The sailor who had come to Pisa to admire two great men found that it was he, on the contrary, who was admired by them. It is true that when Trelawny was absent, Byron said of him: “If we could get him to wash his hands and not to tell lies, we might make a gentleman of him,” but when he was present Byron treated him with the greatest respect. Like all artists, Byron and Shelley wrote in order to console themselves for not living, and a man of action appeared to these two men of dreams as a strange and enviable phenomenon. Shelley consulted Trelawny as to nautical terms, and drew with him, on the sandy shores of the Arno, keels, sails, and sea-charts. “I’ve missed my vocation,” said he. “I ought to have been a sailor.” “A man who neither smokes nor swears can never be a sailor,” Trelawny told him. Byron, an imaginary corsair, would have liked to learn from a real corsair the ways and customs of the brotherhood, and did his utmost in Trelawny’s company to talk in cynical and bravado fashion. Trelawny, quick to perceive his influence over Byron, tried to make use of it in the service of Shelley. “You know,” said he as they rode together one day, “that you might help Shelley a good deal at small cost by a friendly word or two in your next work, such as you have given to other writers of much less merit.” “All trades have their secrets,” Byron answered. “If we crack up a popular author, he repays us in the same coin, capital and interest. But Shelley! A bad investment. . . . Who reads the Snake? . . . Besides, if he cast off the slough of his mystifying metaphysics, he would want no puffing.” “But why do your London friends treat him so cavalierly? They rarely notice him when they meet him at your place. Yet he is as well-born and bred as any of them. What are they afraid of?” Byron smiled and whispered in Trelawny’s ear: “Shelley is not a Christian.” “Are they?” “Ask them.” “If I met the Devil at your table,” said Trelawny, “I should treat him as a friend of yours.” The Pilgrim looked at him keenly to see if there were a double meaning, then moving his horse up nearer said in a low voice of admirably acted fear and respect: “The Devil is a Royal Personage.” * * * With the Williamses, Trelawny was more outspoken. The three of them formed the chorus to the tragedy; knowing they were not made for the chief parts, they took pleasure in commenting the acting of those who were. “One might imagine,” said Trelawny, “that Byron is jealous of Shelley. Yet Murray is obliged to call on the police to protect his premises every time he publishes a new canto of _Childe Harold_, while poor Shelley hasn’t got ten readers. Byron has high birth, riches, beauty, glory, love . . .”