Byron’s note to which Hoppner alludes is in Marino Faliero.  The conclusion of it is as follows:  “The fact is, I hold in utter abhorrence any contact with the travelling English, as my friend the Consul General Hoppner and the Countess Benzoni (in whose house the Converzasione mostly frequented by them is held), could amply testify, were it worth while.  I was persecuted by these tourists even to my riding ground at Lido, and reduced to the most disagreeable circuits to avoid them.  At Madame Benzoni’s I repeatedly refused to be introduced to them; of a thousand such presentations pressed upon me, I accepted two, and both were to Irish women.”

Shelley visited Byron at the Mocenigo Palace in 1818 on a matter concerning Byron’s daughter Allegra and Claire Clairmont, whom the other poet brought with him.  They reached Venice by gondola from Padua, having the fortune to be rowed by a gondolier who had been in Byron’s employ and who at once and voluntarily began to talk of him, his luxury and extravagance.  At the inn the waiter, also unprovoked, enlarged on the same alluring theme.  Shelley’s letter describing Byron’s Venetian home is torn at its most interesting passage and we are therefore without anything as amusing and vivid as the same correspondent’s account of his lordship’s Ravenna menage.  Byron took him for a ride on the Lido, the memory of which formed the opening lines of Julian and Maddalo.  Thus:—­

    I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
    Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
    Of Adria towards Venice:  a bare strand
    Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
    Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
    Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,
    Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
    Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
    Abandons; and no other object breaks
    The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
    Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
    A narrow space of level sand thereon,
    Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down. 
    This ride was my delight.  I love all waste
    And solitary places; where we taste
    The pleasure of believing what we see
    Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: 
    And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
    More barren than its billows; and yet more
    Than all, with a remembered friend I love
    To ride as then I rode;—­for the winds drove
    The living spray along the sunny air
    Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
    Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
    And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
    Harmonizing with solitude, and sent
    Into our hearts aerial merriment.

When the ride was over and the two poets were returning in Byron’s (or Count Maddalo’s) gondola, there was such an evening view as one often has, over Venice, and beyond, to the mountains.  Shelley describes it:—­