A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the _Times_ in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew more than they cared to tell of that tragedy. For one thing, he had seen an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the rescue of the _Ariel_ and brought off the poet and his companions, she would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera. It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death, but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope of finding gold on "the milord Inglese." There seems but little reason for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the _Times_ in 1875: Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us, however reluctantly, in this explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of his spirit. "Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." FOOTNOTES: [8] For the identity of this inn see Leigh Hunt, _Autobiography_. Constable, 1903, vol. ii. p. 123. [9] The Keats was doubled open at the "Lamia." [10] _Trelawney Records_. Pickering, 1878, pp. 197-200, accepts this story, as clearing up what for fifty years had been a mystery to him. III. PORTO VENERE