perhaps, at this point to 
 note that on my asking Mr Severn what he con- 
 sidered the finest work in poetry that Keats had 
 done, he cited the glorious sonnet to Ailsa Craig. 
 I told him that, in my estimation, and probably 
 in that of most, the Odes held a higher place. 
 But who can blame his preference? for the sonnet 
 to Ailsa Craig is a magnificent piece of work. I 
 can remember the old man's face brightening up 
 with animation as he repeated those lines, instinct 
 with the roar and mighty music and majesty of 
 the sea and winds : 
 
 " Hearken thou craggy ocean pyramid ; 
 Give answer from thy voice, the sea-fowls' screams. 
 When were thy shoulders mantled in huge streams ? 
 When from the sun was thy broad forehead hid? 
 How long is't since the mighty power bid 
 Thee heave to airy sleep from fathom dreams ; 
 Sleep in the lap of thunder or sunbeams ; 
 Or when grey clouds are thy cold coverlid ? 
 Thou answer's! not; for thou art dead asleep. 
 Thy life is but two dead eternities — 
 The last in air, the former in the deep ; 
 First with the whales, last with the eagle skies. 
 Drowned wast thou till an earthquake made thee steep : 
 Another cannot wake thy giant size.'' 
 
 Mr Severn held that many of Keats's letters con- 
 tained quite as fine poetry as any of his actual 
 H 113 
 
poetical works, in support of which he read me 
 that exquisitely painful, that exquisitely beautiful 
 last letter of Keats to Fanny Brawne before leaving 
 England — a heart-broken and desparing outburst, 
 which, though in prose form, contains remarkably 
 fine poetry : — 
 
 " Shakespeare always sums up matters in the 
 most sovereign manner. Hamlet's heart was full 
 of such misery as mine when he said to Ophelia, 
 ' Go to a. nunnery, go, go ! ' Indeed, I should like 
 to give up the matter at once. I should like to die. 
 I am sickened with the brute world which you 
 are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. 
 I see nothing but clouds for the future. Wherever 
 I may be next winter, in Italy or nowhere, Brown 
 will be living near you. I see no prospect of any 
 rest. Suppose me in Rome : I should there see 
 you as in a magic glass, going to and from town 
 at all hours. I wish you could infuse a little con- 
 fidence of human nature into my heart. I cannot 
 muster any : the world is too brutal for me. I 
 am glad there is such a thing as the grave. I am 
 sure I shall never have any rest till I get there. 
 At any rate, I will indulge myself by never seeing 
 any more, Dilke, or Brown, or any of their friends. 
 I wish that I were either in your arms, full of 
 faith, or that a thunderbolt would strike me. God 
 bless you.— J. K." 
 
 " What wasted energy 1 " I thought, '' all this is ! 
 How much more to the purpose it would have 
 
 114 
 
been had he sent the lady a box of chocolate- 
 creams, or a dozen of gloves just half a size too 
 small. How much more either would have been 
 appreciated." 
 
 " He might have lived to old age, but for that 
 fatal passion," the old man murmured sadly, with 
 tears in his eyes. " And all the time I was by his 
 bedside day and night, impotent, and wondering 
 what the sudden collapse could mean. How could 
 Mrs Brawne and her daughter ever expect him to 
 come back with that iron in his soul? You must 
 excuse me," he said, passing his hand rapidly over 
 his eyes, "you must excuse me if I am stupid and 
 moody. I seem to see Keats and Fanny Brawne 
 as they were sixty years ago." 
 
 For full ten minutes we sat in silence. Neither 
 seemed to wish for words. Our silence was more 
 eloquent. As for me, I was overpowered and 
 dazzled with the glory of this undying love, which 
 shrivelled up, like parchment in a furnace, any 
 materialistic ideas I might have had : 
 
 "And like a man in wrath, the heart 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' " 
 
 " Stupid and moody ! " The man who could bear 
 a love like this for sixty years — sixty years the 
 eternal city — eternal, though ever changing — had 
 held this eternal love to which time was nothing. 
 And he — he, I think, was back in the days when 
 Keats and Brown, Dilke, Shelley, and himself, were 
 
 115 
 
young fellows dreaming dreams of future greatness, 
 as they strolled beneath the trees, and among the 
 furze on Hampstead Heath — then, not the Hamp- 
 stead of now — or listening to the nightingales by 
 Highgate Meadows, or floating on the upper reaches 
 of the river, on golden summer days. Thinking, 
 perhaps, how he won the prize which took him to 
 Rome ; of the glorious future that seemed stretched 
 before him in a golden haze ; thinking, perhaps, of 
 -^ Shelley's praises ; thinking, certainly, of two figures 
 that I felt by some magnetic affinity were pictured 
 clear before both of us then : the figure of a young 
 poet with deep, inward eyes, deep as the sea or sky, 
 and gleaming with a light not of this world ; a 
 beautiful face already just touched with the hectic 
 bloom betokening the approach of a disease which 
 never spares, and those eyes fixed with an earnest, 
 soul-devouring gaze upon his companion, a gaze 
 the intensity of which deepened the flush on that 
 delicate cheek, as the lips quivered with pain at 
 some gay, thoughtless speech of the other figure 
 in our reverie — a beautiful girl of the true English 
 type, clean cut and lissom, with a delicate hawk- 
 like face ; a girl straight as a reed, with a willowy 
 form, and bright eyes glistening with fun and malice 
 — that malice of girlhood. 
 
 Beautiful, too, she was, with that beauU du diable 
 of eighteen, which was indeed too truly the la beauts 
 du diable in this case. And the girl laughs at some 
 passionate words of the poet, words which, perhaps, 
 
 Ii6 
 
if they had been writ, would have added another 
 garland to his fame ; a girl to flirt with young under- 
 graduates and cool-headed and clever men of the 
 world, like the poet's friend. Brown, but not to 
 understand the longings of a poet striving to realise 
 the ideal of universal loveliness, and panting for the 
 unattained. To such as her his poems and his 
 longings and his burning words would be so much 
 eccentricity — madness, no more. The poems might 
 sound nice, but they did not sound so nice as 
 a rattling valse tune, and a present of them 
 would not be one tithe as nice as a new ball- 
 dress. And the poet himself, very nice too, when 
 he was sensible ; and he made love so beautifully. 
 But he had such strange fits. After all, a smart 
 young stockbroker like Brown would be much more 
 satisfactory. And it was on this shrine that one 
 of the triumvirate of the young century — one whose 
 name will only die when the memory of English 
 poetry passes away, " like a tale that is told " — offered 
 his love ; it was at this shrine that the love, that 
 the life, of " Adonais " was offered up. 
 
 Mr Severn pressed my hand kindly at last, and 
 we awoke from our reverie. He looked at me 
 a moment, and with that keen, intuitive power of 
 comprehension which must have always rendered 
 him unsurpassed as a friend, he said, " You have been 
 thinking with me ; I feel it. Our thoughts have 
 been travelling on the same track. Time has been 
 annihilated. How strange to think he died in my 
 
 117 
 
arms when I was twenty-seven ! And yet he cannot 
 be dead. How could a dead thing influence one 
 like this?" 
 
 " He lives ! he wakes ! 'tis Death is dead, not he ! " 
 I replied ; and thinking of the scene now, the lines 
 of the great poet who left us the year before last 
 came irresistibly to my mind, though they had not 
 seen the light then — lines which express exactly 
 what must have been in that devoted friend's mind 
 then : 
 
 " Peace ! let it be ! for I loved him and love him for ever : 
 The dead are not dead, but alive." 
 
 Mr Severn and I conversed for hours, on the 
 occasion of my visit, about Keats as a poet, and 
 Mr Severn proved that if he himself had taken to 
 that line he would have been as fine a critic as an 
 artist — indeed, probably finer ; for, notwithstanding 
 the marvellous promise he evinced in early years, 
 he somehow never quite attained to that position 
 which was prophesied for him by Shelley, and, 
 in fact, by everyone who knew him in his early 
 days. The death of his beloved Keats, perhaps, 
 damped his ambition to excel. In any case, the 
 only works of any importance he executed since 
 1820, when he gained the Gold Medal and the* 
 Three Years' Travelling Studentship for his Una 
 and Redcross Knight in the Cave of Despair, 
 which enabled him to proceed to Rome with 
 Keats, are very limited in number. There are a 
 
 118 
 
number of portraits, including many of Keats, and 
 one of Baron Bunsen, but the principal other works 
 are Cordelia Watching by the Bed of Lear, The 
 Roman Beggar, The Fountain, Rienzi, and an 
 altar-piece for the Church of St Paul's at Rome. 
 Mr Severn and I talked, as I say, exhaustively about 
 Keats, both personally and poetically, but there is 
 no further need of Keats's criticism. Keats has been 
 weighed in the balance by the keenest experts and 
 not found wanting, and his niche is a little lower 
 than those of Byron and Shelley. I have been able 
 to do something towards preserving the personal 
 memory of a man which has fallen under the shadow 
 of a greater name, and such a noble memory should 
 in itself never meet with death. With this and the 
 enshrinement of the views of his best friend on 
 Keats, I am content, and have no desire to enter 
 the arena of critics and appraisers. 
 
 A few words only before closing. I asked Mr 
 Severn as to whether the reproach of " cockney," 
 as applied to Keats, had any foundation, and he 
 told me not the slightest as regards him personally. 
 Keats came of a good stock, of lowly birth, of 
 course, but still of most superior mental gifts, and 
 the atrocious cockneyisms and conceits in his earlier 
 poems were altogether traceable to the influence 
 of Hunt, an influence which he was, in his last 
 years, rapidly throwing off". Keats was wonderfully 
 without literary vanity, which is surprising in view 
 of the admiration he received in his own clique. 
 
 119 
 
He never took offence at honest criticism, and would 
 tear up poems in the most surprisingly ready way 
 — a practice which it is to be regretted is not more 
 frequently adopted among our latter-day poets. 
 
 I will now add the following corrections as to 
 mistakes in dates (astonishing enough) which have 
 been made by several well-known writers on Keats. 
 
 Several writers of Keatsiana follow that most 
 inaccurate of writers, most unreliable of Cockneys, 
 Leigh Hunt, so hnmnrpusly " taken off," a generation 
 or so later, by Dickens, who speaks of Keats as 
 having just completed his twenty-fourth year when 
 he died, and others seem to have a partiality for 
 anticipating his decease, and placing it in December 
 
 1820. As a matter of fact, Keats was born on 
 31st October 179S, and died in Rome 23rd February 
 
 1 82 1, so he had completed his twenty-fifth (and not 
 his twenty-fourth) year by nearly four months at 
 the time of his death. 
 
 I now conclude this article, in which I have en- 
 deavoured to the best of my ability to bring home to 
 my readers the personality of the last but two of the 
 survivors into this generation of the contemporaries 
 and companions of the three great early century poets 
 — Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mr Severn died in 
 the same year as Miss Clairmont. The last sur- 
 vivor of the Byron-Shelley clique was Trelawney, 
 who died in 1881, and the last of the Keats circle 
 was the younger sister of the poet, Fanny Keats, 
 who became Madame Los Llanos, and survived until 
 
 120 
 
as late as 1889. There is no one now left to tell 
 us in living accents of these glorious poets ; and 
 it is with a feeling of sadness that one looks back 
 upon them, for now that their only equal, the late 
 Laureate, who stepped in so easily to fill their place, 
 and filled it so nobly for fifty years, has gone, who 
 is there to succeed him ? We have some great poets 
 among us still, but their fine poetry belongs to a 
 past generation, and even then, it could not be 
 compared to that of those morning stars of the 
 young century. And as for the younger generation 
 — Voces et preterea nihil. 
 
 121 
 
W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD. 
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List of Publications 9 
 
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