CHAPTER VI.

NORTH WALES AND THE SECOND IRISH TRIP.

William A. Madocks--The Tremadoc Embankment--Shelley’s Zeal for the People of Tremadoc--His big Subscription to the Embankment Fund--Tanyrallt Lodge--Shelley in London--Sussex Selfishness--The Reconciliation with Hogg--Miss Hitchener in Disgrace--She is banished from ‘Percy’s Little Circle’--Brown Demon and Hermaphroditical Beast--Shelley in Skinner Street--Claire and Mary--Fanny Imlay’s Intercourse with Shelley--The Worth and Worthlessness of Claire’s Evidence--Shelley’s Prodigality--Back at Tanyrallt--At Work on _Queen Mab_--At War with Neighbours--Embankment Annoyances--Livelier Delight in Harriett--Wheedling Letter to the Duke of Norfolk--Diet and Dyspepsia--The Hunts in trouble--Shelley’s Contribution for their Relief--The odious Leeson--Daniel Hill’s liberation from Prison--His Arrival at Tanyrallt Lodge--The Tanyrallt Mystery--Shelley’s marvellous and conflicting Stories--Exhibition of the Evidence--Inquisition and Verdict--Shelley’s ignominious Position--His virtuous Indignation at the World’s Villany--His undiminished Concern for Liberty and Virtue--His Withdrawal from Wales to Ireland--He hastens from Dublin to Killarney--Hogg in Dublin--The Shelleys back in London.

(4.)--TANYRALLT, CARNARVONSHIRE, N.W.

In default of data, by which their course could be traced precisely, the historian can only say of the movements of the four adventurers between Ilfracombe and Tremadoc, that they appear to have arrived at the latter place without greatly exceeding the time that would be usually spent by tourists in a trip from North Devon, across the Bristol Channel, and onwards from Cardiff to Carnarvon. Readers will not be far wrong in assuming that on the day of William Godwin’s arrival at Lynmouth (18th September, 1812), his young friend had been two or three days at Tremadoc. Either from the moment of his arrival at Tremadoc, or from a quickly following day, Shelley was for some time in a scene of excitement that diverted his mind from the painful circumstances of his flight from Lynton. In September, 1812, an unusually high tide swept away portions of the breakwater and embankment, that had been raised a few years earlier by a considerable landowner of the neighbourhood (William A. Madocks, Esq., Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and Member of Parliament) for the preservation of lands, which he was set on reclaiming from the sea. The immediate consequence of the injury to the insufficient works was a flood that, sweeping across the imperfectly reclaimed lands, inflicted much suffering and loss on humble tillers and other occupants of the soil. Whether the flood preceded, or followed Shelley’s arrival at Tremadoc by a few days, or was precisely coincident with it, does not appear; but it is certain that he was deeply stirred by the results of the calamity.

Commiserating the poor people, driven from their tenements by the sea, he sympathized also with the wealthier sufferers. Approaching Mr. Madocks, seignior of Tremadoc, and Mr. Williams, the great man’s agent, with appropriate expressions of concern for the trouble that had befallen them and their dependents, Shelley explained to them _more suo_, that he was the eldest son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of Sussex, and eventual inheritor of the baronetcy and broad acres of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley. At present a minor, with his hands tied as the hands of minors ever are, he was in the twenty-first year of his minority; but next August, on attaining his majority, he should be in a position to contribute handsomely to the fund that must be raised to restore Tremadoc to prosperity. In fact, he spoke to the gentlemen of Tremadoc just such brave words of himself, as a few months since had caused honest Jack Lawless to write of him as the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England, and a young gentleman who would do great things for the benefit of Ireland.

It is not wonderful that the Tremadoc gentry were caught by these promises of assistance. A man of politics and affairs, a Fellow of All Souls, and a student of human nature, Mr. Madocks saw the young man’s enthusiasm was sincere, and knew just enough of his history to have no hesitation in taking the young gentleman, at his own valuation. It was not for Mr. Madocks to cross-examine the young gentleman who spoke so frankly of his parentage and prospects. In truth, there was nothing in Shelley’s talk to move either Mr. Madocks, or his local agent (Mr. Williams), to suspicion. Young gentlemen often come into easy circumstances on coming of age, even though they must wait for their father’s estates. Sir Bysshe Shelley had the reputation of being the wealthiest commoner of his county. The whole House of Commons knew the Member for New Shoreham would, in the usual course of things, succeed to great wealth. What more natural than for the eldest son of so considerable a squire, the grandson of so wealthy a baronet, to step into money on the attainment of his majority?

By the elders of Tremadoc a scheme, that showed excellently on paper, was devised for the future security and welfare of the town. The old breakwater and embankment having proved ineffectual for the protection of the imperfectly reclaimed five thousand acres of land, it was determined to build a stronger and more imposing embankment, and make on its top a coach-road, that, uniting two Welsh counties, would be advantageous to England and Ireland, as well as Wales, by shortening the journey from Dublin to Bath and London. There being no question with the projectors respecting the fertility of the land, if it could be duly guarded from the salt-water, it was estimated that the four or five thousand acres of reclaimable soil would soon yield a rental of from 8000_l._ to 10,000_l._ a-year. These advantages would result from an embankment, made at an estimated cost of 20,000_l._

To practical critics it may appear that, unless this scheme were not based on misconception, the owners of the reclaimable land must have been strangely neglectful of their interests. To the same critics it may seem that, as the embankment would yield a revenue of from 8000_l._ to 10,000_l._ a-year to the owners of the land, they were the persons to provide the 20,000_l._ To the Tremadoc elders, however, it appeared only reasonable that the capital, to be so expended for the enrichment of these landowners, should be provided by all persons of the general public, wishing well to Tremadoc and the United Kingdom, of which Tremadoc was part. It does not appear what interest, or whether any interest, was to be paid for money advanced by subscribers. From the way in which she commends Shelley for the largeness of his subscription, it is obvious Lady Shelley regards the moneys proffered by subscribers as differing in no respect from moneys given to a benevolent enterprise.

Shelley thought that the landowners, who would be so greatly benefited by the embankment, should be invited to subscribe liberally. Acting on this view, the impetuous minor assailed several of the neighbouring gentry with personal entreaties for money, for the good cause;--entreaties he could make with a good grace, since, to set richer folk a good example, he had headed the subscription list ‘with a donation’ (says Lady Shelley) ‘of 500_l._, though his means, as the reader has seen, were small.’ It was, doubtless, understood by Messrs. Madocks and Williams, that the young gentleman should not be asked to pay anything for this spirited stroke of his pen, until he should have entered on the financial plenitude, that would follow the attainment of his majority. At the same time the enthusiastic youth undertook to gather subscriptions in his native county, and more especially from his friend, the Duke of Norfolk.

Seeing how set Shelley was on furthering the interests of Tremadoc, it was only natural for Mr. Madocks to have pleasure in letting his young friend a certain furnished cottage at Tanyrallt. Called a cottage, Tanyrallt Lodge differed greatly from the tenement in which the adventurers had been lodging at Lynton. A cottage of gentility, with a billiard-room and circumambient lawns, this lodge almost justified Shelley in writing of it to Hogg, as ‘a cottage extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an Italian Prince.’ Good taste, of course, forbade the Lord of Tremadoc to name a rent beneath the dignity of a tenant who, besides being a gentleman of quality, would soon be in easy circumstances. Even Shelley thought the rent ‘large, but,’ as he wrote with winning candour to Hogg, ‘it is an object with us that they allow it to remain unpaid till I am of age.’ The place was worth the deferred rent; and the landlord lived with his tenant on the friendliest terms; speaking to him confidentially of the descent of Madockses, of Tremadoc, from Prince Madoc, and doubtless listening with proper interest to his youthful tenant’s stories of the Shelleys of olden time, and the ancient snake of the Field Place gardens. At the same time Mrs. Madocks and Miss Westbrook became fast friends, after the wont of gentlewomen, who conceive it is to their interest to be very intimate with one another.

Shelley had done well for himself and his attendant gentlewomen in migrating from North Devon to Carnarvonshire, and throwing himself so impetuously into the embankment business. At Tanyrallt he and they lived (pleasantly for awhile) with the best people of the neighbourhood; and enjoyed the change of scene and society all the more, because in pre-railway days Tremadoc was too far a call from Lynton, for them to fear the talk of the Lynmouth tattlers would come to the ears of the quality round about Tanyrallt. But an altogether wrong view is taken of the position by readers, who question the genuineness of Shelley’s affection for Tremadoc, or suspect him of entertaining his new friends with hopes he intended to disappoint. For the moment he was quite as earnest for the new breakwater as a few months before he had been for Catholic Emancipation. He had been for so long a time looking to the attainment of his majority as a point of his existence, when he should be able to make better terms with his father, or raise money at a comparatively easy rate on his expectations, that he was quite honest in speaking of his coming of age, as a time when he should be able to give 500_l._ to the Tremadoc embankment, and pay the deferred rent for Tanyrallt Lodge. The impetuous and imaginative young man had fairly talked himself into conceiving, that to raise a handsome sum for the embankment fund he had only to carry the subscription list to the Duke of Norfolk and his other friends in Sussex.

(5.)--LONDON: ST. JAMES’S COFFEE-HOUSE.

Soon (say ten days or a fortnight) after taking possession of the Tanyrallt Lodge, Shelley went to London with the ladies of his party. The authorities are at variance respecting the objects, incidents, or duration of this visit. Hogg, who knew nothing of Shelley’s frequent visits to Godwin during this period, seems to have been under the impression that Shelley’s first act, after coming to town, was to seek him out; whereas the interview of reconciliation did not take place till the poet had been at least four weeks in town. Working on Hogg’s misconception, and his own erroneous assumption that Shelley must have left London for Tanyrallt on Thursday, 12th November, because, on the previous Saturday, he intended doing so, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy concludes that Shelley’s ‘brief visit’ to town ‘lasted little more than a week,’ and that Hogg dined with the Shelleys only on one occasion during the visit; whereas the visit exceeded six weeks by a single day, and Hogg dined twice with the Shelleys at the St. James’s Coffee-house. With respect to the length of the stay in London, Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong only by a single day. Lady Shelley, of course, makes several mistakes about the business. (1) Speaking of Shelley’s exertions for the Tremadoc embankment, she says, ‘But he did not allow his zeal to stop even here; for, accompanied by his wife, he hurried up to London to obtain further succour.’ He was accompanied by Miss Hitchener and Miss Westbrook, as well as his wife; and he went to town on other matters besides the Tremadoc embankment. (2) Speaking of the poet’s intercourse with the author of _Political Justice_, Lady Shelley says, ‘During his visit to London, Shelley made the personal acquaintance of Godwin, with whom he lived for a time;’ whereas it is certain that, though calling frequently on Godwin and becoming very intimate with the Skinner Street family, Shelley slept at the St. James’s Coffee-house. (3) Speaking of Shelley’s intercourse with Fanny Imlay, Lady Shelley calls her Fanny Godwin, says she was ‘the philosopher’s daughter,’ and adds in a note that ‘Fanny Godwin was the only sister of Shelley’s second wife;’ whereas Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, by Gilbert Imlay, had no right to Godwin’s surname, was _not_ the philosopher’s daughter, and was only the illegitimate uterine sister of Shelley’s second wife. It is curious to observe how, whilst pushing poor Claire out of all sisterly relation to Shelley’s second wife, whose sister-by-affinity she unquestionably was, Lady Shelley affiliates Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child on William Godwin, and promotes her to the dignity of being whole-sister of Shelley’s second wife. (4) Speaking of Fanny’s death, Lady Shelley says the poor girl ‘died early in 1815.’ Lady Shelley is doubly wrong in these few words; for Fanny did not die in 1815, nor did she die early in any year. She killed herself on 9th October, 1816.

Hurrying up to London (to use Lady Shelley’s expression) Shelley took rooms at the St. James’s Coffee-house, and whilst in town accomplished several objects that had quite as much to do with his trip to the capital, as his avowed purpose of winning subscribers to the Tremadoc embankment. He left Lynton with the intention of being in London in a fortnight. Set on making Godwin’s personal acquaintance, he also wished for reconcilement to Hogg. From the fact that he was a month in town before seeking him out, it may not be inferred that the poet’s desire for intercourse with his college friend was a feeble inclination. Shelley knew enough of the lawyers and their haunts to be aware that he should be only wasting his time in hunting for Hogg, before the barristers and students of the Four Inns had returned to town for Michaelmas Term. He had good reason to think that Hogg, a man of rural birth and nurture, would be slaughtering pheasants till the end of the Long Vacation. Arriving in London on Sunday, 4th October, 1812, Shelley lost no time in going to Skinner Street, because he knew Godwin would be there. Whilst going, almost daily for several weeks, to Skinner Street, he kept away from the Inns of Court, till he could hope to find Hogg in one of them. On the opening of the Michaelmas Term he hastened to the Inns, discovered his old friend’s lodgings, and rushed in upon him at night, in the manner already set forth in these pages. As Hogg ‘returned from the country at the end of October, 1812’ (_vide_ Hogg’s _Life_, Vol. ii., p. 165), Shelley might have found his old friend a day or too earlier; but he was right in thinking he would waste his time and pains in hunting for him much sooner.

For any good he could do the projectors of the embankment Shelley might as well have stayed at Tanyrallt. In promising to do much for them he had ‘talked too fast,’--a fault of which youthful and impetuous persons of both sexes are often guilty; and in due course he was punished for his fast _talk_ by the annoyance that came to him from the pressure, put upon him to _do_ something in fulfilment of his brave words. From one of his letters it seems that he made some faint attempts to get subscribers to the embankment fund in Sussex. Possibly he wrote to his uncle Pilfold and Mr. Medwin on the subject; but it is certain he received neither from them nor any one else in the county any assistance for the great scheme. ‘I see,’ he wrote to Mr. Williams of Tremadoc from the St. James’s Coffee-house on 7th November, 1812, ‘no hope of effecting, on my part, any grand or decisive scheme until the expiration of my minority,’--words comically indicative of the grand and decisive things he had promised to do for Tremadoc, as soon as he should come of age. In Sussex he met with no encouragement. The cold and unsympathetic animals of his native shire cared only for eating, drinking, and sleeping. But his fervid hopes, ardent desires, and unremitting personal exertions, were all engaged for the great cause of the Tremadoc embankment, ‘which he would desert but with his life’:--a declaration not unworthy of Mr. Micawber in his happiest moments.

At the date of this letter Shelley had not seen, nor does he appear to have written to, his particular friend, the Duke of Norfolk, on the enterprise for benefiting owners of property in and near Tremadoc; for he says in the epistle, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has just returned to London. I shall call upon him this morning, and shall spare no pains in engaging his interest, or perhaps his better feelings, in our and our country’s cause.’ If Shelley talked to the Duke of the Tremadoc embankment in the style in which he wrote about it to the Welsh agent, his Grace of Norfolk must have found it difficult to refrain from laughing outright at the youngster.

Though it is questionable whether Shelley journeyed from Tanyrallt to London with a clear purpose of dismissing Miss Hitchener from his little circle, before he should return to the Principality, there are grounds for a strong opinion that he did not travel with Portia from Lynton to Tremadoc, without discovering she was by no means the angelic person he had formerly imagined her. At Lynton, where she was mistaken for a foreigner, whilst climbing the cliffs with her Percy, this tall, thin, rather bony, somewhat masculine, slightly bearded, perceptibly moustached, all too swarthy, far too loquacious young woman had for some time retained her power over Shelley, and even given promise of drawing Harriett under her sway:--facts that did not soften Miss Westbrook to the brown-eyed and brown-skinned intruder. Before they stole away from Lynton, Portia and Eliza were at war, more often open than covert, with one another. Touring under the most favourable circumstances is necessarily attended with conditions likely to try the tempers of imperfectly congenial fellow-travellers; and the journey of the four adventurers from North Devon to North Wales cannot have disposed the ladies-at-war to think less bitterly of each other. Whilst the schoolmistress thought Eliza no worthy member of ‘Percy’s little circle,’ the gentlewoman, whose papa belonged to the highest grade of licensed victuallers, thought any circle too good for the talkative woman, whose father kept a common ale-house. It is not strange, therefore, that in London, if not at Tanyrallt, Shelley decided to banish Portia from his little circle for ever.

On receiving this sentence of extrusion, Portia turned upon her poet with a demand for pecuniary compensation. Wanting, though it must be declared, in the delicacy and highmindedness, appropriate to an incomparable Portia, this demand by a provincial innkeeper’s daughter was not unreasonable. The demandant’s case was this:--‘When you crossed my path I had the respect of my neighbours, and a school by which I made a decent livelihood, both of which valuable things I surrendered at your earnest entreaty that I would come to you and live with you _for ever_. I did not force myself on you. On the contrary, I declined your pressing invitations to come to you in Ireland. Instead of hastening to you in Wales, I asked you to come to me at Hurstpierpoint. I should not have joined you in North Devon, had you not persuaded me you could never be happy without me. A few months of it have sufficed to make you weary of my company; and now you have had all the amusement I am capable of affording you, you tell me to be off. At least, you should help me to place myself in as good a position as the one I surrendered at your request and for your pleasure.’ Shelley could not deny there was justice in the demand. To be quit of her without further quarrelling, he promised to make her an allowance. What he engaged to give in quarterly payments does not appear; but he may be assumed to have promised her forty or fifty pounds a-year. This matter having been settled, it was arranged that Miss Hitchener should spend Sunday, 15th November, 1812, with the trio--dining with them at the St. James’s Coffee-house, and bidding them farewell for ever, at the close of the evening.

Calling on the morning of that same Sunday at the St. James’s Coffee-house to see his friends, Hogg was pressed to be the fifth person at the farewell dinner. Shelley being precluded from walking with him by some special engagement, and Harriett being a sufferer from headache, that made her other than the bright and blooming Harriett with whom he had dined at the same hotel a few days earlier, Hogg was on this occasion induced to attend Eliza and Portia for a promenade in the parks before dinner. Nothing droller can be found in Hogg’s book than his account of his walk in the parks with the brown demon (Miss Hitchener) on his right arm, and the black diamond (Miss Westbrook) on his left. Moving between the belligerent women, Hogg had reason to admire the tone of haughty contempt with which the Black Diamond tossed her insults at the Brown Demon, and the meek contumacy with which Miss Hitchener returned her enemy’s fire. For awhile the fighting was sharp; but in little more than half-an-hour the victory was with the Brown Demon, whose galling meekness and poisonous malice fairly silenced her insolent foe. The Black Diamond turning sulky and silent, Hogg gave his ear for the rest of the walk to the Brown Demon, who poured from her bearded lips the stream of gentle eloquence that afforded him new views on the rights of women.

On their return from this pleasant ‘airing’ in the parks, as they were crossing the threshold of the St. James’s Coffee-house, Miss Eliza Westbrook said viciously to Hogg, ‘How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Why did you encourage her? Harriett will be seriously displeased with you, I assure you; she will be very angry!’

True to her mission, Portia strove to illuminate Percy’s little circle to the last moment of her connexion with it. Hogg happening to refer to the rights of the gentler sex, Miss Hitchener reopened her parable after tea and discoursed eloquently on the high theme, even to the moment of the arrival of the hackney-coach, which had been summoned to remove her from her auditors for ever. Whilst the lady was delivering this final oration, Percy quitted his chair, and taking up a position before her drank-in the musical utterances of her wisdom with a comical show of approval.

If Shelley softened to Portia at the moment of parting, the weakness was transient; for he soon learnt to speak as well as think of her with a resentment that might almost be styled ferocious. As the hour approached for the first of the quarterly payments he rose to rage at the mere thought of the hateful creature.

‘The Brown Demon,’ he wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt on 3rd December, 1812, ‘as we call our late tormentor and schoolmistress, must receive her stipend.... She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency, and bad taste, was never so great, as after living four months with her as an inmate. What would Hell be, were such a woman in Heaven?’

‘_Hermaphroditical beast of a woman!_’ Surely these are strangely strong words for a chivalric gentleman to apply to a woman, whatever her failings may have been!

Whatever disappointments Shelley encountered during this sojourn in London, none of them can have come to him from his treatment in Skinner Street. Welcomed by Godwin with open arms, Shelley entered at once on personal relations with the philosopher, that accorded in every particular with the relations they had maintained towards one another by written words. Coming to the eminent man of letters for sympathy, counsel, and instruction, Shelley received what he sought. So much pitifully snobbish stuff has been written about the intercourse of William Godwin and Shelley, as though the author of _Political Justice_ was greatly honoured and his dwelling glorified by the visits of the heir to a Sussex baronetcy, that it is necessary to remind the reader of the relation which Godwin condescended to hold towards Shelley, and of the relation in which Shelley was reasonably proud to stand in towards Godwin. The position of Godwin towards Shelley was that of a teacher, patron, benefactor. The position of Shelley towards Godwin was that of a pupil and worshiper. And it is to the credit of both that each of the scholars occupied his respective position gracefully, till one of them was guilty of perhaps the wildest extravagance of domestic treason recorded in the annals of men of letters. Whilst Godwin’s condescension and kindness to his youthful _protégé_ had no tincture of arrogance, Shelley’s acknowledgments of his teacher’s kindness were rendered in terms of generous homage and grateful devotion.

At the same time Godwin’s house was open at all hours to Shelley. Let it be observed (for the servility of certain writers requires the clear statement of a matter about which good taste would rather be silent) that, though the Godwins were far from prosperous, the Skinner-Street household was a family no man of culture and sensibility could enter without feeling himself in the home of gentle people. If Godwin looked like a Dissenting minister, and showed signs of his lowly origin, to look into his eyes and to listen to his speech was to recognize a man of unusual intellect. A woman of gentle birth and literary achievements, Mrs. Godwin, somewhat too stout for elegance but none too massive for matronly dignity, was a bright, clever, vivacious, charming woman in society, though she had a faulty temper. Possessing no facial beauty apart from the agreeable expression of her countenance, the eldest daughter of the house (Fanny Imlay) had the voice, carriage, and air of an agreeable and well-mannered young gentlewoman. Charles Clairmont was at Edinburgh when Shelley made the personal acquaintance of the Skinner-Street Godwins; but had the old Charterhouse boy, of comely face and quick brain, been at home in the October and November of 1812, Shelley would have met a young man, qualified by nature and training for an honourable career. Godwin’s son by his second wife was a promising little fellow. The fifteen-years-old damsels, Claire and Mary, were already coming into possession of the wit and personal attractiveness that distinguished them a few years later. Mainly dependent though they were for their food and raiment and pleasures on the shop, over which they had their home, the members of this curiously composed family might be rated with the _bourgeoisie_ from one point of view; but in manner, taste, tone, intellectual interests and aspirations, they were as much gentle people as Shelley’s more fortunate relatives.

Beyond thinking them a pair of bright and winsome children, Shelley in the autumn of 1812 does not seem to have taken much notice of Claire and Mary; but the evidence is abundant that he was no less strongly than agreeably interested in Fanny Imlay. Being thus interested in her, it was a matter of course with Shelley to press her to correspond with him, in order that he might know her more intimately, and contribute to the development of her intellectual and moral nature. Probably he invited her to a correspondence, in the hope that her letters would prove a sufficient substitute for the diverting letters he had for so many months received from the Brown Demon, whose longest epistles for the future would be a mere acknowledgment of her quarterly stipend, should it ever be paid to her. Instead of accepting this invitation with alacrity, Fanny Imlay demurred to the proposal on considerations of propriety. She would have accepted such an invitation from Harriett with glee, but hesitated to enter on a sentimental correspondence with Harriett’s husband; the hesitation being due to scruples, that would not have troubled her, had she been educated in accordance with the theories and proposals of her mother’s _Rights of Woman_. These scruples were not the less influential with Fanny in December of 1812, because she had good reason to think that Shelley and Mrs. Shelley, after enjoying the free run of the Skinner-Street house during their stay in town, showed her father and mother scant courtesy in returning to Wales, without bidding them good-bye.

Notwithstanding his practice of asking young women to correspond with him, Shelley would scarcely have asked Fanny to write to him, without feeling an interest in her. Nor is it probable that he made the request, without thinking he had rendered himself an object of her friendly regard. Instead of indicating indifference, the hesitancy she displayed in acceding to his entreaty may be regarded as evidence, that she was conscious of feeling too warmly for the young man, who after throwing himself on her family for sympathy and social diversion, had gone away from them so lightly. Her resentment of his neglect to render her family the courtesy of a formal adieu, may also be taken as evidence that she was interested in him.

It is no new story that just four years after Shelley made her acquaintance, Fanny killed herself at Swansea. It is no new story that Claire was of opinion that Fanny so destroyed herself, from love of Shelley. Field Place is sure that Claire never really believed any such thing, but was only fibbing in her usual wicked way, when she uttered the story. It is curious to observe, how in the opinion of Field Place, Claire is by turns a liar and a witness of the highest credibility. When she says anything that fits-in with the biographical romance, which is to be substituted for Shelley’s true history, she is a virtuous witness; but when she utters anything at discord with the fictitious narrative, she becomes a miracle of mendacity. When she writes, or seems to have written, that she took Shelley and Mary against their will from London to Geneva; took them there without letting them know she was Byron’s mistress; and, living with them there, in the capacity of Byron’s mistress, managed matters so cleverly that they had no suspicion of her intimacy with Byron--statements so preposterous that they are not to be believed on any conceivable evidence--she is declared a witness of the highest credibility; and Mr. Froude is told-off to declare the preposterous statements must be true, because Claire made them in a withheld document. On the other hand, when this exemplary witness makes the quite credible statement, that Fanny committed suicide for love of Shelley, she is declared a mendacious witness, and Mr. Kegan Paul is instructed to write in _William Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries_:

‘The theory, which owes its origin to Miss Clairmont, that Fanny was in love with Shelley, and that his flight with her sister prompted self-destruction, is one above all others absolutely groundless. To Shelley, as to Mary, she was an attached sister; she was never in love with him, either before or after her sister’s flight.’

How can Mr. Kegan Paul be justified in making this sweeping statement? He does not offer evidence, and can have no sufficient evidence, in support of the comprehensive assertion. At best his statement can be nothing more than Mrs. Shelley’s confident opinion, that her sister was never in love with Shelley. Which of the two, Mary or Claire, was the more likely to know the truth? Mary, who, after her flight with Shelley, saw but little of her sister Fanny; or Claire, who between the elopement in July 1814 and the spring of 1816, saw a great deal of Fanny? Mary, from whom Fanny, if she loved Shelley, would be careful to conceal the cause of her deepening melancholy; or Claire, to whom Fanny may have confided or unconsciously revealed the secret of her wretchedness?

‘The theory’ (as Mr. Kegan Paul calls it) certainly was not ‘absolutely groundless.’ (1) By inviting her to correspond with him, Shelley showed a strong interest in Fanny, and paid her a compliment which would be likely to make her take an interest in him, if she had felt none in him before, or to deepen any concern, she had already entertained for him. (2) Their intercourse in the ensuing year was of a nature to stimulate and feed her interest in him. (3) From the date of her sister’s flight with Shelley, her natural disposition to melancholy steadily deepened:--a fact accordant with the notion that she loved Shelley.

On the other hand, it must be remembered, that the increase of her melancholy may be otherwise accounted for. The affectionate girl may well have fretted about the shame coming to the whole Godwin household from her sister’s elopement with another woman’s husband. She may also have made herself greatly miserable about the circumstances of her mother’s story, which most likely came to her shortly before her sister’s flight. Still, the steady increase of her gloom from the end of July 1814, to the 9th October, 1816, is a ground for regarding Claire’s view of the case respectfully.

Unlike Field Place (to whom Claire is a sufficient witness to prove anything they wish people to believe), I cannot, having regard to her unquestionable faculty for fibbing, deem her unsupported testimony adequate for the settlement of any nicely perplexing question. Having regard, however, to Claire’s better means of observation, and several matters giving at least a colour of probability to her view, I would on this matter rather rely on Claire, who sometimes told fibs, than on the Mary Godwin, who sometimes said things that were the reverse of fact. In the absence of sufficient evidence for a confident conclusion, I hold my judgment in suspense with respect to the question, whether Fanny’s death resulted from the cause to which Claire attributed it. And I advise the reader to do likewise.

(6.)--TANYRALLT.

Returning to Tanyrallt in the middle of November, 1812, Shelley remained there till some day following closely on 26th February, 1813, and left Carnarvonshire for Dublin on 6th March, 1813. Beginning somewhere about the middle of September 1812, the whole term of his domestication in the county of Carnarvon (including the six weeks’ stay in London) was something less than six months. Before the trip to town he had on his hands his wife, Miss Westbrook, and Miss Hitchener. Whilst he and Harriett stayed at the St. James’ Coffee-house, Miss Westbrook probably stayed chiefly at her father’s house, so as not to increase greatly the charges her brother-in-law was at in the hotel. Miss Hitchener also may be presumed to have visited her friends in Sussex, or elsewhere, whilst Shelley was enjoying the society of the Godwins, so that he was at a smaller expense for her than he would have been, had she stayed the whole six weeks at the West-End hotel. Still the cost to Shelley of the locomotion of so large a party from Tanyrallt to London, and of so long a sojourn in town, must have been greatly in excess of his narrow means.

After the return to Wales, till the end of February 1813, he lived at Tanyrallt Lodge (for which he had engaged to pay a ‘large rent’) with his wife, sister-in-law, and three female servants. At the same time he bought expensive books of or through Mr. Hookham of Bond Street, incurred a considerable debt for the printing of _Queen Mab_, and put himself under an obligation to pay Miss Hitchener a quarterly stipend. These items of expenditure being taken into account, it may be computed that, from the middle of September 1812, to the beginning of March 1813, he lived, at the least, at the rate of 1000_l._ a-year; no account being taken of the 500_l._ which he had promised to give to the Tremadoc Embankment when he should come of age. This sum being added to the total of his expenditure during less than six calendar months, it follows that the young gentleman, with only 400_l._ a-year, was for the same term living at the rate of 2000_l._ a-year,--was in fact living beyond his sufficient income by 400 per cent. It is certain therefore that the letter, in which Godwin warned his young friend against the inconveniences of financial extravagance, was no untimely intrusion of needless advice. Following so closely on the admonitory letter, and the epistle in which he declared his freedom from the weakness imputed to him, this outbreak of prodigality shows how cautious the poet’s biographers should be in assuming that his actions corresponded closely with his words.

Whilst living so much beyond his means, Shelley experienced several annoyances in the lovely neighbourhood where he had, for a brief moment, hoped to be happy for ever. Having by the end of the year exhausted the excitement of figuring before the people of Tremadoc as a benefactor, who would never desert them nor grow indifferent to their interests, he discovered in his neighbours the usual qualities of countryfolk, whether they live on the Welsh coast, or in North Devon, or in the Rapes of Sussex. By no means devoid of intellectual narrowness, they were animated with religious bigotry. Believing in Christianity, they mistrusted and disliked those who scoffed at it. Whilst the gentry were proud and grasping, the peasantry were poor and cringing. The farmers were ignorant fools, the squires were (in Shelley’s opinion) insufferably dull fellows. ‘The society in Wales,’ he wrote from Tanyrallt to Hogg, even as early as 3rd December, 1812, ‘is very stupid. They are all aristocrats and saints; but that, I tell you, I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of the business is, that they hunt people to death who are not so likewise.’

The result, or rather the fruitlessness, of Shelley’s excursion to London was, of course, a great disappointment to the Tremadoc populace, and to others of the gentry, besides Mr. Madocks and Mr. Williams. Instead of returning with a handsome list of subscribers, headed by his particular friend the Duke of Norfolk, he was constrained to acknowledge he had not found a single subscriber in London or Sussex. It was clear to the Welshmen that the young gentleman had been talking too fast, and that they had been taken-in by his plausible speech. Angry with themselves for being such simpletons, some of them were disposed to punish him for their own folly. In his annoyance at feeling that his Tremadoc friends had discovered the value of his grand talk, Shelley wrote bitterly, from Tanyrallt on 7th February, 1813, to Hogg of ‘the variety of discomfitures’ coming to him from ‘the embankment affairs, in which he had thoughtlessly engaged!’

Indications are not wanting that for a brief while after coming to Tremadoc, Shelley was less loquacious than he had been for some years about those of his views on politics and religion, that could not fail to be as offensive to the people of Carnarvonshire as they had proved to persons of other counties. But it was not in his nature to be so discreet for many weeks together. Hence it came to pass that before leaving Wales he was superlatively distasteful to several of his Tanyrallt neighbours on account of his infidelity and ultra-radicalism. By some means or other one of his Irish pamphlets fell into the hands of a certain Mr. Leeson, who, discovering treason in the essay, sent it up to the Government, and then went about the neighbourhood, saying the author of the pamphlet was a pestilent Republican, who ought to be driven out of the country. Shelley and Harriett tried to persuade themselves that Mr. Leeson’s animosity against them was due to their firmness in refusing to receive him within their doors, because they knew him to be ‘malignant and cruel to the greatest degree,’--a view of the case that, on coming to Mr. Leeson’s ears, cannot have rendered him less desirous of ridding the neighbourhood of those pestilent Shelleys.

In one of the earlier weeks (probably towards the end of the second week) of November, 1812, whilst the Shelleys were still at the St. James’s Coffee-house, Hogg appears to have urged his friend for pecuniary ends to make overtures for a reconciliation with his father, and to appeal to the Duke of Norfolk for his good offices in rendering the overtures successful. It being obvious to Hogg that the Shelleys were living greatly beyond their means, he may well have pressed this scheme upon them as the only plan of preserving them from a scandalous exposure of their financial troubles. The advice thus given in the first instance by word of mouth, was renewed by words of the pen, to which Shelley (more truth-loving, be it remembered, than most men) replied from Tanyrallt, on 3rd December, 1812, in a letter, containing these remarkable words:--‘_I_ will, this instant, sit down and do penance for my involuntary crime by writing a long wheedling letter to his Grace, and you shall be informed of the success of the experiment.’ At the same time, whilst avowing his despair of influencing his father by any but selfish considerations, Shelley declared his intention of approaching old Killjoy with an air of good humour and a conciliatory countenance, and essaying to conquer his austerity with civil speeches. ‘When I see him,’ he remarks, ‘though I shall say the civilest things imaginable, yet I shall not look as if I liked him, because I do not like him.’

To wheedle, is to entice, coax, cajole with flattering and false words for the attainment of an end. To write a wheedling letter is to write false and flattering words for the attainment of an end. Such a letter Shelley coolly declares his intention of writing to his father’s patron, in order to get money by doing so. At the same time he coolly declares his intention to say ‘the civilest imaginable things’ to his father (whilst hating him cordially), in order to get money out of his pocket.

An incident of English public affairs to stir Shelley greatly during his residence at Tanyrallt was the punishment of the Hunts for libelling the Prince Regent in the _Examiner_ newspaper, the sentence on each of the brothers being a fine of 500_l._ with imprisonment for two years. Though the facts of the case have been strangely misrepresented (the virulent libel on the Prince Regent in his private character having been minimized into a saucy reference to his age and corpulence), there is no need to set them forth precisely in this chapter. Whether the libel was well deserved (as Mr. Rossetti avers, whilst admitting with his usual honesty the extreme virulence of the attack) is a question beside the main question, viz., whether the ministers responsible for the efficient government of the country would have been justified in allowing clever and resolute journalists to use such violent and scurrilous language, in order to inflame the public against the individual who was the _ipso facto_ sovereign. On this question no opinion is here offered. It is enough to record that the poet (by this time slightly acquainted with Leigh Hunt) felt that the Hunts had been punished with excessive severity, and should be relieved of the pecuniary part of their punishment. Acting on this sentiment Shelley wrote, on some day of February, 1813, from Tanyrallt, to Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street,--‘I am rather poor at present, but I have 20_l._ which is not immediately wanted. Pray begin a subscription for the Hunts; put my name down for that sum, and, when I hear that you have complied with my request, I will send it to you.... P S.--... On second thoughts I enclose the 20_l._’

Applauding Shelley for subscribing 500_l._ for the Tremadoc embankment, Lady Shelley applauds him for coming forward with 20_l._ ‘to vindicate and support an oppressed fellow-struggler for liberty and justice.’ A matter, to be mentioned in connexion with the gift to the Hunts, is that Shelley was in debt to divers of the petty tradesmen of his neighbourhood, who, in the opinion of some readers, may have had a stronger claim to the money so gallantly sent off to the journalists in trouble; his debts to small tradesmen being the more worthy of notice, because they did not give him their goods on the understanding that they should wait for payment till he came of age.

Shelley’s letters from Tanyrallt show that he was reading history and philosophy in the last month of 1812 and the opening months of 1813. The books sent him in this period by his London bookseller comprise works by Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Spinoza, and Kant, it being worthy of notice that, whilst ordering Greek classics, he requires editions having ‘Latin or English translations printed opposite.’

At the same time he is at work on _Queen Mab_. In a former chapter reference was made to metrical compositions, that were in course of time expanded and worked into _Queen Mab_. But though there are grounds for a confident opinion, that it comprised a considerable quantity of his earlier verse, the first of Shelley’s compositions to be mentioned amongst the fruits of his poetical genius, was the production of 1812 and the opening months of 1813. _Queen Mab_ was unquestionably the work of which he wrote on 18th August, 1812, from Lynton to Mr. Thomas Hookham: ‘I conceive I have matter for six more cantos.... Indeed, a poem is safe; the iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack.’ Writing of the same poem from Tanyrallt to Hogg on 7th February, 1813, he says, ‘_Mab_ has gone on but slowly, although she is nearly finished.’ On a later day of the same month he wrote to Mr. Hookham, ‘_Queen Mab_ is finished and transcribed.’ The use made of old material does not touch the fact that the poem was mainly written in his twenty-first year, instead of his nineteenth year. When he wrote (June, 1821) in the _Examiner_ the words, ‘a poem, entitled _Queen Mab_, was written by me at the age of eighteen--I dare say in a sufficiently intemperate spirit,’ he was guilty of an error to be grouped with his misstatements to Godwin, respecting the time when he wrote _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. After announcing the completion of the poem to Hookham, the poet adds, ‘I am now preparing the notes, which shall be long and philosophical.’ It is worthy of remark that he was working upon the notes when he was at a distance from Godwin, who, on no evidence whatever, has been declared personally accountable for the note touching love and marriage,--a note comprising sentiments which Godwin had promulgated when Shelley was playing with his corals, and abandoned before the close of the last century.

The most agreeable aspect of Shelley’s life at Tanyrallt affords a view of his intercourse with his wife. As she gave birth to Shelley’s eldest child, Ianthe Eliza, in London, on 28th June, 1813, Harriett, at the turn of the year 1812-13, had for some time been in a state of health, to animate Shelley with a renewal of tenderness for her, and to quicken their mutual affection. Stirred with the hope of becoming a father in the ensuing summer, the poet who had longed at Dublin and Nantgwillt for the delights of conversation with his philosophical school-mistress, now found in his wife the sufficient mate she had not been to him either in Ireland or at Keswick. Possibly his discovery of a Brown Demon in the whilom angelical Miss Hitchener was, in some degree, accountable for his contentment with the wife who promised soon to give him an heir. Anyhow there can be no question that the moderate satisfaction with which he may be said to have regarded his bride for several months after the subsidence of the first excitements of the honeymoon, was now replaced by a state of feeling that caused him to write of her with mingled pride and gladness. The letter in which, whilst defending her from the imputation of being ‘a fine lady,’ he spoke admiringly of ‘the uncalculating connexion of her thoughts and speech,’ was dated to Fanny Imlay on 10th December, 1812. In a letter of later date, referring to his unconcern whether he came to terms with his father, he associates Harriett’s happiness with his own contentment;--‘Harriett is very happy as we are, and I am very happy.’ Though he writes complainingly in a yet later letter (7th February, 1813) of vexation coming to him from ‘the embankment affair,’ he speaks of his home as a place where he forgets the annoyance, and knows nought but joy in Harriett’s society;--‘for when I come home to Harriett I am the happiest of the happy.’ Whilst reading Greek classics with the help of ‘cribs,’ he is teaching Harriett Latin so as to give her a general notion of Horace’s _Odes_ and Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. ‘Harriett,’ he writes to Hogg on the 7th February, 1813, ‘has a bold scheme of writing you a Latin letter. If you have an Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, she will thank you to bring it.’

Whilst Hogg (who had promised to stay with his friends at Tanyrallt in the next month) is thus invited to take part and interest in her higher education, Harriett is corresponding with the man who (according to the Shelleyan idolaters) was guilty of trying to seduce her some sixteen months since. Even to these idolaters it must appear that Shelley’s confidence in his wife’s goodness was perfect, when he encouraged her to live in affectionate intimacy with the man whom he still (according to the idolaters) thought guilty of having so recently essayed to seduce her. By them also it must be admitted that this confidence in her goodness was at Tanyrallt associated in Shelley’s breast with lively affection for her. The happy state of feeling was in its brightest season and tenderest hour when Shelley produced the famous dedicatory lines of _Queen Mab_.

‘TO HARRIET * * * * *

‘Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world, Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn? Whose is the warm and partial praise, Virtue’s most sweet reward?

Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow? Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on, And loved mankind the more?

Harriet! on thine:--thou wert my purer mind; Thou wert the inspiration of my song; Thine are these early wilding flowers, Though garlanded by me.

Then press into thy breast this pledge of love; And know, though time may change and years may roll, Each floweret gathered in my heart It consecrates to thine.’

In representing that these verses were written in 1810, and addressed in the first instance to Harriett Grove, Medwin committed the most ludicrous blunder of his unreliable book;--the mistake, moreover, that, of all his multitudinous blunders about Shelley, is most easily shown to be a mistake. (1) The critical reader has only to compare these verses with the puerile sets of rhymes in _St. Irvyne_ to be satisfied that in 1810 Shelley could not have written them, to save his own life or compass his father’s death. (2) The first two stanzas are so completely out of harmony with the certain facts of Shelley’s pursuit of his cousin’s affection, as to prove conclusively that she was not in his mind when he wrote the verses. Instead of ‘gleaming through the world,’ Harriett Grove’s love of her cousin was less than apparent even to his own sister. Instead of warding off the poisonous arrow of the world’s scorn, the world had no sooner displayed a disposition to speak scornfully of him, than Harriett Grove told him to go about his business. Instead of speaking of him with ‘warm and partial praise,’ Harriett Grove never discovered anything to commend in him. Shelley and Harriett Grove had parted company for ever, months before he had endured the disgrace, from whose withering effects he describes himself as recovering under the sympathetic looks of the Harriett to whom the poem is addressed. (3) On the other hand, the descriptive lines are appropriate to the circumstances under which he won Harriett’s love, and she gave him her heart, whilst social disgrace was new to him. (4) In June, 1821, though forgetful of the exact year of his life in which _Queen Mab_ was written, Shelley remembered so clearly having dedicated the poem to his first wife that he wrote from Italy to Mr. Ollier in that month:--

‘I ought to say, however, that I am obliged to this piratical fellow in one respect: that he has omitted, with a delicacy for which I thank him heartily, a foolish dedication to my late wife, the publication of which would have annoyed me, and indeed is the only part of the business that could seriously have annoyed me, although it is my duty to protest against the whole.’

These facts notwithstanding, some of the Shelleyan enthusiasts (in their reluctance to believe that Shelley ever cared much for Harriett Westbrook) insist that Medwin may have been right in this business, because the verses appeared in the original edition of _Queen Mab_ under this heading, ‘To Harriet *****,’ the number of the asterisks being the same as the number of the letters in the surname ‘Grove,’ whereas there are _nine_ letters in ‘Westbrook,’ and _seven_ in ‘Shelley.’ ‘The number of asterisks,’ says Mr. Buxton Forman, ‘it will be observed, corresponds with the name of Grove; and they might have been left simply by oversight when the dedication went to press as for Harriet Shelley.’

For the argument to have the faintest force, it would be needful to show that, when indicating a name by asterisks, Shelley was careful to use the same number of asterisks as the name had letters. Was this Shelley’s practice? Though the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_ was made up chiefly of a journal kept by Mary Godwin, it comprises letters and other original writing by Shelley, who saw the little book through the press, and made himself responsible for its typographical details. In the ‘journal’ ‘Shelley’ (a name of seven letters) is indicated by ‘S***,’ the initial letter and _three_ asterisks; ‘Claire,’ a name of six letters, being also indicated by ‘C***,’ the initial letter and three asterisks. In the original writing by Shelley, the names ‘Mary’ and ‘Claire’ are indicated thus: ‘We dined (M***, C***, and I) on the grass:’ the initial of the name of four letters and the initial of the name of six letters being alike followed by _three_ asterisks.

Though he was happy in Harriett’s society, there is reason for thinking Shelley was much out of health towards the end of his stay at Tanyrallt. In the middle of February, 1813, he had been living for three months on vegetables. Living at this period of his story ‘on what he could get,’ _i.e._ chops and steaks, when he was on journeys and feeding at inns, Shelley persisted in the diet of vegetarians when he was at home. ‘I continue vegetable,’ he wrote to Hogg on 27th December, 1812; ‘Harriet means to be slightly animal until the arrival of spring.’ Of course, he persuaded himself that this diet favoured his health; but we know from Peacock, who may be termed the physiological observer of his friend’s peculiarities, that, instead of being good for him, it was hurtful to the delicate and nervous Shelley in various ways.

‘When,’ says Peacock, ‘he was fixed in a place, he adhered to this diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree with him: it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick-coming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place.’

The maker of these discreet observations gives a remarkable example of the quickness, with which Shelley rose from a condition of physical weakness to a high state of bodily vigour and enjoyment under the stimulus of animal food. During the excursion (August, 1815) on the Thames, from Old Windsor to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, Shelley, on ‘the way up,’ was so weak and otherwise out of order, as to feel he ought to return. Having taken medical advice at Oxford with no apparent advantage, he was entreated by Peacock to eat three well-peppered mutton-chops. Acting on the wise counsel, Shelley forthwith ate with keen relish three well-peppered mutton-chops, and went on his way rejoicing. ‘He lived in my way,’ says Peacock, ‘for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.’ Living thus carnivorously at the comfortable inn at Lechlade, where the party rested for two nights, he there wrote the _Lines in Lechlade Churchyard_.

How Byron and Shelley came to resemble one another in eccentricity of diet is uncertain. The older poet had recourse to his regimen of Epsom salts and vegetarian starvation in the first instance for the reduction of his fatness; but Shelley’s natural habit of body forbids the suspicion that he took to abstinence for the same purpose. Nor can the influence of the vegetarians, with whom he lived intimately in London and at Bracknell, be held accountable for his first trial of a diet, which he adopted in Dublin, before making their acquaintance. Perhaps he adopted the Byronic diet just as he adopted the Byronic shirt-collar, in imitation of the poet whom he admired so greatly. It is conceivable that, had he not heard of Byron’s dinners of hard biscuits or mashed vegetables, washed down with soda-water, he would have continued to eat and drink, as he had done from boyhood to the middle of his twentieth year. Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley’s vegetarianism, attended with intermissions of the regimen when he was on his journeys and ‘ate what he could get,’ differed little from Byron’s general rule of abstinence from the luxuries of the table, broken with occasional dinners and suppers, at which he devoured whatever came in his way. For thus feeding themselves, the two poets have fared differently at the hands of history. Whilst Byron has been generally ridiculed for living low in order to preserve his beauty; Shelley has been no less generally applauded for his indifference to the pleasures of the table.

The diet, which affected them so differently in reputation, had the same results on their nerves and health. Under the regimen of starvation (accompanied in the case of Byron, by far the stronger man, with a more free use of purgative medicine) they became weak and nervous sufferers from a peculiar kind of spasmodic dyspepsia, that in its sharper assaults disposed them to seek relief from pain in laudanum, and may perhaps have been the first and chief cause of their perilous familiarity with opium. In drinking laudanum to deaden the pangs of spasmodic dyspepsia, consequent on long persistence in a lowering, and otherwise hurtful diet, Shelley (be it observed) took opium when he had been slowly reduced to a condition, that rendered the drug more powerful to derange his nerves for several days, than it would have been had he been previously sustained by sufficient food. This is a matter for readers to bear in mind whilst considering circumstances soon to be narrated.

It follows that, after living for three months on the diet usual with him in this period of his career, Shelley may be regarded as in a state of health that, besides making him restless and disposing him to have recourse to opium, would be fruitful of ‘those thick-coming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place.’

Several circumstances, apart from his health, may also be assumed to have disposed him just then to think of getting away from Tanyrallt. He had just finished _Queen Mab_; and the act of completing an intellectual enterprise, that has engaged a scholar’s faculties for several months, is often followed by a yearning for diversion in new scenes. At war with some of his neighbours, living on uneasy terms with others, and sick of the embankment folly, that had for some time been fruitful of annoyances, he may well have wished to fly off from a place that had lost the charms of novelty. Pecuniary considerations may also have disposed him to fly from Tremadoc. If he remained at Tanyrallt for another six months, Mr. Madocks would be pressing him for payment of a certain deferred rent; Mr. Williams would be pressing him for the settlement of certain other small affairs of business; and the projectors of the new embankment would be asking when he would find it convenient to pay the promised 500_l._ Another affair, that may be presumed to have troubled Shelley in the middle of February, 1813, was the near approach of the day when Daniel Hill would appear at Tanyrallt with a reasonable expectation of being again taken into the service of the master, who had caused him to be imprisoned in North Devon. It is not suggested that Shelley was meditating flight from North Wales in order to get out of Daniel Hill’s way. By showing that Shelley had given Daniel Hill timely information where to find him, the servant’s arrival at Tanyrallt on the 26th of February, 1813, would of itself be sufficient to show the injustice of any such suggestion. But though he was ready to befriend the Irishman, who had suffered so much in his service, Shelley may well have wished to leave his corner of Carnarvonshire, as soon as Daniel should appear in Mr. Leeson’s neighbourhood. The inquisitive, prying, malevolent, relentless Mr. Leeson would, of course, think it his duty to learn whence Daniel had come, and what he had been doing since his master’s arrival at Tremadoc. Shelley had reason to apprehend that Mr. Leeson (already in correspondence with the Solicitor of the Treasury about the poet) would receive official information of Daniel’s recent trouble, and his master’s not remote activity in North Devon. In which case there would be talk in Tremadoc, that would make Tanyrallt an especially disagreeable place of abode for Daniel Hill’s master.

Such was the position of affairs in North Wales, when, during the night of 26th February, 1813 (and within a few hours of the Barnstaple gaol-bird’s appearance at the villa, fit for an Italian prince), Tanyrallt became the scene of certain curious incidents. The weather was cold and stormy, the wind in its violence made an uproar loud as thunder about the gables and chimneys of Tanyrallt Lodge, and the rain fell in torrents, when Shelley loaded a pair of pistols, under strong impression that he should have occasion to use them during the night. Having loaded the weapons, the poet went to bed between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., and remained in bed for about half-an-hour, when, on hearing a noise in one of the parlours, he rose from Harriett’s side, and, taking his pistols, went downstairs. A minute or two later, the sound of a pistol-shot was heard in the house. This pistol-shot was followed at a brief interval by a second explosion of the same kind. Audible to Harriett in her bedroom, to Miss Westbrook in her bedroom, and to the domestic servants (three maids and Daniel Hill), who, though in the act of going to rest, had not yet got into their beds, the firing caused the ladies and servitors to assemble hurriedly in the chief parlour of the house, where Shelley gave them this stirring account of what had taken place.

On getting to the bottom of the stairs he went to the billiard-room, where the noise of steps was audible. Following these steps he went through the billiard-room into the little room, called ‘the office,’ where he saw a man in the act of quitting the room through the glass-door, opening into the shrubbery. Shelley was so fortunate as to avoid the shot of the pistol, which the retreating miscreant fired at him. Shelley did his best to return the shot, but by ill-luck his pistol only flashed in the pan. The next incident of the affair was that the assassin knocked Shelley down;--an incident that afforded the assassin an opportunity of flying into the outer darkness. Instead of making off, the assassin grappled with Shelley and struggled with him on the floor. During this struggle, the narrator drew his second pistol and fired a shot, that caused the man to shriek, as he rose from the floor and went away into the shrubbery. The assassin had fled, but not without being wounded in the shoulder, if Shelley estimated rightly the effect of his second shot. A very remarkable incident of the affair was, that, after seeming to be wounded in the shoulder, and just before turning to fly, the assassin delivered himself of this rather too melodramatic utterance:--‘By God, I will be revenged! I will murder your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’

One can imagine how poor little Harriett shuddered and cried, ‘Oh, the wretch!’ It is more difficult to realize Miss Westbrook’s sensations. Of course, the party of seven did not separate immediately after hearing Shelley’s horrible tale. On the contrary, they remained in the parlour for about two hours, before Shelley (thinking it highly improbable that the wounded assassin would return before the morning, to execute his atrocious menaces) advised the two ladies to retire to rest. In accordance with this advice, the women went off to bed, leaving Shelley and Daniel Hill to sit up and keep guard, in case the villain should make a second attack.

In declaring it improbable that the assassin, with a bullet in his shoulder, would return before daybreak to murder Harriett and ravish her sister, the author of _Zastrozzi_ showed how imperfectly he realized the possibilities of the position. After returning to her bed at about one a.m., Harriett had occupied it just upon three hours, when at about 4 a.m., she heard a third pistol explosion, which caused her immediately to rise from her couch, and run downstairs to her husband, who received her with a thrilling statement of his narrow escape from death by the pistol that had just gone off. His story was this:--He had sent Daniel Hill out of the room to see what o’clock it was, when, in the servant’s absence, he heard a noise at the parlour window, and, on approaching the window, saw a man thrust his arm _through the glass_ and fire a pistol at him. Hence the broken window and the explosion that had brought Harriett from her bedroom. Thank Heaven! instead of bedding itself in his body, the pistol’s ball had passed through his flannel night-shirt, without even grazing his skin. Had he not been standing sideways towards the window, Shelley said he must have been killed. In support of these statements, he pointed to the broken window and the holes made in his flannel night-dress by the bullet. Further, he assured Harriett that, after so narrowly escaping death, he aimed and pulled the trigger of his pistol, but it would not go off:--this being the second time for him to draw trigger, with no result save a flash in the pan. His pistol having failed him again, Shelley aimed a blow at his assailant with an old sword, which the miscreant had almost succeeded in wresting from him, when Daniel Hill rushed into the room. On Daniel Hill’s appearance, the twice-baffled assassin let go his hold of the old sword, and again disappeared in the darkness. All this took place during the night of Friday, 26th February, 1813. On Saturday, the 27th instant, Shelley went off with his marvellous story (differing in important particulars from the narrative of the previous pages) to the Solicitor-General of the county, who lived at a distance of some twelve miles from the scene of the outrage.

My account of what took place, and of what was alleged by Shelley to have taken place in Tanyrallt Lodge on the night of 26th February, 1813, is made from the statements of what may be called the circular letter which Mrs. Shelley sent at her husband’s request, to divers of his friends, whom they wished to inform precisely of a matter, likely to be greatly misrepresented. As this letter was intended to be the enduring and authoritative record of the strange and perplexing business, I have used it for my narrative. It should, however, be observed, that the account of the matter so given by the Shelleys, some ten or fourteen days after the affair, differs materially from what Shelley himself seems to have told the Solicitor-General and Mr. Madocks of the affair on the 27th of February. Medwin’s report of what Mr. Madocks told him of Shelley’s own statement, is to this effect:--That, whilst sitting in the study on the eventful night, Shelley ‘heard a noise at the window, saw one of the shutters gradually unclosed, and a hand advanced into the room armed with a pistol;’ that the weapon having missed fire, Shelley ran to seize the ruffian who had pulled the trigger; that, on passing through the door into the garden, to get at the villain, Shelley found himself face to face with his assailant; that the villain made a second attempt to shoot Shelley with a pistol, which, like the other pistol, missed fire; that, after this second essay at shooting, the poet and his assailant wrestled with one another desperately in the garden, till the latter escaped from the lawn to the shrubbery, and disappeared. The inaccurate Medwin’s report of what Mr. Madocks told him at Florence long after 1813, is, of course, to be read with suspicion and distrust. On one or two points of his account of the affair, Medwin is guilty of mistakes of fact, for which he alone is to be held accountable. But it was not in Shelley’s power to tell the exciting story twice in the same fortnight, or on two following days, without discrepancies. That his story to Mr. Madocks on 27th February, 1813, gave particulars of ‘long and painful wrestling on the lawn’ is more than probable; the lawn having been trodden and rolled upon by some person or persons, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of violent wrestling.

The story, of course, flew like wildfire. In Tremadoc it was received with general incredulity and derision, as a tale made up by young Mr. Shelley, in order to have a pretext for leaving the neighbourhood in a trice without paying his bills; but Shelley and Harriett begged their friends to understand that the story would not have been received in this insulting way, had it not been for the malevolent action of Mr. Leeson, who hastened to assure the Tremadoc shopkeepers they were being trifled with by an impostor.

The affair having been reported by Shelley to the Solicitor-General, it became the subject of careful investigation. Not only was the evidence of the alleged attack sifted, but it was sifted by persons peculiarly qualified to examine it. The Solicitor-General of the county (an expert in evidence touching assaults and other outrages against the law), keen-witted Mr. Madocks (a man of affairs, familiar with the people of the neighbourhood), Mr. Williams (Mr. Madocks’s agent, a shrewd Welshman), Mr. Williams’s brother (a man of similar shrewdness) were amongst the persons to look into the matter. All these persons were friendly to Shelley, though they had for some time thought him given to talk too fast. All four were on familiar terms with him. The Solicitor-General received the Shelleys into his own house, and entertained them there from 27th February to the day in the first week of March, on which they left North Wales for Ireland. Consequently the investigation was directed, made, carried out by the gentleman, who was at the moment of the investigation Shelley’s host. Mr. Madocks and the Messrs. Williams had a distinct interest in keeping on friendly terms with Shelley, and doing all that was just for the maintenance of his credit. Consequently the investigation was in the hands of Shelley’s especial friends. Yet the unanimous verdict of local opinion was that no attack had been made, and that Shelley’s allegations respecting the attacks said to have been made on him during the night of the 26th of February were baseless and untruthful,--their untruthfulness being referable either to delusion or falsehood on his part. No single voice (except the voices of Harriett, Miss Westbrook, Shelley, doubtless Daniel Hill, and possibly the other servants of the house,) was raised in Carnarvonshire against the result of an investigation, which, be it observed, was (from the wetness of the ground about the lodge, at the time of the alleged assaults) made under peculiarly favourable conditions. With the single exception of Mr. Hookham (who seems, at least for a moment, to have believed the wild story), Shelley’s London friends were no less unanimous in thinking the verdict of the inquisitors a just one. Hogg says of the alleged attack, ‘Persons acquainted with the localities and with the circumstances, and who had carefully investigated the matter, were unanimous in the opinion, that no such attempt was ever made. _I never met with any person who believed in it._’ In the summer of 1813 (within a few months of the alleged attack), Peacock, who had made Shelley’s acquaintance in the previous autumn, went from London to Wales, and prosecuted inquiries on the spot respecting this Tanyrallt business; the result being that he had no doubt the attacks were never made, and that Shelley’s perplexing part in the affair was referable to ‘semi-delusion,’--the condition of mind in which Shelley, according to Peacock, was partly deluded and partly untruthful.

How could the investigators come to any other conclusion on the main question than that the attacks had not been made?

(1) It did not escape them that Shelley, living in a peaceful nook of Carnarvon, loaded his pistols before going to bed under circumstances, indicating in some degree a mental predisposition to find an occasion for using the weapons during the night.

(2) It did not escape them, that of the seven persons in the house, no one, with the exception of Shelley, professed to have seen the assassin, either on the occasion of attack No. 1 in the little office, or on the occasion of attack No. 2, at the parlour window.

(3) It did not escape them, that Shelley admitted no third person was present on the occasion of either his first or his second conflict with the assassin.

(4) It did not escape them, that no one of the seven persons, with the exception of Shelley, could speak to having heard a sound, that might not be referred either to the storm, or Shelley’s action, or to the action of some person lawfully in the house.

(5) It did not escape them, that the two pistol explosions in the little office might have been caused by Shelley’s two pistols, there being no evidence (apart from his bare assertion) that one of his pistols had only flashed in the pan during affair No. 1.

(6) It did not escape them, that, as he was passing through the window into the shrubbery at the very moment of Shelley’s appearance in the little office, the assassin acted very strangely in suddenly changing his mind and attacking Shelley, when he had it in his power to accomplish his purpose of passing into the outer darkness.

(7) It did not escape them, that, after knocking Shelley clean down, the assassin surrendered the advantage coming to him from the _coup_, so far as to throw himself on the floor, and struggle with his adversary, instead of kicking him on the head.

(8) It did not escape them, that, after shrieking from Shelley’s pistol-shot and recovering his feet, the assassin acted in a very unbusiness-like way, in saying, ‘By God, I will be revenged! I will murder your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’

(9) Questions were, of course, put to Shelley respecting the light, which enabled him to see his assailant in the act of quitting the room ‘through a glass-door which opened into the shrubbery.’ It being a starless, pitch-dark night (for the rain descended in torrents), Shelley, if he saw an assailant, must have discerned him by artificial light. It is not to be imagined that the billiard-room and little office were illuminated with many candles, so as to give the combatants a good view of one another. Shelley would scarcely have gone in search of nocturnal enemies with a candle in his hand. If he took a candle into the little office, it must surely have been extinguished soon after he entered the small chamber. The proximity of the shrubbery outside the glass door, would not have lessened the darkness of the room or of the space on which the glass-door opened. What questions were put to Shelley, and what he said, about the light, which rendered the assassin visible, does not appear.

(10) To the investigators it must have appeared strange that the assassin, either with or without a bullet in his shoulder, returned in three hours to make a second attempt on Shelley’s life.

(11) To the same inquisitors it must have seemed remarkable that the assassin preluded this second essay at murder, by thrusting his arm through the glass, and thereby smashing the window. It is unusual for nocturnal assailants to be so noisy in their preliminary movements.

(12) Through the wetness of the ground about the house, the assassin could not have approached the parlour window for the accomplishment of his deadly purpose, or after the second futile attempt at murder, without leaving clear footprints on the soaking-wet lawn. There were marks of footsteps on the grass, to which the investigators paid particular attention. On visiting Tremadoc and Tanyrallt in the summer of 1813, when all the circumstances of the alleged assaults were fresh in the memory of the people in those parts, Peacock received information, that years afterwards caused him to write these words:--‘Persons who had examined the premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window.’ Why was the lawn thus trampled and rolled upon at some distance from the parlour window? To give the ground an appearance that would accord with some account given by Shelley of his final struggle with the assassin, other than the account given of the contention in Harriett’s well-known letter on this subject? Who had trampled and rolled about on the wet grass, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of a struggle? Shelley? or Daniel Hill? or both of them? As there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window, it was, of course, obvious to the investigators, that the persons, accountable for the hard usage of the turf in one particular spot of the lawn, had entered the house and remained there, after so trampling and disordering the surface of the sward; and also, that no persons had been about the garden during the night, with the exception of persons of the house. Of course, the investigators narrowly scrutinized the footprints, which certainly occupied much of their intention. Doubtless the Solicitor-General satisfied himself whether any of the footprints corresponded with the soles of Shelley’s shoes, the soles of Daniel Hill’s boots, the soles of boots and shoes worn by the women of the house. Of the particulars of the Solicitor-General’s conclusions respecting these damnatory marks on the wet grass there is no record. There is no reason to regret the absence of such particulars from the record. It is enough to know that the investigators examined the footprints, and came to the conclusion that they were made by no foreigner to the household.

(13) But it still remains to state the most remarkable matter of evidence that came under the notice of the investigators. On coming to Shelley in the parlour immediately after the second of the alleged attacks, Mrs Shelley perceived that the window-curtain and her husband’s flannel night-shirt had been penetrated by a bullet. Shelley told her that this injury had been done to the curtain and his night-dress by the ball of the pistol that had been fired at him by the assassin,--firing _from_ the window into the room. The mark of this ball was found by the inquisitors in the wainscot near the window; the position and character of the mark showing that the pistol, instead of being fired _from_, had been fired _towards_ the window;--that, instead of being fired by the assassin outside the window, the pistol had been fired by Shelley _from_ the interior of the room.

This piece of dynamical evidence satisfied the inquisitors that Shelley’s baffled assassin was an imaginary caitiff. Till it can be shown that a ball, issuing from a pistol pointed due south, must necessarily take a course due north, Shelley (all his superb poetry notwithstanding) must be held to have said what was directly the reverse of the fact, when he told his wife that the bullet, which, after passing through his flannel shirt and the window-curtain, penetrated the wainscot near the parlour window, was shot from the window in the direction of the opposite wall. The discovery of that bullet-mark gave the _coup-de-grace_ to whatever remained of the favourable regard in which Shelley had been held by the people of Tremadoc.

It is probable that Peacock first hit upon his curious term ‘semi-delusions,’ after reviewing all the facts that came to his knowledge about this singular affair in the summer of 1813. How much of Shelley’s chief part in the strange affair should be attributed to hallucination? How much to deceptive intention? I would fain attribute the whole of it to delusion. But I cannot do so. In previous pages prominence has been given to every consideration, that may be produced honestly, in order to dispose the reader to think delusion chiefly accountable for the poet’s final escapade at Tanyrallt. There is no positive evidence that he was seriously out of health, or under the dominion of morbid fancy, or taking laudanum with extraordinary freedom at this particular time; but for his reputation’s sake I have been careful to adduce every matter favourable to the opinion that his action in what is usually called ‘the Tanyrallt mystery,’ should be referred to nervous derangement rather than to moral obliquity. In a previous chapter especial notice was taken of his imaginary escape at Keswick from the grasp of an imaginary robber--a delusion which seems to have been in no degree complicated with deceitful designs--in order that the incident should be remembered to his advantage, when the readers of this work should be invited to decide for themselves how far he was deluded, and how far false, in this Tanyrallt business.

Notwithstanding the numerous and obvious reasons for thinking he acted dishonestly throughout the whole affair, it is conceivable that he was under the influence of delusion in the earlier passages of the drama. In loading the pistols before he went to bed, and declaring a fear that he would have occasion to use them before the morning, he only did and said what has been done in nervous apprehension by countless men, whose honesty has never been called in question. In leaving his bed so soon after his retirement to the couch, and going downstairs with his weapons to look for a housebreaker, he displayed only the alarm that was likely to ensue from the anticipation of disturbance. The nervous man, who passes at night through dark passages in search of a burglar, is apt to imagine he sees the intruder for whom he is looking. All the imaginary incidents of the imaginary encounter in the little room are reconcilable with the theory that Shelley acted sincerely in the whole affair. It was natural for the author of _Zastrozzi_ to imagine himself addressed by the imaginary assassin in such language, as might have proceeded from any one of the villains of that marvellous romance. In spite of the suspicious circumstance that he sent Daniel Hill out of the room before seeing the assassin again at the window of the parlour, I can just conceive it possible that Shelley really believed he saw the villain at the window.

But at this point my ability to imagine, that he may have acted and spoken from misconception, comes to an end. His pistol may have exploded accidentally, though it is more reasonable to think he fired it with design;--intending that the ball should pass through his night-dress, and holding the flannel well out from his body with the left hand, so that the bullet in passing through the night-dress should not graze the skin of his body. But it is inconceivable that he attributed the explosion of his own pistol to the imaginary weapon of an imaginary assassin. As the ball of Shelley’s weapon struck and pierced the wainscot of the window, it cannot be supposed to have smashed the window. To Shelley’s muscles, acting upon glass and frame in Daniel Hill’s absence, it must be attributed that the window was injured in a manner, accordant with what he a few minutes later told Mrs. Shelley of his conflict with the assassin. The old sword, which the imaginary assassin was alleged to have tried to wrest from him, seems to have been used by Shelley as an instrument for smashing the window.

Even by those, who can believe the poet imagined himself struggling desperately with an assailant _on the other side of the window frame_ whilst he was thus smashing the window, it will be conceded that the indications of struggling, put subsequently on the wet grass of the lawn at a considerable distance from the house, must have been put on the turf for evidential ends, and with a deceptive purpose. The turf cannot have been trampled upon, stamped down and rolled upon, in order to keep a nocturnal assailant out of the house. The grass must have been so treated in order to give it a show of having been the scene of a violent struggle between persons, alternately wrestling with and rolling over one another:--a show that should on the morrow accord with Shelley’s original account to the Solicitor-General, which seems to have differed materially from his account of the struggle to Harriett. Shelley cannot be imagined to have gone out of his house at an early hour of a cold February morning, immediately after a night of alarm and wakefulness, and to have danced and rolled upon the grass of his wet lawn for mere amusement. Nor are servants wont to act in so insane a fashion for the mere fun of the thing. For what end, but the one already stated, can the grass have been thus danced, trodden, and rolled upon? Whether the signs of a struggle were put upon the grass by Shelley himself, or by some other person or persons of his household, the work of disordering the turf’s surface must be regarded as _his_ work.

But though the evidence is so conclusive that Shelley was _not_ attacked by an assassin at Tanyrallt on the night of 26th February, 1813, and that he with his own pistol shot through the flannel night-dress the bullet, which he declared to have been shot through it by another person, his wildest idolaters insist that he was so attacked and shot at. Lady Shelley says, ‘Yet this continual beneficence could not save Shelley from an attempt on his life of a most atrocious and extraordinary kind.’ Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy wishes us to believe that the baffled assassin was no other person than Miss Hitchener’s father.

Assuming that the first quarterly allowance of Miss Hitchener’s stipend was not paid; assuming that ineffectual demands had been made to Shelley for payment of the money; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s account of Shelley’s treatment of her had caused much angry talk against him in her father’s tap-room; assuming that this angry talk incensed Miss Hitchener’s papa against the Shelleys; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s papa (formerly a smuggler) journeyed from his Sussex village to Carnarvonshire, in order to wreak his wrath on the hateful trio; Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy argues that Miss Hitchener’s papa was the villain who tried to shoot Shelley in the little room opening into the shrubbery, and who, some hours later, appeared at the parlour window and shot the bullet through Shelley’s flannel shirt:--a bullet that, according to Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, must have passed from the window, through the window-curtains, and through Shelley’s flannel-shirt, and then turning round in the parlour have come straight back to the wainscot on the window side of the room. Positively Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy has given this explanation of the Tanyrallt mystery, and been cordially applauded by Shelleyan enthusiasts for the sagacity and reasonableness of his way of showing, that Shelley was shot at in the manner declared by him. This is the way in which Shelley’s biography has been dealt with by a ring of gentlemen, of whose acuteness and discretion Mr. James Anthony Froude has the highest opinion.

It is not surprising that Shelley hastened in a few days from the scene of his humiliating exposure. He would have left Carnarvonshire sooner, had he not been detained by want of money. To get the means of flight the young gentleman, who a few days earlier sent 20_l._ to Mr. T. Hookham for the relief of the Hunts, now wrote a hasty note to Mr. T. Hookham for the restoration of the money, in order that he might have the means of getting away from Tremadoc. To this brief note by the excited poet Mrs. Shelley added a postscript in somewhat less agitated style:--

‘_Tanyralt, March 3rd, 1813_.

‘DEAR SIR,--I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. Oh send the twenty pounds, if you have it! You will probably hear of me no more!--Your Friend,

PERCY SHELLEY.’

‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day from being up all night that I am afraid what he has written will alarm you very much. We intend to leave this place as soon as possible, as our lives are not safe as long as we remain. It is no common robber we dread, but a person who is actuated by revenge,--who threatens my life and my sister’s as well. If you can send us the money it will add greatly to our comfort.--Sir, I remain your sincere friend,

H. SHELLEY.’

The printed transcripts of this note and postscript differ in several minute particulars from the printed transcripts of the same writings in Lady Shelley’s book; but the only important difference between the two sets of printed transcripts is that, whilst it is given without any date in Lady Shelley’s book, the note is given in Hogg’s version with an obviously erroneous date.

One of the mistakes of Lady Shelley’s inaccurate book is the representation that, in writing the brief note to Mr. T. Hookham, Shelley merely asked the bookseller for a loan of 20_l._ ‘It would appear,’ the lady says, ‘that after sending off the 20_l._ for the Hunt subscription he was in want of money. Hence the request to Mr. Hookham for a little temporary accommodation to enable him to make the necessary removal from Tanyrallt.’ It is, however, certain that Shelley wished the receiver of his note to regard him as asking for the restoration of _the_ 20_l._ sent a few days earlier to Bond Street, as a contribution to the Hunt fund. It has been already remarked that the letter accompanying this remittance to Mr. Hookham for the Hunt Fund was dated, ‘February, 1813,’ without a note of the particular day. Hence the precise day on which the money was despatched from Tanyrallt to London is unknown. But there is evidence for fixing the approximate date of the remittance. On 7th February, 1813, Shelley wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt, ‘_Mab_ has gone on, but slowly, although she is nearly finished.’ In the subsequent letter to Mr. Hookham, accompanying the contribution to the Hunt Fund, Shelley says, ‘_Queen Mab_ is finished and transcribed.’ Consequently between the date of the earlier letter and the composition of the later epistle, Shelley had _finished_ and _transcribed_ his poem,--work that may be computed to have given him occupation for a fortnight. This computation would give the 22nd February as the approximate date of the letter, accompanying the remittance for the Hunt Fund, to Mr. Hookham. Written and posted on Monday, 22nd February at Tanyrallt, or Tremadoc, the letter would start on its journey by mail for London in the early morning of Tuesday, 23rd February, and arriving in London on the evening or night of Thursday, 25th February, would be delivered in Old Bond Street on the morning of Friday, 26th February--the morning of the very day, on whose night the first of the imaginary attacks was made by the imaginary assassin at Tanyrallt. According to this calculation Shelley found himself in urgent need of the money he had so recklessly given away, just twenty-four hours after the note or notes for the money came to the hands of the Bond-Street bookseller.

There are differences between Hogg’s transcript of the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham and Lady Shelley’s transcript of the same note. One of the discrepancies is that Lady Shelley gives us ‘Oh! send me 20_l._, if you have it,’ whereas Hogg gives us ‘O send the twenty pounds, if you have it.’ Whichever of the two versions is taken, it is clear that ‘if you have it’ signifies ‘if you have not parted with it to the Hunt Fund Committee,’ and that Shelley was asking for the return of his own money. As he had no reason to suppose the prosperous bookseller might be without twenty pounds either in his till or at the bank, by ‘if you have it’ Shelley cannot have meant ‘if you are the possessor of so much money.’ Affording no indication that Shelley felt he was putting himself under a pecuniary obligation to the man of business, the language of the note precludes the assumption that he was asking outright for a loan of money. Though he may have felt, and probably did feel, that his note would move Mr. Hookham to lend him 20_l._ if he had parted with the subscribed 20_l._, Shelley asked for the restoration of his own 20_l._ Much the same may be said of Mrs. Shelley and her postscript. Instead of writing as though she and her husband were asking Mr. Hookham to do them a considerable kindness, she wrote as though she were merely asking for their own money.

When the assassination-note came to Mr. Hookham’s hands on the morning of Tuesday, 3rd March, he had passed Shelley’s gift on to the Hunt Fund. In his inability to return the subscribed money, the bookseller sent him 20_l._ as a loan; a loan which Shelley acknowledged from Bangor Ferry, on 6th March, 1813, in terms affording proof that the present writer has not misconstrued the assassination-note. Lady Shelley’s printed transcript of the letter from Bangor Ferry, makes Shelley write thus,--

‘From the tenor of your letter I augur’ (_argue_ ?) ‘that you have applied the 20_l._ I sent to the benefit of the Hunts.... By your kindness and generosity we are perfectly relieved from all pecuniary difficulties. We only wanted a little breathing time, which the rapidity of our persecutions was unwilling to allow us. We shall readily repay the 20_l._ when I hear from my correspondent in London; but when can I repay the friendship, the disinterestedness, and the zeal of your confidence?’

Mr. Hookham having sent Shelley 20_l._ as a loan, instead of returning the subscribed money, the poet argues from the bookseller’s action and epistle, that the latter has ‘applied the 20_l._’ (sent for that purpose) ‘to the benefit of the Hunts.’

Within a few hours of writing the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham, Shelley wrote to Mr. Williams, begging for 25_l._ he needed for the payment of ‘little debts;’ observing in the same note, ‘I am surprised that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of. Surely enquiries have not been sufficiently general, or particular?’

Whilst Mrs. Shelley’s words, ‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day, _from being up all night_,’ indicate that the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham was written on the morrow of the imaginary attacks at Tanyrallt, the manner in which Shelley here refers to measures for discovering the assassin shows that the note to Mr. Williams must have been written at a time when ‘the investigations’ were in an early stage of their progress to a damnatory conclusion. Had he known of the discovery of the bullet-mark in the wainscot, Shelley could scarcely have suggested that the investigations of the case had not been sufficiently ‘particular.’ A few hours later, when he heard how particular they had been, his slight face must by turns have flushed with annoyance and then whitened with shame.

The evidence is abundant that Shelley was touched acutely by the shame of his position, during the last days of his sojourn in Carnarvonshire. There is a pathetic note of sincerity in one passage of the insincere letter he wrote from Bangor Ferry to the bookseller of Old Bond Street;--the passage in which he declared he was less delighted by the arrival of Mr. Hookham’s remittance, because it rescued him from ‘a situation of peculiar perplexity,’ than because it assured him he still retained the confidence of at least one friend, whose generous conduct ‘made amends to’ his ‘feelings, wounded by the suspicion, coldness, and villany of the world.’ It was thus that the young man, with a singular aptitude for thinking himself persecuted by any one who presumed to call him to order, spoke of his Carnarvonshire neighbours, because they were offended by his attempt to trifle with their credulity. Those of them who kept out of his way, or otherwise showed a disinclination to speak to him of his latest escapade, were frigid, unfeeling, hard-hearted. Those, who hinted their inability to see how a bullet issuing from a pistol pointed due south could take a course due north, were meanly suspicious. Those, who frankly declared their disbelief of the assassination-story, were sheer villains. Though the discovery of the bullet-mark in a place it could not have reached, after passing from the window through his night-dress, must have convinced him (if he needed to be convinced) that the ball had issued from his own pistol, he persisted in declaring the ball had proceeded from the weapon of his imaginary assailant. ‘The ball,’ he wrote from Bangor Ferry, ‘of the assassain’s pistols (he fired at me twice), penetrated my night-gown and pierced the wainscot;’--omitting to add, for his correspondent’s information, that the ball struck the wainscot in a way proving the bullet to have issued from his own pistol. As might be expected of the young man, who three years earlier had declared his intention to have recourse to deception because it would answer his purpose, and just three months earlier had declared his intention to write a wheedling letter to the Duke of Norfolk because he might get some money by doing so, Shelley stuck to his erroneous statements when he must have known them to be misstatements, however much he may have been under the influence of pure hallucination, when he first uttered them. His stubborn adherence to the misstatements, in the letter to Mr. Hookham, is rendered the more offensive by the Pecksniffian style in which he, in the same letter, proclaims his delight in contemplating truth and virtue. ‘If,’ he remarks, ‘the discovery of truth be a pleasure of singular purity, how far surpassing is the discovery of virtue!’ In the same vein he observes in the postscript,--‘Though overwhelmed with our distresses, we are by no means indifferent to those of liberty and virtue!!!’

(7.)--DUBLIN AND KILLARNEY.

Preserving amidst his varied distresses this honourable concern for the interests of liberty and virtue, Shelley journeyed from Bangor to Holyhead, and after a tedious and rough sea-passage (of forty hours duration) arrived on Tuesday, 9th March, 1813, at Dublin, where he passed several days at 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, the residence of Mr. John Lawless.

Ignorant of his friend’s intimacy with the Irishman of letters, who in 1813 was at work on the _Compendium of the History of Ireland_, Hogg may well have been at a loss how to account for Shelley’s second visit to the people, whose wrongs he had failed to redress with two pamphlets and a broadside. But with their imperfect knowledge of the poet’s relations with honest Jack Lawless, the readers of this page can readily discover motives for the second visit to the land of greenness and thraldom. There is no positive evidence that Shelley procured money either from Mr. Medwin or anyone else for the publication of a voluminous _History of Ireland_. But a _Compendium_ (though scarcely a voluminous one) _of Irish History_ was produced by honest Jack Lawless in 1814; and twenty-eight years later, Frederick William Conway (who was editor of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_ in 1812-13, with good opportunities for observing the nature of honest Jack’s intercourse with the _immediate_ heir to one of the first fortunes of England), referred to Shelley in the _Dublin Evening Post_ (November 17th, 1842), as having been ‘made the pecuniary dupe of a person not less sincere in his politics, but in money matters less honest,’--words that unquestionably referred to honest Jack Lawless’s pecuniary dealings with the youthful poet. Other evidence has already been given that Lawless’s friendly relations with Shelley were attended with pecuniary arrangements. Harum-scarum youngster though he was, Shelley would scarcely have given his Lynton landlady the draft on ‘Lord Cloncurry’s brother,’ without any grounds for thinking that Jack Lawless was under an obligation to honour the writing. One would like to know more of honest Jack’s literary and financial relations with the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England; but enough is known to justify readers in assuming that, besides going to Ireland in March, 1813, to receive the solace of his friend’s sympathy with his distress, Shelley went to 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, Dublin, to see how his ‘literary friend’ was getting on with ‘the work,’ that on its publication could not fail to ‘produce great profits.’

It is in the reader’s memory that Hogg promised to visit the Shelleys in Carnarvonshire, and pass a few days with them at Tanyrallt, in March, 1813,--an arrangement that could not be carried out, when the poet, with his wife and sister-in-law, had left Wales for Ireland. To spare him the annoyance (similar to the annoyance Godwin endured half-a-year earlier) of journeying to Tanyrallt, only to find they had departed, Mrs. Shelley had given Hogg timely information of the circumstances which had determined her and her husband to fly to Ireland. As the letter, which afforded him this information, was ‘written from Tanyrallt, a day or two after the catastrophe,’ Hogg was guilty of a curious slip when (writing from memory of the lost epistle) he declared that, to the best of his recollection, apart from the different date, it was ‘precisely similar, word for word,’ indeed, to the letter Harriett wrote to Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street, from Dublin on the 12th (Lady Shelley says 11th) of March, giving the details of the alleged attacks. As Harriett’s later letter to Mr. Hookham began with the words, ‘My Dear Sir, We arrived here last Tuesday, after a most tedious passage, during the whole of which time we were dreadfully ill,’ it cannot have corresponded so precisely, as Hogg represents, with her earlier letter from Tanyrallt. Had the Shelleyan enthusiasts noticed this droll slip, they would have discovered in it yet another proof of Hogg’s incomparable villany, instead of attributing the excessive statement to the writer’s honest purpose of saying emphatically that, in so far as it related to the alleged attempts at assassination, the later epistle to Mr. Hookham seemed like a copy of the earlier letter to him. It appeared also that Harriett (_not_ Shelley) wrote similar accounts of the assassination-incidents either from Tanyrallt or Ireland, to other persons, besides Mr. Hookham and Hogg. ‘I have been informed,’ says the biographer, ‘that she also sent to other persons a narrative of the nightly fears in the same terms, writing descriptive circulars, and dispatching them in different directions.’ Why were these letters of intelligence written by Harriett instead of her husband, who certainly was the natural and fittest person to put on record the matters, so closely touching his honour? Though she made it to one of her correspondents, readers may smile at the statement, that Harriett wrote the letters, in order to spare her husband the pain of recalling again and again the horrors of that awful night.

Having made arrangements for the long journey to Carnarvonshire, Hogg determined to make the longer trip to Dublin, in accordance with his friends’ entreaties that he would join them at 35 Cuffe Street. The result of the determination was, that some few days later he experienced in the Irish metropolis just such a disappointment as William Godwin had experienced at Lynton. On coming to Cuffe Street, after an unusually rough and trying journey, he learnt that the Shelleys, with Miss Westbrook, had gone off to Killarney. Of course he lost no time in asking the fugitives, through the post, why they had treated him so unhandsomely, and whilst awaiting their reply amused himself as he best could in exploring Dublin, and studying the manners and humours of the people with whom he became acquainted, chiefly through Jack Lawless’s friendly offices. For a moment readers of this page may well imagine, that Shelley had relapsed into his former hallucination respecting Hogg’s intentions towards Harriett, and had carried her off to Killarney in order to keep her out of his way. But Shelley’s action, on hearing of his friend’s arrival in Dublin, disposes of the suspicion. There had been misunderstanding on the part of the Shelleys, attended with uncertainty whether Hogg would cross the sea. A sudden whim for visiting Killarney was enough to convert this uncertainty respecting his purpose into a confidence that he would not come to them. So off they went to Killarney, in the very worst season for viewing the Lakes, a few days before Hogg appeared at Jack Lawless’s door.

Mr. Lawless advised Hogg to run to Killarney and join his friends there; but Hogg did not think it advisable to spend money in running south after the trio who might have already started for the Giant’s Causeway. After spending nearly all the time and money at his disposal, the young Templar returned to London without coming to the presence of the people he had travelled so far to see; but not without gathering materials for a singularly vivid and humorous account of life and manners in Dublin seventy years since. Bidding his Irish acquaintances adieu, Hogg started on his homeward journey some four-and-twenty hours before Shelley and Harriett arrived at the Cork Hotel, Dublin, after covering two hundred and forty English miles in less than forty-eight hours. Intelligence of Hogg’s appearance in Dublin having come to them at noon on Monday, 29th March, 1813, Shelley and his wife (now within three calendar months of her accouchement), without Miss Westbrook, started for the capital, posting to Cork, where they caught the mail that deposited them in Dublin at 3 p.m. of Wednesday, 31st March. Though Lady Shelley says they did not return to London till May, 1813, it is certain that Shelley and Harriett were at 23 Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the second week of April.