Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/118

 zeppa,’ something in the same way that I told it one night at Diodati, when Monk Lewis, and Shelley and his wife, were present. The latter sketched on that occasion the outline of her Pygmalion story, ‘The Modern Prometheus,’ the making of a man (which a lady who had read it afterwards asked Sir Humphrey Davy, to his great astonishment, if he could do, told a story something like Alonzo and Imogene); and Shelley himself, or ‘The Snake,’ (as he used sometimes to call him,) conjured up some frightful woman of an acquaintance of his at home, a kind of Medusa, who was suspected of having eyes in her breasts.

“Perhaps Polidori had strictly no right to appropriate my story to himself; but it was hardly worth it: and when my letter, disclaiming the narrative part, was written, I dismissed the matter from my memory. It was Polidori’s own fault that we did not agree. I was sorry when we parted, for I soon get attached to people; and was more sorry still for the scrape he afterwards got into at Milan. He quarrelled with one of the guards at the Scala, and was ordered to leave the Lombard States twenty-four hours after; which put an end to all his Continental schemes, that I had forwarded by re-