A locket with hair from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelley on Lord Byron’s lifestyle.

Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom… at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divides Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or a fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house , which every now and the resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… .[P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean palace was defective… .I just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they changed into these shapes.

Via Ratak Mondosico.