CHAPTER XVII.

GRETA BANK.

Shelley wishes for a Sussex Cottage--His Friends at Keswick--Southey at Home--Poet and Schoolmaster--Southey's Way of handling Shelley--Shelley caught Napping--Mrs. Southey's Tea-cakes--Eggs and Bacon on Hounslow Heath--At Home with the Calverts--Shelley's remarkable Communications to Southey--His Story of Harriett's Expulsion from School--The Story to Hogg's Infamy--Mr. MacCarthy on the _Posthumous Fragments_--Miss Westbrook's transient Contentment--Shelley's _For Ever_ and _Never_--His Interest in Ireland--Burning Questions--Southey and Shelley at War--The _Address to the Irish People_--Letters to Skinner Street--Godwin tickled by them--Shelleyan Conceptions and Misconceptions--Shelley forgets all about Dr. Lind--Preparations for the Irish Campaign--Letter of Introduction to Curran--Project for a happy Meeting in Wales--Miss Eliza Hitchener--Bright Angel and Brown Demon--Shelley's Delight in her--His Abhorrence of her.

From Shelley's letter of 26th November, 1811, to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, it appears that the trio came to Keswick with the purpose of journeying southward, and settling in some picturesque nook of Sussex, when they should have succeeded or failed in the main object of their expedition to the Lake country. The Horsham attorney was instructed to look out for a cottage, adapted to their means and requirements, near St. Leonard's forest or in any other part of the county, where they would be at a distance from soldiers and workshops, and have rural quietude with good scenery.

It would have been well, perhaps, for Shelley and his chances of domestic contentment, had they held to this plan, and settling down in a peaceful Sussex village, avoided the life of comfortless vagrancy, in which he spent the rest of his life. It would have been better still, perhaps, both for him and Harriett, had they been content to lead tranquil and studious days at Greta Bank for two or three years in the society of the Southeys at Keswick, of De Quincey and Wordsworth at Grasmere, of Coleridge and John Wilson. But it was not in his nature, nor, perhaps, was it possible to a young woman of her peculiar temper, to be happy for many months together, in any place that wanted the charm of novelty. Anyhow, instead of biding his time at Greta Bank till De Quincey and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Wilson, had come about them, Shelley surrendered the advantages of the home, that had been provided for him by ducal favour, and left Cumberland at the beginning of February without making any acquaintances at Keswick with the exception of the Calverts from whom he parted regretfully, and the Southeys from whom he parted in no kindly temper.

Either through the carelessness of the original writer (who may have made the common mistake of pre-dating the epistle by an entire month), or through the carelessness of the copyist of the document, a wrong date (10th October, 1811) is given in Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's _Shelley's Early Life_, to the extract from an unpublished letter, in which the poetical aspirant says of the author of _Thalaba_, 'Southey hates the Irish; he speaks against Catholic Emancipation. In all these things we differ. Our differences were the subject of a long conversation.' As Shelley had not seen Southey on 10th October, 1811, as he made Southey's acquaintance at Keswick, which he entered for the first time on some day of the following month (November, 1811), he cannot have talked in the earlier days of October, 1811, with the celebrated man of letters on questions touching Catholic Emancipation and the discontents of the Irish Catholics. The long conversation and differences about those topics may have been affairs of November, but it is more probable that the famous poet and the unknown literary aspirant had no angry altercations about Ireland's wrongs and Robert Emmett's story before the last month of 1811.

It is, however, certain that they differed on these subjects, and that their differences of opinion were fruitful of overbearing speech on Southey's part,--and of much vehement and bitter speech from Shelley.

Shelley came to Keswick with a disposition to have the friendliest relations with the man of letters who two years since had been his favourite English poet, and whom he regarded as a great man till personal intercourse extinguished the favourable opinion. And whilst Shelley went to 'the lakes' in a mood to render homage to Southey's greatness, Southey was by no means disinclined to receive the homage in those portions of his laborious time, in which he condescended to have speech with inferior mortals. But, notwithstanding Shelley's readiness to admire and Southey's readiness to be admired, no one familiar with their peculiar infirmities of intellect and temper would have predicted that the two men would prove congenial companions. In return for his worship and deference, the vehement and romantic Shelley looked for encouragement and sympathy from the famous scholar and poet. Hoping for a cordial welcome to the great man's heart and library, Shelley was reprimanded with a look of mingled surprise and displeasure for his presumption in taking books from the great man's shelves. The welcome accorded to him by the man of fame was attended with limitations and conditions. The house was open to him, but only at times when the master could see him. The library was open to him for the perusal of such books as their owner put into his hands, or rather for such passages of them as were submitted to his consideration. Eager for approval and acutely sensitive of disrespect, the youngster was quick to perceive that Southey listened to his words with supercilious curiosity and amusement, and in replying to them felt himself talking to an intellectual inferior,--to a mere whimsical scatterbrain singularly devoid of mental discretion; to a youth whose exuberant speech ran on matters of which he knew very little. Taking this view of his young friend, Southey (whose dictatorial air and eloquence had, in his thirty-eighth year, assumed all the overbearing insolence that distinguished him in later time) gave his young friend much equally wholesome and unacceptable admonition, that would have been less ineffectual for good and far less effectual for harm, had it been given in a less offensive manner.

Whilst he never failed to take something more than his proper share of the conversation, in whatever company he found himself at this period of his life, the argumentative Shelley liked to imagine he controlled the minds of the listeners, who were more often silenced than swayed by his excessive loquacity. With comical and characteristic self-complacence he wrote of Mr. Calvert and the Duke of Norfolk's other guests, soon after the visit to Greystoke Castle, 'We met several people at the Duke's. One in particular struck me. He was an elderly man, who seemed to know all my concerns, and the expression of his face, whenever I held the argument, _which I do everywhere_, was such as I shall not readily forget.' The young gentleman who, 'holding the argument everywhere,' pursued his customary course even in the presence of ducal quality, met in Southey's house with an entertainer, no less fond of holding the argument; with a host not at all disposed to be overtalked by a boy, barely half his own age. In Southey, the poet usually went hand-in-hand with the pedagogue; but in his dealings with Shelley, the poet disappeared in the pedagogue, the scholar merged in the schoolmaster,--sometimes in the angry schoolmaster. Instead of withdrawing into silence, Southey met the youngster's vehement assertions with scornful counterstatements, traversed his arguments with caustic speech that turned them to ridicule, or raising his voice poured upon him torrents of invective, that only stung and lashed the beardless disputant to wilder extravagances of speech.

Some of Southey's donnish ways to the irrepressible lad were superlatively exasperating. One of the schoolmaster's tricks was to stop the course of controversy by taking down a book, opening it, and reading a passage in a tone, which implied that the quotation closed the discussion for all minds, accessible to reason. At other times, when Shelley had talked himself purple, this exasperating Southey was content to remark in a tone of galling pity and tenderness, 'No doubt, no doubt; I thought and spoke in just the same way when I was your age.' Few forms of dissent are more irritating to a callow disputant than a suggestion that he thinks what he thinks and says what he says, merely because he is very young and inexperienced. Whilst Southey was writing with sublime compassionateness of the young 'man at Keswick, who acted upon him as his own ghost would,' Shelley wrote from Greta Bank to a correspondent, whose personal acquaintance he had still to make:--'Southey, the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once, is now the paid champion of every abuse and absurdity. I have had much conversation with him. He says, "You will think as I do when you are as old." I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr. S.'s proselyte.' Recalling how he had dealt and differed with Shelley in Keswick, Southey (_vide_ _The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles_, 1881) wrote to the author of _Laon and Cythna_ in June, 1820:--'Eight years ago you were somewhat displeased when I declined disputing with you on points which are beyond the reach of the human intellect,--telling you that the great difference between us was, that you were then nineteen and I was eight-and-thirty.' Southey's letter about his own ghost was dated 14th January, 1812; Shelley's letter to Godwin, about 'the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once,' was dated just two days later, 16th January, 1812. Whilst Shelley was nothing more respectable to Southey than a young simpleton of parts, who might survive his folly and become a sensible man, Southey was nothing less contemptible in Shelley's eyes than a literary hireling, who defended every abuse and absurdity he was ordered to defend.

Few were the words spoken in later time to Southey's advantage, many the words spoken to his ridicule, by the younger poet, with whom he had wrangled so hotly on the marge of Derwentwater. One of Shelley's stories, to his enemy's discredit, was the droll account of the way he was led by Southey into his little upstairs study, locked into the narrow chamber, and then 'read' into unconsciousness by his merciless captor; the thing thus read to the captive's stupefaction being one of the captor's poems in manuscript. Charmed with the beauties of his own creation, the author read on slowly and distinctly, till the listener would fain have escaped from the scene of his punishment; read on till the listener nodded from drowsiness, instead of approval; read on till the whilom unwilling listener had ceased to listen; read on till the same whilom listener slipt from his seat to the floor; and still read on till, on looking up from his manuscript for something more flattering than silent admiration, he looked in vain for him who should have given it. The Southey of this comical anecdote may well have been surprised at the listener's unaccountable disappearance. How had he escaped?--Not by the door, for it was locked; nor by the window, for it was barred; nor by the chimney, for it was too narrow. The poet's wonder at the listener's disappearance was exchanged for wonder at his insensibility and indifference to what was loveliest in poetic art, when, on looking under the table, he discovered the whilom listener, lying at full length on the carpet, and wrapt in profoundest slumber. It is suggested by the humorous Hogg that, if Shelley had kept his chair and consciousness, during the reading of the long poem, he would never have been placed by the naturally indignant bard on the roll of the Satanic School.

Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, by the way, discovers cause for virtuous indignation at Hogg's monstrous untruthfulness, in representing that the poem, which acted thus soporifically on Shelley, was _The Curse of Kehama_. The poem of _The Curse_ had been published long before Shelley set foot in Southey's house. Even whilst he was at Oxford, Shelley had taken from a printed copy of _The Curse_ four lines to serve as a motto for the title-page of his own sublime and undiscoverable poem (that possibly was never written), _On the Existing State of Things_. It is infinitely absurd to suppose Southey read in manuscript one of his _old_ poems to Shelley at Keswick. In saying Southey was guilty of this offence, Hogg said what was untrue. It follows that Hogg was a reckless writer, false biographer, and bad man. The fun of the matter is that Hogg does not say the poem was The Curse of Kehama. On the contrary, he is at pains to say he is uncertain whether it was _The Curse_, or some other of the poet's metrical performances. 'The poem, if I mistake not, was _The Curse of Kehama_,' are the words of the biographer, who is so rashly assailed for inaccuracy, though in his mere repetition of Shelley's piquant anecdote, he is so careful to say the poem of the story may _not_ have been the _Curse_. It is thus that, in his passion for defaming Hogg, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy pelts him with any stone, or stick, or bit of dirt that comes to hand.

The incident of the story, if it was a real one, cannot be supposed to have taken place when Mrs. Southey regaled the stranger from southern England with the tea-cakes, which he devoured so ravenously, after abusing them with the vehemence of unqualified prejudice. Had he at that time offered her husband the affront of going to sleep at the poetical-reading, the lady would scarcely have pressed Shelley so cordially to partake of the tea and hot buttered tea-cakes, blushing with currants, or sprinkled with caraway seed, with which she and her poet were regaling themselves, at the close of washing-day.

'Why! good God, Southey!' the younger poet is reported to have exclaimed, with a look of disgust at the unromantic fare, 'I am ashamed of you! It is awful, horrible, to see such a man as you are, greedily devouring this nasty stuff.'

'Nasty stuff, indeed!' cried Mrs. Southey. 'How dare you call my tea-cakes nasty stuff?'

To assuage the lady's wrath, Shelley scanned the cakes, sniffed their savour, took up a piece of one of them, and ate it. Scent and palate convincing Shelley that it was an occasion for prompt recantation of a sentiment formed from the mere appearance of things, he went to work at the remaining tea-cakes, devouring them even more greedily than Southey. Another plate of the hot and buttered cakes being brought to the board, Shelley took something more than his full share of them, and was hoping for the appearance of yet a third plate, when he learnt that more could not be had, the whole batch having been eaten to the last fragment and crumb. Hogg had the story of Mrs. Southey's tea-cakes from Harriett (Westbrook) Shelley, who added, naïvely, 'We were to have hot tea-cakes every evening "for ever." I was to make them myself, and Mrs. Southey was to teach me.'

The story has considerable biographical value, as an example of Shelley's alternate abstemiousness and self-indulgence in food. Resembling Byron in habitual abstinence and indifference to the quality of the fare that sustained him, Shelley also resembled Byron in occasional acts of feasting that might almost be called excesses of greediness. Hogg gives a piquant account of a meal Shelley made off eggs and bacon, in the parlour of a humble inn on Hounslow Heath, at a time subsequent to his union with William Godwin's daughter, when, as a vegetarian, he had for a considerable period regarded pork with abhorrence. Entering the modest tavern, at a moment when Hogg was about to assail a goodly dish of the gross and abominable meat, the hungry poet eyed the bacon with disgust, looked at it with curiosity, sniffed its alluring savour, regarded it longingly, just as he had in former time regarded Mrs. Southey's tea-cakes. 'So this is bacon,' he observed daintily, taking a morsel of the meat on the end of a fork, and putting it into his mouth. Having tasted fat, he fell from the purity of abstinence to the uncleanness of carnal enjoyment. Having consumed a liberal portion of his friend's dish, he ordered another dish on his own account, and devoured it voraciously. Sharpened with what it fed upon, his appetite caused him to cry aloud, 'Bring more bacon;' an order that was speedily followed by the appearance of a third dish. After despatching this third dish, the poet demanded a fourth, when to his lively annoyance he learnt there was no more bacon in the house. It was debated whether the landlady should not be sent to Staines for more bacon; but Hogg prevailed on his friend to put a bridle on fleshly appetite, and set forth for his cottage at Bishopgate and Mary's well-furnished tea-table. On coming to that tea-table, Shelley astonished his wife by exclaiming eagerly, 'We have been eating bacon together on Hounslow Heath, and do you know it was very nice? Cannot we have bacon here, Mary?' On hearing he could not have bacon till the morrow, but must for the present be content with tea and bread and butter, the poet replied plaintively, 'I would rather have some more bacon.' When a worthy book shall be written on the Feasts of the Poets, it will not fail to tell how Byron, after long spells of fasting, used to devour huge messes of broken potato and stale fish, drenched with vinegar. Nor will it omit to record how Shelley ate poor Mrs. Southey out of buttered tea-cakes, and gorged himself with fried bacon at a pot-house on Hounslow Heath.

Whilst they dispose me to think the famous feast on tea-cakes cannot have preceded the hour when Shelley fell asleep under Southey's poem, circumstances also incline me to think the acrimonious disputations on Irish affairs must have followed the first day of Shelley's entertainment at Greta Bank. Anyhow, it is certain that the Shelleys and Southeys were on friendly terms, when the former took up their abode in Mr. Calvert's house. The garden at Greta Bank was the 'pretty garden' of the piquant story known to every reader of De Quincey's curiously inaccurate paper about Shelley. It was to a question, put to her by one of the Southey party, then calling upon her in her new quarters, that Mrs. Shelley replied, with winning childishness, 'Oh, no, the garden is not ours; but then, you know, the people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house;' an utterance that, coming from the girlish wife, may well have amused the married ladies to whom it was made.

Nor is it conceivable that Southey and Shelley had exchanged hot and disdainful words on questions of Irish politics, when the younger poet, overflowing with pitiful speech on subjects about which he should not have uttered a syllable to so slight an acquaintance, told Southey the story of Harriett's conversion to Atheism, and the still more revolting tale of Hogg's attempt to seduce her. By the first of these excesses of communicativeness, Southey was informed how Shelley had busied himself in making proselytes in Mrs. Fenning's boarding-school; how Harriett Westbrook was expelled the school for accepting his doctrine and aiding him in his purpose; and how he had married her, in order to render her the _amende honorable_ for the disgrace and trouble he had brought upon her. The second of the amazing stories was, that on their journey from Edinburgh to York Hogg had attempted to debauch his friend's bride, so soon after her marriage. Telling these things to his wife's discredit and Hogg's infamy, Shelley spoke frankly of his disapproval of marriage. About the same time, either from Shelley's own lips, or from the lips of some other informant, it came to Southey's knowledge that, since coming to Keswick, Shelley had told his wife expressly, that he regarded the marriage-rite as a ceremony of no binding force, and that he should leave her on ceasing to love her. Having no doubt the statements thus made to Harriett _at_ Keswick were a mere repetition of statements made to her by Shelley _before_ their marriage, Southey had reasons in 1820 for declining to believe that, after deciding to wed one another by lawful form, either she or Shelley had entered the compact on the Free Love understanding that they should be at liberty to separate on ceasing to like one another. One could wish Southey had stated more precisely how much of his knowledge of Shelley's nuptial and pre-nuptial relations to Harriett came to him from Shelley's own lips, and how much from other informants. It is, however, certain that Southey received from Shelley's own tongue, his information, or misinformation, touching the circumstances of Harriett's alleged expulsion from school, touching Shelley's alleged motive for marrying her, and touching the attempt said to have been made by Hogg on her honour. Whether the allegation to Hogg's infamy should be deemed good evidence against the law-student is a question to be considered in a subsequent chapter. For the present, it is enough to observe that Shelley spoke to Southey at Keswick on divers delicate personal matters, about which even he would scarcely have opened mind and heart to so recent an acquaintance had they already squabbled fiercely on Irish affairs.

Because Shelley introduced a virtuous Irishman into the later part of _St. Irvyne_, and published in the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_ some metrical trash about a banshee's moan, and a white courser, bestridden by a shadow sprite, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy would have us believe, that Shelley did not leave Oxford without seriously interesting himself in the history and legends of Ireland, and entertaining a purpose to redress the wrongs of her miserable people. Here are Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's own words:--

'One of them' (_i.e._ the poems of the _Posthumous Fragments_) '_The Spectral Horseman_, is interesting as showing that at this early period, Shelley had begun to take that interest in the history and legends of Ireland, which led to such extraordinary results two years later. We have here "The Banshee's moan on the storm;" "A white courser," like that of O'Donoghue, "bears the shadowy sprite;" "The whirlwinds howl in the caves of Innisfallen,"--

"Then does the dragon, who, chained in the caverns To eternity, curses the champion of Erin, Moan and yell loud at the lone hour of midnight." _Fragments, page 25._

'Extravagant as all these passages are,--they show Shelley's sympathies for Ireland had already been awakened, and that his practical efforts for her benefit at a later period were not the result of any sudden or passing caprice.'

What evidence that a youngster--living in the times of Moore, and Maturin, and Sydney Morgan; in times when the popularity of the 'Irish Melodies' had called into existence a score imitators of their author; in times when romantic Irish ballads and patriotic Irish ballads lay on every drawing-room table; in times when to humour the prevailing taste for fiction about Ireland, and to profit by the demand for Irish tales at circulating libraries, Lady Morgan christened one of her stories _The Wild Irish Girl_, though no such girl played a part in the narrative,--was a serious student of Irish history and legends, and had entered on a course of inquiry and thought, that naturally resulted in a resolve to visit Ireland, for the purpose of striking the manacles from the bruised and bleeding limbs of Fair Erin! Thus is it that Shelley's story has been told by his fanciful idolaters.

The instruction given (November 26th, 1811) to Mr. Medwin, the Horsham lawyer, to find a Sussex cottage for the poet's habitation, is a sufficient proof that Shelley at that time designed to settle ere long in his native county. When a man speaks to his lawyer on such a matter, he may be assumed to mean what he says. Shelley's written words to the man of business were: 'We do not intend to take up our abode here for a perpetuity, but should wish to have a house in Sussex. Let it be in some picturesque, retired place--St. Leonard's Forest, for instance. Let it not be nearer to London than Horsham, nor near any _populous_ manufacturing town. We do not covet either a propinquity to _barracks_.' The young man who wrote with this amplitude and precision must have meant what he said. He could not afford to hire a house and let it stand empty. With no purpose of staying a long time at Keswick, he wished for a house in Sussex to retire to, in the company of his wife and sister-in-law, when he should withdraw from the lakes. This was his plan when he entered Keswick; and when he had been there some weeks.

What made him relinquish this scheme for a home? Probably he relinquished it at the advice and with the approval of his wife and her sister, and also in accordance with his own judgment, immediately after the visit to Greystoke Castle, and Mr. Calvert's offer to take them into his house. When they had been received at the Castle--not for a mere formal dinner, not for a brief three nights' stay, but for a visit of several (eight or nine) days--the prospect of living for a considerable time at Keswick must have been acceptable to both the sisters; to the gentle and lovable Harriett, who had several reasons for thinking such a residence would be for her husband's advantage,--and to the scheming and ambitious Eliza, who, in some degree sincerely desirous for Harriett's and Percy's welfare, was chiefly ambitious of taking rank with gentlewomen. Exulting in her reception at Greystoke Castle,--a reception that qualified her to speak of the Duchess of Norfolk as her friend, and gave her the castle-mark of gentility in the eyes of the 'highest quality' of and near Keswick--Miss Westbrook, we may be sure, was in no hurry to withdraw from the neighbourhood, that was the scene of her sweetest social triumph; from the town that necessarily rated her one of the Greystoke circle. It was manifest to the prudent and ambitious Miss Westbrook, that nothing could be more favourable to her own hopes, and aims, and interest, than such a residence at Keswick as would plant her amongst the local 'quality,' and result in future invitations to the Castle,--nothing more certain to please her money-grubbing and upward-looking father; nothing more likely to conciliate Percy's wrathful father; no course more likely to end in her own admission to Field Place during the life of Percy's mother.

At the same time it was no less manifest to Miss Westbrook that a better place of residence than Keswick could not be found for her youthful and erratic brother-in-law during the next two or three years. Living in Sussex he would be a perpetual irritant to his irritable father. Living in Cumberland he would be out of his father's way, and under the fewest temptations to exasperate him to fiercer anger. Not only would he be out of his father's way in Cumberland, but living there, in a certain sense, under the Duke of Norfolk's patronage, he would be passing his time under conditions most likely to confirm the Duke in his friendly disposition towards him, and therefore most likely to result in the reconciliation of the father and son. At Keswick her brother-in-law would have literary society, form literary friendships, and have access to the libraries of his literary friends. On hearing her brother-in-law enjoyed the Duke of Norfolk's favour, and meant to remain for a considerable time at Greta Bank, Miss Westbrook was hopeful that Mr. De Quincey would soon call upon him. On their return to the lakes, Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mr. John Wilson would make his acquaintance. Mr. Wordsworth might hold aloof from the new-comers for a time, but in some way or other he would extend the hand of good-fellowship to them, soon after Coleridge's reappearance in his favourite haunts. Living with such friends, Percy would read many books, and write a wonderful poem, that, raising him yet higher in the omnipotent Duke's good opinion, would restore him to his father's favour, and open the doors of Field Place to his wife and her sister. These were Miss Westbrook's views of the position and prospect. No one can say they were unreasonable views. Had they been so, Harriett would have accepted them out of her usual submissiveness to so incomparable a sister. But there was no need for Miss Westbrook to force her views of these matters on her sister, who, without guidance or instruction of any kind, had come to the same conclusions. Harriett and Eliza had seldom been of different opinions on anything up to this point of their story. At least for once, the concurrence of their sentiments was in no degree due to the elder sister's authority.

Whilst Harriett and Miss Westbrook both liked the notion of living at Keswick for a considerable period, Shelley also favoured it. One consequence of Shelley's enthusiasm and nervous vehemence was that, whilst he was the most changeable of mortals in some matters, he seldom did a thing once without at the same time intending to do it 'for ever.' A restless vagrant from his manhood's threshold to his death, he seldom entered a picturesque place without declaring he would live in it 'for ever.' He was perpetually doing things 'for ever,' and undoing them a few days or weeks later. He never made a friendship with man or woman without vowing the league should be perpetual. He went to York with the intention of living there 'for ever.' He declared he would love Hogg 'for ever.' He vowed he would live 'for ever' in friendship with Miss Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, and no long time afterwards vowed just as passionately and sincerely to hate her 'for ever.' It mattered not to him in periods of passionate excitement, that in his opinion love and all other sentimental preferences were mere consequences of perception and wholly independent of volition. It mattered not that 'Love was free,' and that in his judgment 'To promise for ever to love the same woman was not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed,' because such a vow excluded its maker from inquiries he might be constrained to make, and from new judgments he might be compelled to form, and was therefore by the nature of things powerless to bind its utterer when the mental perceptions required him to disregard it. All the same, he never desired human affection without praying for it, in order that he might enjoy it 'for ever,'--never wished vehemently for anything without hoping, in his emotional intensity, to get happiness from it 'for ever.' He promised to love Harriett Westbrook 'for ever,' whilst believing himself to be so constituted that at no distant time he might be powerless to love her at all. In the same spirit, with the same fervour, and the same perception of love's fickleness and instability, he carried off Mary Godwin with avowals that he would love her 'for ever.' When Claire, in the 'Six weeks' tour,' exclaimed with delight at each new scene of loveliness, 'Let us live here,' the lively and humorous girl was laughing in her sleeve at Shelley's practice of declaring he would 'live for ever' in any place, that pleased him greatly at first sight. Allowance must be made for Shelley's vehement emotionality and extravagance of diction by readers who would not be misled by his use of 'ever' and 'never' in matters of his own personal story.

In the absence of positive evidence to the point, I have little doubt that Shelley entered the rooms assigned to him in Mr. Calvert's house with a declaration that he would inhabit them 'for ever,' and that the sisters who had him in their keeping entered the same rooms with a strong opinion that he would do well to inhabit them for a considerable time. He would scarcely have remained in them for seven weeks had he not taken possession of them with the intention of occupying them for as many years. How was it then that he withdrew so soon from so eligible an abode? Certainly the cause was neither a sudden dislike of Keswick, nor a diminution of his affectionate regard for Mr. and Mrs. Calvert. There exists testimony in his own handwriting that he left Keswick with regret, and the Calverts with a hope to see more of them. 'I hope,' he wrote to a friend from Whitehaven on 3rd February, 1812, as he was on the point of sailing for Ireland, 'some day to show you Mrs. Calvert; I shall not forget her, but will preserve her memory as another flower to compose a garland which I intend to present to you.' How came he then to tear himself away at the beginning of February, 1812, from a place he liked, and from friends in whom he delighted? How was it that, on tearing himself from this place and these friends, he went off to Ireland,--an expedition he certainly cannot have thought of making when, on 26th November, 1811, he wrote to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, about a house in Sussex? How are we to account for the change of purpose that sent him on a mission to Ireland for the Repeal of the Union and the Emancipation of the Catholics? Successive writers have either declared their inability to answer this question, or have answered it in the wrong way.

Confessing his inability to answer the question, Hogg conjectures that some Irish frequenter of the Mount Street coffee-house, or some Hibernian Hampden, encountered by Shelley on the hills of Cumberland, may have inspired Shelley with an ambition to settle all the Irish questions, and put a period to all the Irish grievances, by making the voyage to Dublin, and speaking words of wisdom to its inhabitants. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is certain that this new project for the pacification of Ireland was the natural result of Shelley's Oxonian study of Irish history and legends; that the poet went to Ireland of his own mere motion, after coming slowly and dispassionately to a strong and reasonable opinion that he would do Ireland good service, by visiting her capital, and in the course of a few weeks converting her children to moderation, temperance, industry, orderliness, and universal political amenity. The present writer is no less certain that Shelley's Oxonian concern for Irish literature had nothing to do with his marvellous scheme for settling Irish difficulties; that his premature departure from Keswick was mainly due to his dislike of Southey; and that his Irish mission was the outcome of sentiments arising from his acrimonious disputations with the same poet on questions of Irish politics.

It is not surprising that the man of letters and his young friend exchanged their views on questions that engaged the attention of all persons interested in the politics of the United Kingdom. It would have been strange had the _Quarterly_ Reviewer and the literary aspirant--the mature Tory, who spoke disdainfully of his former republicanism as mere boyish effervescence, and the youthful enthusiast of the revolutionary school--differed amicably on matters, so calculated to stir the temper of either disputant. Whilst they were alike fervid and intolerant, each had a manner peculiarly irritating to the other, as soon as their pulses quickened under verbal contention. Overbearing and contemptuous, even to those who agreed with him, Southey soon grew insufferably dogmatic and disdainful to the boy who had the presumption to contradict him. Never remarkable for a reverential and conciliatory demeanour to those of his elders who ventured to teach him what he did not wish to be taught, Shelley soon ceased to show his opponent the respect due from him to a man, so greatly his superior by age, experience, and achievement. Southey's attempts to snub his young friend into submissiveness, and lecture him into sensible views, only stirred and stung Shelley to declare in shriller notes his repugnance to the views that were forced upon him in so dictatorial a manner. On finding that in Southey's study and presence he was expected to hold silence and take instruction, the young gentleman (_ætat._ 19), who deemed himself qualified 'to hold the argument everywhere,' became furious. Of course, everything Southey said in this insolent style, against the Irish, only made Shelley think, or confirmed him in thinking, the reverse. The more insultingly he was told that all Ireland needed was firm government and the steady maintenance of existing laws, the more clear was it to Shelley that Ireland's chief need was the gentle rule of new and humane laws. Southey's assertions that reasoning was wasted on the Irish, for whose government the bayonet was the best instrument, only made Shelley more positive that the Irish were a gentle, generous, and reasonable people, who could be reasoned into virtuous behaviour, and be cured by sympathetic and persuasive speech of their faults and failings,--faults and failings chiefly, if not altogether, due to the tyranny under which they had groaned so long.

To show that he was altogether right, and the exasperating Southey altogether wrong, about Ireland and the Irish, Shelley set to work with his pen on the production of _An Address to the Irish People_, that, written at Keswick in the last month of 1811 and the first month of 1812, was printed and published at Dublin in February, 1812. As the words of this curious and delightfully boyish composition fell to the paper, it struck the author that it would be well for him to visit Ireland, and enforce with his persuasive tongue the wholesome admonitions of his pen,--and very pleasant for him, and Harriett, and Eliza, to observe in the streets of Dublin the first signs of that conversion of the Irish people to thrift, industry, temperance, and tolerance, which could not fail to be the immediate consequence of the publication of so excellent an essay. This notion of going to Ireland, for the purpose of contributing to, and witnessing the success of, his pamphlet, was the more agreeable to Shelley because he was eager to get away from the odious Southey, and because, in going to Ireland (of all places of the earth's surface) to get out of the renegade's way, he would exhibit, in a singularly telling and emphatic manner, his contempt for all that had been urged to the discredit of the dear Irish people by the malignant apostate from pantisocratic and other republican principles. Under these circumstances, is it wonderful that the later slips of the _Address_ were written in the midst of arrangements for the author's expedition to the land, that would be so speedily recovered from rancour and wretchedness to contentment and prosperity?

Whilst writing the _Address to the Irish People_ at Greta Bank, Shelley found other employment for his pen, in producing verses to Robert Emmett's glorification, with other additions to the collection of poems which he designed to publish in Dublin; and in throwing off letters to Miss Eliza Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, near Brighton, and to a certain famous author and struggling bookseller, who must have experienced emotions of amusement and self-complacence on perusing the first of the letters, in which the author of the _Necessity of Atheism_, approached William Godwin with expressions of profoundest reverence, several months before he was permitted to gaze on the altogether human lineaments of the divine philosopher.

In the first of these letters (a letter dated from Keswick on 3rd January, 1812, though it is one of the many blunders of Mr. Kegan Paul's book about Godwin to insist that it was written from Keswick ten months before Shelley set foot in the place) Shelley assures the addressee of the epistle that 'the name of Godwin has been used to excite in him feelings of reverence and admiration;' that he has been 'accustomed to consider' the sublime Godwin as 'a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him;' and that after long regarding the sublime Godwin regretfully as one of 'the honourable dead,' as a personage 'the glory of whose being had passed from this earth of ours,' he has learned with 'inconceivable emotions' that so great a benefactor of his species still has an earthly existence and an earthly habitation in Skinner Street, in the City of London. 'It is not so,' ejaculates the writer of the adulatory epistle; 'you still live, and, I firmly believe, are still planning the welfare of human kind.' It was in this strain of extravagant and obsequious reverence that Shelley approached, in January, 1812, the man whose house he entered some months later, whose hospitality he accepted freely as it was proffered, and whose sixteen-years-old daughter he lured into Free Love two and a half years later. It is also well for the reader to know and remember, that at the time of writing this characteristic epistle, the singularly truth-loving Shelley had not recently discovered with inconceivable emotion that Godwin was still living and following his trade in Skinner Street. The evidences are clear that the sentimental words about the writer's regret for the death of the too dazzling luminary were untrue words.

The dazzling luminary, who would perhaps have left the letter unanswered, had not its adulation tickled his self-complacence agreeably, replied in terms that caused the young enthusiast to produce an autobiographic fragment for his correspondent's enlightenment. Writing from Keswick on 10th January, 1812, to the philosopher of Skinner Street, Shelley (after the customary announcement of his filial relation to 'a man of fortune in Sussex') remarks that his habits of thinking never coincided with his father's habits of thinking; that it was his misfortune in childhood to be 'required to love, because it was his duty to love' his father, a system of coercion which, of course, rendered it impossible for him to love his father; and that he published his two novels (_St. Irvyne_ and _Zastrozzi_) before he was seventeen years of age,--a statement not a little wide of historic truth. Instead of publishing these books when he was at Eton, and only sixteen years of age, he was seventeen years and ten months old when he published the earlier story, and eighteen years and four months old when he published the later tale, both romances having appeared whilst he was a member of University College, Oxford. These inaccuracies are followed in the letter by a more remarkable example of the writer's inaccuracy in statements touching his personal affairs. Representing that he read Godwin's _Political Justice_, and adopted its views, whilst he was at Eton, he adds, 'No sooner had I formed the principles which I now profess than I was anxious to disseminate their benefits. This was done without the slightest caution. I was twice expelled, but recalled by the interference of my father.' All this is represented to have taken place at Eton before he 'went to Oxford;' yet it is certain that he never published anything controversial on the questions raised in the _Political Justice_ whilst he was at Eton, and no less certain that he was not twice expelled from the school for doing so. Though he left Eton prematurely, and with a bad name, his dismissal from the school differed so widely from expulsion, that he would not have been justified in speaking of himself as having been expelled once.

In the same letter (of 10th January, 1812, to Godwin) Shelley says of the circumstances of his expulsion from Oxford,

'I printed a pamphlet, avowing my opinions and its occasion.... Mr. ----, at Oxford, among others, had the pamphlet; he showed it to the Master and the Fellows of University College, and I was sent for. I was informed that in case I denied the publication, no more would be said. I refused and was expelled.'

It is scarcely needful for me to remind the readers of this work, that the collegiate authorities never told him he could escape punishment by disclaiming the publication; never urged him to deny the publication; never expelled him for refusing to deny it. The whole statement is untrue in every particular. What made him pen these untruths, with or without cognizance of their absolute untruthfulness? Ever taking the most charitable view of his friend's most perplexing infirmity, Hogg maintains that Shelley had no intention of misstating the case when he misstated it so egregiously.

'This is incorrect,' says Hogg; 'no such offer was made, no such information was given; but musing on the affair, as he was wont, he dreamed that the proposal had been declined by him, and thus he had the gratification of believing that he was more of a martyr than he really was.'

Yet further Shelley writes in the same delusive style in the same epistle:--

'It will be necessary, in order to elucidate this part of my history, to inform you that I am heir by entail to an estate of £6000 per annum.... My father has ever regarded me as a blot, a defilement of his honour. He wished to induce me by poverty to accept of some commission in a distant regiment, and in the interim of my absence to prosecute the pamphlet, that a process of outlawry might make the estate on his death devolve to my younger brother. These are the leading points of the history of the man before you.... I am married to a woman whose views are similar to my own. To you, as the regulator and former of my mind, I must ever look with real respect and veneration.'

Readers should notice and remember each of the several untruthful statements of this extract. (1) It was untrue that the Squire of Field Place had 'ever regarded' his son 'as a blot and defilement of his honour.' (2) It was untrue that the Squire had endeavoured to force his son to accept a commission in a distant regiment in order that, during his absence on military service, he might deprive him by legal process of his birthright to the advantage of his younger brother. (3) It was untrue that the Squire had put pressure on his son to enter the army, though it has been suggested by one of the poet's several friendly biographers that, soon after his expulsion from Oxford, it may perhaps have been suggested to the unruly boy that he should adopt the military profession, like his cousin Tom Medwin, who went from the University into a cavalry regiment. (4) The father who had dealt so leniently and tenderly with his son on first hearing of his academic disgrace, never for an instant entertained a thought of compassing the prosecution of the author and printer of the scandalous tract. Of the malicious purpose and scheme, attributed to the kindly though irascible Squire of Field Place by the boy to whom he had been a considerate and good father, Hogg says justly:--

'It is only in a dream that the prosecution, outlawry, and devolution of the estate could find place. The narration of such proceedings would have been too strong and strange for a German romance; it would have been too large a requisition upon the reader's credulity to ask him to credit them in the father of _Zastrozzi_....'

One may well smile at such egregious ignorance of law and affairs in the self-confident youth, who was preparing to visit Ireland in order to Emancipate the Catholics, Repeal the Union, and instruct the whole Irish people in political science. It is, however, no matter for smiling that this young scatterbrain, whom his adulators compare with the Saviour of the World, penned these egregious inventions to his father's discredit in a letter to a person, with whom he had no domestic connexion,--to a stranger, of whom he knew nothing, save that he was a writer of entertaining and clever books.

Readers must settle for themselves whether the untruthful statements were sheer and wilful untruths, or the fruits of misconception scarcely compatible with mental sanity, or products of a state of mind that would justify the critic in adopting Peacock's term, and speaking of them as results of 'semi-delusion.' On these points there may be room for differences of opinion; but it must be obvious to all judicious readers that in putting the erroneous statements on paper, the generous and chivalric Shelley was actuated by a desire to exhibit his father as an unnatural and treacherous parent to the man of letters, to whom the epistle was addressed. Had the Squire of Field Place been the bad father Shelley declared him, it was not for Shelley to say so in a letter to a stranger. Even to his nearest and dearest friend--even to so familiar a comrade as Hogg, in the time of their most affectionate intimacy--Shelley would have been silent on so painful and shameful a subject, had he been the loyal and chivalrous being his idolaters would have us think him.

Readers may also reflect on the different strain in which Shelley, only a few weeks earlier, wrote of his father to the Duke of Norfolk. Godwin, the stranger, is informed by Shelley that his father regards him as a blot and defilement; that his father had striven to force him out of the country into distant military service; that his father had designed to institute legal proceedings against him for writing _The Necessity of Atheism_; that his father had desired to despoil him of his birthright, and place his younger brother next in succession to the family estate. These statements are made to the stranger, who is not likely to know the real causes of his correspondent's estrangement from his father. But in Shelley's letter to the Duke of Norfolk, who knows all about the domestic question and the Squire's treatment of his son, it is not suggested by Shelley that 'the pamphlet' had anything to do with his father's anger. On the contrary, his father's extreme displeasure with him is attributed to the real cause--his marriage, and the circumstances of the _mésalliance_. Why this difference? To those who answer that, whereas Shelley was in his right mind when writing to the Duke of Norfolk, and labouring under delusions when writing to William Godwin, it must appear curiously significant and suggestive of another conclusion--that he wrote truthfully of his affairs to the correspondent who (to his knowledge) knew the truth of them, and altogether untruthfully about his affairs to the person whom he had reason to think ignorant of them.

Godwin's answer to the letter containing these inaccurate statements is not extant; but it is on the evidences that the philosopher's reply indicated surprise at, and disapproval of, the terms in which his youthful correspondent had spoken of his father. Finding he had exhibited himself in an unfavourable light to the author of _Political Justice_, Shelley hastened to retrieve the false step, and recover his correspondent's good opinion by writing (14th January, 1812), in his third letter from Keswick to Skinner Street:--

'You mistake me if you think that I am angry with my father. I have ever been desirous of a reconciliation with him, but the price which he demands for it is a renunciation of my opinions, or, at least a subjection to conditions which should bind me to act in opposition to their very spirit. It is probable that my father has acted for my welfare....'

Neither misconception nor semi-delusion can be pleaded for Shelley's statement that he was not angry with his father. It was not true that he had 'ever been desirous of a reconciliation with his father.' The two statements were untruths, told by Shelley in order to set himself right with his correspondent. For the same purpose he now admits that his father (charged in the previous letter with an execrable design for depriving him of his birthright) may have acted for his welfare. Other words of the extract should have the reader's thoughtful consideration. One of the charges against the Squire of Field Place being that, after banishing his son from his boyhood's home at the instigation of religious intolerance, he required his son's renunciation of his sincere opinions as the condition for their reconcilement, it is well for readers of the poet's story to take especial notice of his admission that, instead of being required to renounce his opinions, he was only required to 'submit to conditions which should bind him to act in opposition to their very spirit,' words of qualification which, coming from Shelley, are sufficient evidence to the moderation and reasonableness of the conditions. There is a wide difference between a demand for the renunciation of opinions and a demand for abstinence from noisy and aggressive assertion of them; and the father who requires a youngster in his nonage to hold his pen and tongue on certain subjects of difficult and perilous controversy is guilty of no despotic excess of paternal authority. The forbearance which Mr. Timothy Shelley had required of his son was in truth nothing more than the forbearance which William Godwin was already urging the youngster to exercise for his own advantage. 'I will not again,' Shelley writes to his newly selected Mentor, 'crudely obtrude my peculiar opinions or my doubts on the world;' a promise which he, of course, had no intention of keeping; a promise he was, even at the moment of making it, on the point of breaking in the imbecile _Address to the Irish People_. Had he made the same promise to his father and kept it, there would have been peace between them,--at least on mere matters of opinion.

Writing to William Godwin, on 16th January, 1812, a letter that affords some curious examples of the obsequious adulation with which he approached the man of letters, whose friendship he was desirous of winning, Shelley remarked:--

'I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust. The knowledge which I have, whatever it may be (putting out of the question the age of grammar and the horn-book), has been acquired by my unassisted efforts. I have before given you a slight sketch of my earlier habits and feelings--my present are, in my opinion, infinitely superior--they are elevated and disinterested; such as they are, you have principally produced them.'

'I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust.' This language is no less comprehensive than precise. Including all his schoolmasters and other official teachers, it includes all his advisers and social monitors--includes even his own father. How about Dr. Lind?--the wise, the humane, the gentle and large-minded Dr. Lind? the physician who trained him in science and philosophy, and carried him through brain-fever at Field Place? the benign hermit of _Laon and Cythna_, the persuasive teacher of _Prince Athanase_? Readers cannot need to be reminded of all Shelley told Hogg and his second wife about the wise physician's influence on his mental and moral development; of the poetic egotisms of _Laon and Cythna_ and _Prince Athanase_, that glorified the doctor for having been the beneficent illuminator of his pupil's young mind; the poetic egotisms which Mrs. Shelley accepted, and the present Lady Shelley regards, as severely accurate autobiographic evidence. Taking them _au pied de la lettre_ Lady Shelley argues from these scraps of egotistic verse as though they were historic _data_ of unimpeachable authority. Lady Shelley is confident that Dr. Lind ('the erudite scholar and amiable old man,' as she styles him) was one of Shelley's Eton tutors,--a tutor in whom he delighted at school, and remembered in after-life with love and veneration. Yet Shelley assures us that up to January, 1812, he never had tutor or adviser of any kind from whose lessons and suggestions he had not recoiled with disgust. Did Shelley really recoil with disgust from the hard-swearing doctor who taught him to curse his father?--from the enlightened physician who guided his 'scientific studies?' Or had he clean forgotten the doctor and all his virtuous ways when he was writing from Keswick to William Godwin? To those who answer this last question in the affirmative, it must seem strange that Dr. Lind, with all his virtue and wisdom, was so completely forgotten by the young gentleman, whom he had influenced so strongly and agreeably so few years since. If Dr. Lind was so great a power in the poet's education as trustful readers of his poetry imagine, it is passing strange that Shelley never remembered him when he was recalling his teachers and their services in the first month of 1812. By those who attribute the frequent inaccuracies of his personal statements to a fertile fancy, an innocent and unconscious inventiveness, it must be considered that Shelley's unruly and too vigorous imagination was suspiciously associated with an unreliable (though often strongly retentive) memory,--that whilst curiously apt to imagine things had taken place which had never occurred, he was also at times strangely forgetful of matters that he might well have been thought certain to remember.

On learning from this same Keswick letter of 16th January, 1812, that Shelley had made up his mind to go shortly to Dublin, with his wife and sister-in-law, for the purpose of furthering, to the utmost of their joint powers, the cause of Catholic Emancipation, Godwin (who seems to have been vastly delighted with the letters from Keswick, whilst seeing much to disapprove in them) sent his youthful and enthusiastic correspondent a letter of introduction to Curran, the Irish Master of the Rolls. In the letter which acknowledged the note of introduction as 'a great and essential service,' Shelley (28th January, 1812) referred apologetically to the lawfulness of his union with Harriett Westbrook, as a concession he made to despotic usage from 'considerations of the unequally weighty burden of disgrace and hatred, which a resistance to this system' (_i.e._ of lawful wedlock) 'would entail upon his companion' in connubial felicity. Yet further in defence of his politic 'submission to the ceremonies of the Church,' and in reference to the uneven consequences of the other and in some respects better course, he remarked, 'a man in such a case, is a man of gallantry and spirit--a woman loses all claim to respect and politeness. She has lost modesty, which is the female criterion of virtue, and those, whose virtues extend no further than modesty, regard her with hatred and contempt.'

Unaware how completely Godwin had abandoned certain of his earlier views respecting wedlock (_i.e._ (1) that in the existing state of English society the existence of mutual love was a sufficient sanction of the conjugal association of a man and woman; (2) that where such love existed it was better for spouses to live together in the liberty of Free Love than in the bondage of lawful marriage; and (3) that the institution of lawful matrimony was a demoralizing interference with the liberty of individuals), Shelley regarded his marriage as a domestic incident, from which he would suffer in the philosopher's esteem, unless he were duly informed of the considerations which had determined Harriett's husband to accommodate his conjugal arrangements to the prejudices of society. But though he wrote thus apologetically of his marriage, in order to place himself higher in the philosopher's favour, Shelley wrote honestly. From his Eton days he had been a favourer of Free Love. But for Hogg, he would have taken Harriett to his embrace without marrying her. He did not relinquish his purpose of uniting himself to her in the loose and easy fashion, until Hogg had made him see the enormity of the disadvantages that would ensue to him and her from the arrangement. The principal reasons he gave in January, 1812, for having married her were the same reasons he gave in the previous August for determining to marry her.

Another thing to be noticed in this statement to Godwin is its evidence how precisely he saw, and how fully he realized, the shameful character of the position held by a woman living conjugally with a man not her lawful husband,--the position in which he, ere long, placed his intimate friend's sixteen-years-old daughter. Whilst the male partner of such an association merely acquired a reputation for gallantry and spirit, the female lost all title to social respect. Whilst he became the gallant keeper of a mistress, she became nothing less contemptible than a kept mistress. The youngster of birth and breeding, who saw this in the January of 1812, saw it no less clearly in the summer of 1814, when he determined to become the gallant keeper of a mistress, and, in violation of one of the most sacred laws of hospitality, prevailed on his intimate friend's sixteen-years-old daughter to accept the position of a mistress.

Shelley did not leave Keswick without a plan for making away with time agreeably in the ensuing summer, when he should have emancipated the Irish Catholics, repealed the Act of Union, and withdrawn from the land he had endowed with perpetual felicity. On 16th January, 1812, he wrote to Godwin: 'In the summer we shall be in the north of Wales. Dare I hope that you will come to see us? Perhaps this would be an unfeasible neglect of your avocations. I shall hope it until you forbid me.' Twelve days later (28th January, 1812), whilst referring lightly to this project for a meeting in Wales, Shelley ventured to express his hope that in the ensuing summer he and Harriett would entertain Mr. and Mrs. Godwin, and their children, in the same romantic spot, where it was their purpose to receive another 'most dear friend.' This 'most dear friend' was Miss Eliza Hitchener of Hurstpierpoint in Sussex, whose acquaintance Shelley had formed whilst staying under his Uncle Pilford's roof at Cuckfield.

Philosopher, Deist, and Republican, Miss Eliza Hitchener kept a school for little girls at Hurstpierpoint, and seems to have enjoyed, in her particular parish of Sussex, a larger measure of social respect than was accorded to her father, the keeper of a public-house in the same neighbourhood, who had been in some way or other concerned in the contraband trade of the Sussex coast, before he changed his name from Yorke to Tichener and joined the noble army of licensed victuallers. Thus much was discovered about Miss Hitchener and her father from the letter, written by Joint-Postmaster-General, the Earl of Chichester, to the Secretary of the General Post Office on 5th April, 1812:--'Miss Hichener,' the Earl wrote, 'of Hurstpierpoint, keeps a school there, and is well spoken of; her Father keeps a Publick House in the neighbourhood; he was originally a smugler, and changed his name from Yorke to Tichener, before he took the Publick House.' The statesman, who spelt smuggler with a single 'g,' and described Mrs. Shelley as 'a servant, or some person of very low birth,' cannot be said to merit unqualified confidence for the accuracy of his spelling and personal intelligence; but he may have been right in representing that the whilom 'smugler' and his daughter assumed different surnames. As an instructress of children, Miss Hitchener may have had a professional motive for getting away from her papa's assumed surname, even as he had a sound prudential motive for getting away from a proper name, disagreeably familiar to the 'smuglers' of the Sussex coast.

Anyhow, the lady figures as Miss Eliza Hitchener in Shelleyan annals. Opinions differ respecting Miss Hitchener's character and conduct. Shelley had not known her long before he thought much ill of her. But there are sufficient grounds for a confident opinion that she was neither the angelic creature he imagined her, whilst cherishing her with platonic affection, nor the superlatively evil being he imagined her when he came to denounce her, in shrillest notes of abhorrence, for being a brown demon and an hermaphrodite.