Besides the unfinished “Vampire,” he began also, at this time, another romance in prose, founded upon the story of the Marriage of Belphegor, and intended to shadow out his own matrimonial fate.  The wife of this satanic personage he described much in the same spirit that pervades his delineation of Donna Inez in the first Canto of Don Juan.  While engaged, however, in writing this story, he heard from England that Lady Byron was ill, and, his heart softening at the intelligence, he threw the manuscript into the fire.  So constantly were the good and evil principles of his nature conflicting for mastery over him.[124]

The two following Poems, so different from each other in their character,—­the first prying with an awful scepticism into the darkness of another world, and the second breathing all that is most natural and tender in the affections of this,—­were also written at this time, and have never before been published.

[Footnote 116:  Childe Harold, Canto iii.]

[Footnote 117:  To this lameness of Polidori, one of the preceding letters of Lord Byron alludes.]

[Footnote 118:  The Corsair.]

[Footnote 119:  His system of diet here was regulated by an abstinence almost incredible.  A thin slice of bread, with tea, at breakfast—­a light, vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of Seltzer water, tinged with vin de Grave, and in the evening, a cup of green tea, without milk or sugar, formed the whole of his sustenance.  The pangs of hunger he appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking cigars.]

[Footnote 120:  From his remembrance of this sketch, Polidori afterwards vamped up his strange novel of the Vampire, which, under the supposition of its being Lord Byron’s, was received with such enthusiasm in France.  It would, indeed, not a little deduct from our value of foreign fame, if what some French writers have asserted be true, that the appearance of this extravagant novel among our neighbours first attracted their attention to the genius of Byron.]

[Footnote 121:  “The wind (says Lord Byron’s fellow-voyager) gradually increased in violence until it blew tremendously; and, as it came from the remotest extremity of the Lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam.  One of our boatmen, who was a dreadfully stupid fellow, persisted in holding the sail at a time when the boat was on the point of being driven under water by the hurricane.  On discovering this error, he let it entirely go, and the boat for a moment refused to obey the helm; in addition, the rudder was so broken as to render the management of it very difficult; one wave fell in, and then another.”]

[Footnote 122:  “I felt, in this near prospect of death (says Mr. Shelley), a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though but subordinately.  My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine.  When we arrived at St. Gingoux, the inhabitants, who stood on the shore, unaccustomed to see a vessel as frail as ours, and fearing to venture at all on such a sea, exchanged looks of wonder and congratulation with our boatmen, who, as well as ourselves, were well pleased to set foot on shore.”]