Visiting Lord Byron in 1821, Percy Shelley wrote to his friend Thomas Love Peacock:

“Lord Byron’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels as if they were the masters of it.”

He added in a postscript: “I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were, before they were changed into these shapes.”

My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour to the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the single exception of Noah’s Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind yet seen.

— George Bernard Shaw, letter to The Academy, Oct. 15, 1898

Very high and very low temperature extinguishes all human sympathy and relations. It is impossible to feel affection beyond 78° or below 20° of Fahrenheit; human nature is too solid or too liquid beyond these limits. Man only lives to shiver or to perspire. God send that the glass may fall, and restore me to my regard for you, which in the temperate zone is invariable.

— Sydney Smith, letter to Sarah Austin, July 1836

A passage from Irene Iddesleigh, by Amanda McKittrick Ros, arguably the worst novel ever written:

‘False woman! Wicked wife! Detested mother! Bereft widow!

‘How darest thou set foot on the premises your chastity should have protected and secured! What wind of transparent touch must have blown its blasts of boldest bravery around your poisoned person and guided you within miles of the mansion I proudly own?

‘What spirit but that of evil used its influence upon you to dare to bend your footsteps of foreign tread towards the door through which they once stole unknown? Ah, woman of sin and stray companion of tutorism, arise, I demand you, and strike across that grassy centre as quickly as you can, and never more make your hated face appear within these mighty walls. I can never own you; I can never call you mother; I cannot extend the assistance your poor, poverty-stricken attire of false don silently requests; neither can I ever meet you on this side the grave, before which you so pityingly kneel!’

Mark Twain called it “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.” The whole thing is here.

A Man with a Shotgun said to a Bird:

‘It is all nonsense, you know, about shooting being a cruel sport. I put my skill against your cunning — that is all there is of it. It is a fair game.’

‘True,’ said the Bird, ‘but I don’t wish to play.’

‘Why not?’ inquired the Man with a Shotgun.

‘The game,’ the Bird replied, ‘is fair as you say; the chances are about even; but consider the stake. I am in it for you, but what is there in it for me?’

Not being prepared with an answer to the question, the Man with a Shotgun sagaciously removed the propounder.

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

Byron swam the Hellespont. On May 3, 1810, the 22-year-old poet and a Lieutenant Ekenhead of the frigate Salsette swam the breaststroke from Sestos to Abydos, crossing from Europe to Asia in an hour and 10 minutes as they sought to emulate Leander’s nightly swims to Hero. “The whole distance … including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles.”

“I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical,” Byron wrote. He commemorated the feat in Don Juan:

A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.

The feat is often regarded as a founding achievement in open-water swimming, and an event is held each year in its memory.