the project.  “I heard some days ago that Leigh Hunt was on his way to you with all his family; and the idea seems to be that you and he and Shelley are to conspire together in the Examiner.  I deprecate such a plan with all my might.  Partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party answer for the rest.  I tremble even for you with such a bankrupt Co.!  You must stand alone.”  Shelley—­who had, in the meantime, given his bond to Byron for an advance of 200_l_. towards the expenses of his friends, besides assisting them himself to the utmost of his power—­began, shortly before their arrival, to express grave doubts as to the success of the alliance.  His last published letter—­written July 5th, 1822—­after they had settled at Pisa, is full of forebodings.  On the 8th he set sail in the “Don Juan”—­

                   That fatal and perfidious bark,
  Built in th’eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark,

and was overtaken by the storm in which he perished.  Three days after, Trelawny rode to Pisa, and told Byron of his fears, when the poet’s lips quivered, and his voice faltered.  On the 22nd of July the bodies of Shelley, Williams, and Vivian, were cast ashore.  On the 16th August, Hunt, Byron, and Trelawny were present at the terribly weird cremation, which they have all described.  At a later date, the two former were seized with a fit of delirium which is one of the phases of the tension of grief.  Byron’s references to the event are expressions less of the loss which he indubitably felt, than of his indignation at the “world’s wrong.”  “Thus,” he writes, “there is another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly and ignorantly and brutally mistaken.  It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.”  Towards the end of the same letter the spirit of his dead friend seems to inspire the sentence —­“With these things and these fellows it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard.  I know it is against fearful odds, but the battle must be fought.”

Meanwhile, shortly after the new settlement at the Lanfranchi, the preparations for issuing the Liberal, edited by Leigh Hunt in Italy, and published by John Hunt in London, progressed.  The first number, which appeared in September, was introduced, after a few words of preface, by the Vision of Judgment, with the signature Quevedo Redivivus, and adorned by Shelley’s translation of the “May-Day Night,” in Faust.  It contained besides, the Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother’s Review, an indifferent Florentine story, a German apologue, and a gossiping account of Pisa, presumably by Hunt.  Three others followed, containing Byron’s Heaven and Earth, his translation of the Morgante Maggiore, and The Blues—­a very slight, if not silly, satire on literary ladies; some of Shelley’s posthumous minor poems, among them “I arise from dreams of thee,” and a few