At that time the rumour spread in Pisa that an extraordinary man had arrived there, of whom people told a hundred different tales, all contradictory and many absurd. They said that he was of royal blood, of very great wealth, of sanguine temperament, of fierce habits, masterly in knightly exercises, possessing an evil genius, but a more than human intellect. He was said to wander through the world like Job’s Satan seeking a similar adventurer, or calumniator of God. It was George Byron . . . I had not seen Niagara Falls, nor the avalanches of the Alps, I did not know what a volcano was, but I had watched furious tempests, lightning had struck near me, and still nothing from amongst the sights which I had known produced anything like the bewilderment created in me by reading the works of this great soul.