With the departure of the Shelley party and of Davies, Byron and Hobhouse were left on their own. But not for long. Between Davies's leaving on 5 September and their own setting out to see more mountains on the 17th, they saw or entertained a number of visitors. It was in that fortnight, for example, that Lady Jersey and her husband were in the area. One of the formidable aristocratic ladies who decided who should or (perhaps more importantly) should not be invited to the fashionable social gatherings periodically held in Almack's Assembly Rooms in London, Lady Jersey was a major arbiter of Regency fashion and it had therefore been important that she had not dropped Byron when the tide of public opinion was running against him. Now she gave the lie to Brougham's assertion that all the English in the Geneva area shunned him. Someone who did the same, and who also visited Diodati at this time, was Richard Sharp. He was thirty years older than Byron, had met Boswell and Johnson and known Fox before becoming a friend of Lord Holland, and most of the other prominent Whigs. He was particularly close to Samuel Rogers, the poet and banker more responsible than anyone else for introducing Byron to the fashionable world after the success of Childe Harold. Like Rogers, Sharp came from a Dissenting background and had represented the Dissenting interest in Parliament. An impressive speech he gave attacking Britain's pre-emptive strike on neutral Denmark in 1807, when Copenhagen was bombarded and there were many civilian casualties, led to his being known as ‘Copenhagen’ Sharp, although later his reputation as a diner-out who could talk in an informed manner on a wide variety of topics meant that ‘Conversation’ was substituted for ‘Copenhagen’. Byron had at one point thought of going to the continent in the company of ‘Conversation’ Sharp but the plan had fallen through. Now that he was in Switzerland, Sharp could visit not only Byron but also Madame de Staël, so that, having entertained him at Diodati, the two young men would see him again at Coppet, as they would also Lord and Lady Jersey.