A large part of the three volumes is taken up with a characterisation of Adrian and Lord Raymond, the latter of whom falls when fighting for the Greeks. How impossible it was for her to rid her mind of her own sorrow is shown at the end of the third volume, where Adrian is drowned, and Lionel Verney is left alone. He thus says of his friend: "All I had possessed of this world's goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue--I owed to him. He had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. Beyond all other beings he had taught me that goodness, pure and simple, can be an attribute of man." Mrs. Shelley made the great mistake of writing this novel in the first person. _The Last Man_, who is telling the story, although he has the name of Lionel, is most assuredly of the female sex. The friendship between him and Adrian is not the friendship of man for man, but rather the love of man and woman. Mrs. Shelley's next novel, _Lodore_, written in 1835, thirteen years after the death of her husband, had a better outlined plot and more definite characters. But again it echoes the past. Lord Byron's unhappy married relations and Shelley's troubles with Harriet are blended in the story, Lord Byron furnishing the character in some respects of Lord Lodore, while his wife, Cornelia Santerre, resembles both Harriet and Lady Byron. Lady Santerre, the mother of Cornelia, augments the trouble between Lord and Lady Lodore, and, contrary to the evident intentions of the writer, the reader's sympathies are largely with Cornelia and Lady Santerre. When Lodore wishes Cornelia to go to America to save him from disgrace, Lady Santerre objects to her daughter's accompanying him: "He will soon grow tired of playing the tragic hero on a stage surrounded by no spectators; he will discover the folly of his conduct; he will return, and plead for forgiveness, and feel that he is too fortunate in a wife who has preserved her own conduct free from censure and remark while he has made himself a laughing-stock to all." These words strangely bring to mind Lord Byron as having evoked them. Again Lady Lodore's letter to her husband at the time of his departure to America reminds one of Lady Byron: "If heaven have blessings for the coldly egotistical, the unfeeling despot, may those blessings be yours; but do not dare to interfere with emotions too pure, too disinterested for you ever to understand. Give me my child, and fear neither my interference nor resentment."