Readers no less clearly remember how, just upon a month after the _Eight Days’ Tour of the Lake_, Shelley and the girls, leaving Byron for just the same length of time to his own devices, made the _Eight Days’ Trip to Chamouni_, returning to Mont Alègre and Diodati towards the close of July. Is it not in the whole world’s memory how, when the rain held them prisoners in Byron’s villa, the poets and the sisters, in the excitement of reading ghost stories, terrified one another with ghastly tales of their own invention;--a tournament of wit and terrifying fancy, that bore enduring fruit in Mary Godwin’s _Frankenstein_? It is enough to remind readers of this page how, on the 18th of June, after hearing Byron recite the _Christabel_ verses on the witch’s breast, Shelley shrieked in horror at his own vivid imagination of a woman with eyes instead of nipples; and how in the ensuing August, when Monk Lewis had joined the group at Diodati, Byron, and Mary, and Shelley, and Claire, drew about the terrifying relater and beset him with their intensely excited faces, whilst he poured forth strange stories of hideous fancy and grim humour. That Shelley had no intention in the middle of July of returning to England straight from Switzerland, but was possessed by a project of descending the Danube in a boat, visiting Constantinople and Athens, Rome and the Tuscan cities, and returning by Southern France, appears from a letter he wrote from Geneva to Peacock on 17th July, 1816, in the interval between the _Tour of the Lake_ and the _Trip to Chamouni_,--a letter containing this remarkable passage,--‘On the motives and consequences of this journey, I reserve much explanation for some future winter walk or summer expedition!’ How about these words, that refer _not_ to the ‘Eastern scheme which has just seized on our imaginations,’ _but_ to the trip from London to Geneva? Had he believed himself to have told the truth at Bishopgate, in intimating that he was about to leave England in order to escape his father and uncle, he would have seen neither need nor occasion for saying more about the motives for the journey. May the words be taken as an admission, that the Bishopgate fictions were fictions, and that Peacock had still to learn the full and true story of the motives and purpose of the trip to Geneva?