John William Polidori - Ximenes & Other Poems

John William Polidori was born on 7th September 1795 in London to Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political emigre scholar, and Anna Maria Pierce, an English governess. He was the eldest of 8 children.From 1804 Polidori was a pupil at the recently formed Ampleforth College. In 1810 he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1st August 1815. He was 19.In 1816, Dr. Polidori was given the job of Byron's personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. The publisher John Murray offered Polidori GBP500 to keep a diary of their travels. At the Villa Diodati, Byron's rented villa at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont.One night in June, after the company had read aloud from a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. There were to be two outsta