Captain Williams and his wife, and Shelley’s cousin, Captain Medwin.  The latter used frequently to dine and sit with his host till the morning, collecting materials for the Conversations which he afterwards gave to the world.  The value of these reminiscences is impaired by the fact of their recording, as serious revelations, the absurd confidences in which the poet’s humour for mystification was wont to indulge.  Another of the group, an Irishman, called Taafe, is made, in his Lordship’s correspondence of the period, to cut a somewhat comical figure.  The master-passion of this worthy and genial fellow was to get a publisher for a fair commentary on Dante, to which he had firmly linked a very bad translation, and for about six months Byron pesters Murray with constant appeals to satisfy him; e.g.  November l6, “He must be gratified, though the reviewers will make him suffer more tortures than there are in his original.”  March 6, “He will die if he is not published; he will be damned if he is; but that he don’t mind.”  March 8, “I make it a point that he shall be in print; it will make the man so exuberantly happy.  He is such a good-natured Christian that we must give him a shove through the press.  Besides, he has had another fall from his horse into a ditch.”  Taafe, whose horsemanship was on a par with his poetry, can hardly have been consulted as to the form assumed by these apparently fruitless recommendations, so characteristic of the writer’s frequent kindliness and constant love of mischief.  About this time Byron received a letter from Mr. Shepherd, a gentleman in Somersetshire, referring to the death of his wife, among whose papers he had found the record of a touching, because evidently heart-felt, prayer for the poet’s reformation, conversion, and restored peace of mind.  To this letter he at once returned an answer. marked by much of the fine feeling of his best moods.  Pisa, December 8:  “Sir, I have received your letter.  I need not say that the extract which it contains has affected me, because it would imply a want of all feeling to have read it with indifference....  Your brief and simple picture of the excellent person, whom I trust you will again meet, cannot be contemplated without the admiration due to her virtues and her pure and unpretending piety.  I do not know that I ever met with anything so unostentatiously beautiful.  Indisputably, the firm believers in the Gospel have a great advantage over all others—­for this simple reason, that if true they will have their reward hereafter; and if there be no hereafter, they can but be with the infidel in his eternal sleep....  But a man’s creed does not depend upon himself:  who can say, I will believe this, that, or the other? and least of all that which he least can comprehend....  I can assure you that not all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance, would ever weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my behalf.  In this point of view I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Caesar, and Napoleon.”