‘L[ord] B[yron] is greatly improved in every respect; in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connexion with la Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about 4000_l._ a-year, 100_l._ of which he devotes to purposes of charity. He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued; and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man.’ When Mr. Froude wrote so gushingly, almost in the same paragraph, of Shelley’s speckless purity of thought and manners, and Byron’s revolting dissoluteness in living with another man’s wife, he had still to learn that this guileless and angelic Shelley rated Byron’s _liaison_ with the Contessa Guiccioli as an eminently virtuous and salutary arrangement. In the same letter to Mary (mind, Mr. Froude, the letter is written to Mary _née_ Godwin, the writer’s own exemplary wife), Shelley says:-- ‘He’ (Byron) ‘has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of _Don Juan_, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day,--every word has the stamp of immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending. This canto is in the style, but totally, and sustained with incredible ease and power, like the end of the second canto. _There is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled._ It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached of producing,--something wholly new and relative to the age, _and yet surpassingly beautiful_.’ On, or about, the same day, Shelley wrote from Ravenna about this same Canto of _Don Juan_, which he commended so highly to Mary, for its unqualified purity and surpassing beauty, to his friend Peacock:-- ‘Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here, to whom he is attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an altered man. He has written three more cantos of _Don Juan_. I have yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is pregnant with immortality. I have not seen his late plays except _Marino Faliero_, which is very well, but not so _transcendently fine_ as the _Don Juan_.’