It was while Byron was at Pisa that his natural daughter, the little Allegra, died, after a rapid illness, of typhus fever at her Convent School. He disliked her mother--we have noted the reasons why it was hardly to be expected that he would do anything else--but he had viewed the child as the gift of heaven, precious, though at first undesired. He had played with her in his garden at Ravenna, and had made a will leaving her £5000, and was at once too fond and too proud to make any mystery of the relationship. All his friends, as well as his sister were apprised of it, and received news, from time to time, of the child's physical and moral progress. Nearly all of them were informed of her death. "It is a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne--with time," he wrote to Murray. "The blow was stunning and unexpected," he told Shelley. "I suppose that Time will do his usual work--Death has done his." To Sir Walter Scott he commented: "The only consolation, save time, is that she is either at rest or happy; for her few years (only five), prevented her from having incurred any sin, except what we inherit from Adam." He desired, too, that the child's relationship to him should be proclaimed on a tablet to be set up in Harrow Church; but that was impossible owing to the prejudices of the Vicar and Churchwardens. It seemed to them that "every man of refined taste, to say nothing of sound morals," would practise hypocrisy in such a matter. The Vicar wrote to Murray to say so, and to ask him to point out to Byron that, in the case of ex-parishioners, the Churchwardens had the power not only to advise hypocrisy but to enforce it; and he enclosed a formal prohibition from one of them, running thus: "_Honoured Sir_, I object on behalf of the parish to admit the tablet of Lord Byron's child into the church. "_James Winkley, Churchwarden._" It was the pitiful performance of a clerical Jack-in-Office; and we will leave it and pass on, merely noting that Byron, more than once, in defining his duties to Allegra, affirmed and illustrated his own religious position. One of his avowed reasons for not allowing her to be brought up by her mother was that Jane Clairmont was "atheistical." For himself, he said, he was "a very good Christian," though given to expressing himself flippantly. The affirmation is confirmed by Shelley's description of him, half playful and half-shocked, as "no better than a Christian," and by the account of his opinions given by Pietro Gamba in a letter to Dr. Kennedy--from which it appears that though Byron might, like his own Cain, defy the God of the Shorter Catechism, he was profoundly reverent in his attitude towards really holy things. Count Pietro reports two conversations with him on these sacred matters; the first talk taking place at Ravenna: