It was during the time of indecision that Shelley came, at his request, to visit him; and we may take Shelley's letters to Peacock as our next testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Shelley reports, "consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon;" and in a postscript he adds: "I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circæan Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase, five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane." Then he proceeds: "Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom (but one must sleep or die, like Southey's sea-snake in _Kehama_) at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea. We then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning." They gossiped about many things, and considered, among other matters, what would be the best place for Byron, the Gambas, and Madame Guiccioli to live in. Switzerland had been proposed, but Shelley urged objections which Byron admitted to be sound. Switzerland was "little fitted for him." The English colonies would be likely to "torment him as they did before," ostentatiously sending him to Coventry, and then spying on him when there. The consequence of his exasperation might be "a relapse of libertinism," a return to the Venetian way of life, "which he says he plunged into not from taste, but from despair." Perhaps the last-named danger was rather less than Shelley supposed; for the drapers' and bakers' wives of Geneva and the Canton of Vaud are neither so attractive nor so accommodating as those of Venice; but, on the whole, this wayward sprite, as he is commonly esteemed--so wayward that he had been expelled from his University and had sacrificed a large fortune to an unnecessary quarrel with his father--showed common sense and worldly wisdom in his advice. He showed so much of it, indeed, and showed it so clearly, that Byron begged him to write to Madame Guiccioli and put the case to her; which he duly did "in lame Italian," eliciting an answer very eloquent of his correspondent's growing anxiety as to her hold upon Byron's heart. Madame Guiccioli agreed to the proposal, but then begged a favour: "Pray do not leave Ravenna without taking Milord with you." But that, of course, was rather too much to ask. The most that Shelley could promise was that he would undertake every arrangement on Byron's behalf for his establishment at Pisa, and would then "assail him with importunities," if these should be necessary, to rejoin his mistress; and it seems that they were necessary, for two months or more later, we find Shelley writing to him: "When may we expect you? The Countess G. is very patient, though sometimes she seems apprehensive that you will never leave Ravenna."