The maker of these discreet observations gives a remarkable example of the quickness, with which Shelley rose from a condition of physical weakness to a high state of bodily vigour and enjoyment under the stimulus of animal food. During the excursion (August, 1815) on the Thames, from Old Windsor to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, Shelley, on ‘the way up,’ was so weak and otherwise out of order, as to feel he ought to return. Having taken medical advice at Oxford with no apparent advantage, he was entreated by Peacock to eat three well-peppered mutton-chops. Acting on the wise counsel, Shelley forthwith ate with keen relish three well-peppered mutton-chops, and went on his way rejoicing. ‘He lived in my way,’ says Peacock, ‘for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.’ Living thus carnivorously at the comfortable inn at Lechlade, where the party rested for two nights, he there wrote the _Lines in Lechlade Churchyard_. How Byron and Shelley came to resemble one another in eccentricity of diet is uncertain. The older poet had recourse to his regimen of Epsom salts and vegetarian starvation in the first instance for the reduction of his fatness; but Shelley’s natural habit of body forbids the suspicion that he took to abstinence for the same purpose. Nor can the influence of the vegetarians, with whom he lived intimately in London and at Bracknell, be held accountable for his first trial of a diet, which he adopted in Dublin, before making their acquaintance. Perhaps he adopted the Byronic diet just as he adopted the Byronic shirt-collar, in imitation of the poet whom he admired so greatly. It is conceivable that, had he not heard of Byron’s dinners of hard biscuits or mashed vegetables, washed down with soda-water, he would have continued to eat and drink, as he had done from boyhood to the middle of his twentieth year. Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley’s vegetarianism, attended with intermissions of the regimen when he was on his journeys and ‘ate what he could get,’ differed little from Byron’s general rule of abstinence from the luxuries of the table, broken with occasional dinners and suppers, at which he devoured whatever came in his way. For thus feeding themselves, the two poets have fared differently at the hands of history. Whilst Byron has been generally ridiculed for living low in order to preserve his beauty; Shelley has been no less generally applauded for his indifference to the pleasures of the table.