Shelley rode and practised pistol-shooting with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes, and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.
All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution, remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic persons to invest the poet.

Society of the ordinary kind he hated.

The voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with Shelley's almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on his mistaking his wife's mention of the Aziola, a little owl common enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor.

This dislike for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some disagreement between him and Mrs.Shelley, and kept him further apart from Byron than he might otherwise have been.

In a valuable letter recently published by Mr.Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to Trelawny, he said:--"She can't bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead." In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all in Italy, except Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr.and Mrs.John Gisborne at Leghorn.