Word: byronical
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...annoyance of his mistress' husband, Byron's rooms at the Palazzo Guiccioli were soon "full of conspirational gear and mysterious documents . . . local liberals." Once, when the police were active, the Gambas even let Byron keep "a bag full of bayonets, some muskets, and some hundreds of cartridges." When the revolt finally fizzled (Byron always suspected it would), Byron, Teresa and the Gambas were exiled, at last settled down at Pisa...
There once more Byron could be close to the Shelley circle, which had gained a new recruit in dark, hawk-nosed, piratical Edward Trelawny (The Adventures of a Younger Son) who, to Byron's annoyance, looked and acted like a Byron hero. Trelawny discovered that Byron had nicknamed Shelley "The Snake...
...Shelley reminded him (he said) of a serpent that walked on the tip of its tail -so strange and rapid were his movements, so remote his habits-glistening, ubiquitous, and hard to capture." Trelawny did not discover that of him Byron had said: "If they could teach Trelawny to wash his hands and tell the truth, they would have some hope of turning him out a gentleman...
Life in Pisa was seldom dull. Sometimes Shelley saw visions. He alarmed one friend by pointing to the sea one day and saying: "There it is again-there!" He said he saw "a naked child," Byron's dead daughter, Allegra, "rise from the sea and clap its hands as in joy. . . ." Once in an absent-minded moment he "glided" stark naked through the room where his wife was entertaining friends...
When the sailing fad set in, Shelley and his friend Williams went tacking and tipping up & down the coast. One day their horribly waterlogged, fish-eaten bodies were brought ashore and buried. Then they were dug up for cremation on the beach. "Is that a human body?" asked Byron. "Why, it's more like the carcass of a sheep." Shelley's brains, "cupped in the broken cranium," seethed and boiled as in a cauldron for a long time. Byron felt sick, went for a swim. Driving home, Byron and Leigh Hunt felt a "hysterical gaiety . . . drank...