(9)--On 10th April, 1822, when his relations with the great poet had been shaken and ruffled by gusts of discord, Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, ‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of _Paradise Regained_. _Cain_ is apocalyptic,--it is a revelation not before communicated to man.’ Of course, Shelley’s idolatry of his hero was not always maintained at this pitch of enthusiasm. There were moments when the worm turned against his God, and wrote disparagingly of him. But the foregoing passages from Shelley’s letters and works exhibit his prevailing view of Byron the poet, and his worshipful disposition towards the man Byron. Nor may it be imagined that the worshiper was enabled to think thus reverentially of the idol, because he was unaware of what was most repulsive in the darker stages of Byron’s career. For Shelley is the most strenuous and precise of all the many givers of testimony respecting the Venetian excesses. Writing to Peacock of Byron’s Venetian life, Shelley says, on 22nd December, 1818:-- ‘The fact is, that first, the Italian women with whom he associates are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses [who] smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L[ord] B[yron] is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in England.’ None the less able, however, was Shelley to admire the same Byron (of whom Mr. Froude writes disgustfully, for ‘living with another man’s wife’) as a being to be worshipt for his divine excellences and beneficent achievements. None the less could he regard Byron with reverence and delight, as ‘the spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body.’ The winter (styled by Hogg ‘a mere Atticism’) had for its chief domestic incident the birth of Mary’s eldest son, the ‘William’ of his father’s song, and of the early grave at Rome, who was born on 24th January, 1816, on the ninth day after Lady Byron’s withdrawal from Piccadilly Terrace to Kirkby Mallory. Byron’s Ada was only in the seventh week of her life, when Shelley’s boy entered upon his brief existence. Born within six weeks and three days of one another, these infants are curiously associated in literary annals; for whilst Byron gushed for the world’s edification over his Ada in verse, that set the sentimental mothers weeping throughout the country, Shelley’s parental devotion to his ‘delightful child’ broke forth into song that was no less insincere.