Of Romantic lovers

Shelly’s widow, Mary, writes Burlington, tried tirelessly to interest the National Gallery in purchasing a painting of Count M., said to be a Titian, though it was probably a pretty run of the mill Bastiani, and which the National Gallery in the event wisely chose not to buy. Mary was trying to sell it in order to help a young Italian aristocrat and revolutionary whose only means of support were irregular stipends from Count M. When the sale of the picture did not transpire, the dashing cavalier blackmailed Mary, threatening to publish her letters to him. We don’t know what was in them, but her decision to buy the letters suggests Mary had not been very wise.

Contessa, the mistress of Byron, was obliged to go back to her husband when Byron left for Greece and died. Actually, when Byron left for Greece: the affair seems to have been over before he left and not cut short romantically by his death in Misolonghi, as it is usually reported. “Of the plague”, it is usually said, most romantically, without mentioning that it was, in fact, dysentery. The fellow shat himself to death. The Contessa, I am sure, thought that he deserved it.