Beautifully fatal male lovers were pursued from Harrow on the Hill to the Hellespont, but  Lady Caroline Lamb was Lord Byron`s most famous affair. Related to the one of the assumed lesbian Ladies of Llangollen – and to Diana Princess of Wales, her Ladyship coined this epithet for a  major English poet. Hounded out of society by allegations of incest, a broken marriage, and death of a child, he sought   Picadilly W1, Seaham in  County Durham, Geneva ( where he suggested writing a spooky story which became Frankenstein)  and the `sodomic sea` of Venice.

Still unfulfilled, Byron died two hundred years ago this year -  of an infection caught whilst fighting for Greek Independence in Missolonghi. He was 34.

The Cornelian

No specious splendour of this stone
Endears it to my memory ever;
With lustre only once it shone,
And blushes modest as the giver.

Some, who can sneer at friendship’s ties,
Have, for my weakness, oft reprov’d me;
Yet still the simple gift I prize,
For I am sure, the giver lov’d me.

He offer’d it with downcast look,
As fearful that I might refuse it;
I told him, when the gift I took,
My only fear should be, to lose it.

This pledge attentively I view’d,
And sparkling as I held it near,
Methought one drop the stone bedew’d,
And, ever since, I’ve lov’d a tear.

Still, to adorn his humble youth,
Nor wealth nor birth their treasures yield;
But he, who seeks the flowers of truth,
Must quit the garden, for the field.

‘Tis not the plant uprear’d in sloth,
Which beauty shews, and sheds perfume;
The flowers, which yield the most of both,
In Nature’s wild luxuriance bloom.

Had Fortune aided Nature’s care,
For once forgetting to be blind,
His would have been an ample share,
If well proportioned to his mind.

But had the Goddess clearly seen,
His form had fix’d her fickle breast;
Her countless hoards would his have been,
And none remain’d to give the rest.

photo: john Murray