It may not be irrelevant to mention that Miss Michell, Sir Bysshe’s first wife, was my grandfather’s first cousin; and that my mother bore the same degree of consanguinity to Miss Pilfold; their fathers being brothers; which circumstances I mention in order to account for the intimacy of our families, and mine with Bysshe, as he was always called. Among the letters of an aunt of mine, was found one [See Appendix No. 1] from him, written in his eleventh year, and which I give entire, not so much on account of its merit, or as a literary curiosity, but to show the early regard he entertained for me, the playfulness of his character as a boy, and the dry humour of franking the letter, his father then being member of Parliament for the Rape of Bramber; nor is it less valuable to show his early fondness for a boat.

He was most engaging and amiable as a child; such as he, afterwards thinking perhaps of himself, describes:— He was a gentle boy, And in all gentle sports took joy; Oft in a dry leaf for a boat, With a small feather for a sail, His fancy on that spring would float, If some invisible breeze might stir Its marble calm.—Rosalind and Helen.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was brought up in retirement at Field Place, and received the same education as his elder sisters, being instructed in the rudiments of Latin and Greek by Mr. Edwards, the clergyman of Warnham, (the parish in which they lived), a good old man, but of very limited intellects, and whose preaching might have been edifying if his Welch pronunciation had made it intelligible; at all events, his performance of the service was little calculated to inspire devotion. At ten years of age he was sent to Sion House, Brentford, where I had preceded him. This school, though not a “Dotheboys-hall,” was conducted with the greatest regard to economy. A slice of bread with an “idée” of butter smeared on the surface, and “thrice skimmed skyblue,” to use an expression of Bloomfield the poet, was miscalled a breakfast. The supper, a repetition of the same frugal repast; and the dinner, at which it was never allowed to send up the plate twice without its eliciting an observation from the distributor, that effectually prevented a repetition of the offence, was made up generally of ingredients that were anonymous. The Saturday’s meal, a sort of pie, a collect from the plates during the week. This fare, to a boy accustomed to the delicacies of the table, was not the most attractive; the whole establishment was in keeping with the dietry part of it, and the system of the lavations truly Scotch.

The lady of the house was by no means a Mrs. Squeers—I do not remember seeing her five times whilst I was at the seminary of learning,—she was too fine to have anything to do with all the dirty details of the household; she was, or was said to be, connected with the Duke of Argyle—I never knew one of the Scottish nation who did not claim relationship, or clanship, with the noble duke. She was given out for a sprig of nobility at any rate; another sister, an old maid, the factotum of the establishment, was an economist of the first order.

Exchanging for the caresses of his sisters an association with boys, mostly the sons of London shopkeepers, of rude habits and coarse manners, who made game of his girlishness, and despised him because he was not “one of them;” not disposed to enter into their sports, to wrangle, or fight; confined between four stone walls, in a playground of very limited dimensions—a few hundred yards—(with a single tree in it, and that the Bell tree, so called from its having suspended in its branches, the odious bell whose din, when I think of it, yet jars my ears,) instead of breathing the pure air of his native fields, and rambling about the plantations and flower gardens of his father’s country seat—the sufferings he underwent at his first outset in this little world were most acute.

Sion House was indeed a perfect hell to him. Fagging, that vestige of barbarous times, in the positive sense of the word, as adopted in public schools, was not in strict use; that is, the boys of the higher classes had not expressly chosen and particular slaves; but perhaps there was in operation here, another and a worse form of government—a democracy of tyrants—instead of the rule of a few petty sovereigns; and although here the elder boys did not oblige their juniors to perform for them offices the most menial, to clean their coats and shoes, they forced them to bowl to them at cricket, and run after their balls until they were ready to drop with fatigue—to go out of bounds for them to the circulating library, or purchase with dictionaries and other books sold by weight to the grocer, bread and cheese to stay their cravings of hunger, and to receive the punishment of the transgression, if caught in the fact. And more than one of these petty despots (there were young men at the school of seventeen or eighteen) used to vent on his victims his ill-humours in harsh words, sometimes in blows. Poor Shelley! he was always the martyr, and it was under the smart of this oppression that he wrote:— There rose From the near school-room, voices, that alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes, The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. Revolt of Islam.

And again:— Day after day—week after week— I walked about like a thing alive— Alas! dear friend! you must believe The heart is stone—it did not break. Rosalind and Helen.

We were about sixty school-fellows. I well remember the day when he was added to the number. A new arrival is always a great excitement to the other boys, who pounce upon a fresh man with the boldness of birds of prey. We all had had to pass through this ordeal, and the remembrance of it gave my companions a zest for torture. All tormented him with questionings. There was no end to their mockery, when they found that he was ignorant of pegtop or marbles, or leap-frog, or hopscotch, much more of fives and cricket. One wanted him to spar, another to run a race with him. He was a tyro in both these accomplishments, and the only welcome of the Neophyte was a general shout of derision. To all these impertinences he made no reply, but with a look of disdain written in his countenance, turned his back on his new associates, and when he was alone, found relief in tears.

Shelley was at this time tall for his age, slightly and delicately built, and rather narrow chested, with a complexion fair and ruddy, a face rather long than oval. His features, not regularly handsome, were set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled naturally. The expression of countenance was one of exceeding sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes were very large and prominent, considered by phrenologists to indicate a great aptitude for verbal memory. They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in contemplation, dull, and, as it were, insensible to external objects; at others they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice was soft and low, but broken in its tones,—when anything much interested him, harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never lost. As is recorded of Thomson, he was naturally calm, but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of horror and indignation were visible in his countenance.

I have said that he was delicately framed, and it has been remarked, “that it is often noticed in those of very fine and susceptible genius. That mysterious influence, which the mind exercises over the body, seeming to prevent the growth of physical strength, when the intellect is kept ever alive, and the spirits continually are agitated.”

“As his port had the meekness of a maiden, the heart of the young virgin who had never crossed her father’s threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more susceptible of all the sweet charities than his. In this respect Shelley’s disposition would happily illustrate the innocence and virginity of the Muses. He possessed a most affectionate regard for his relations, and particularly for the females of his family. It was not without manifest joy that he received a letter from his mother and sisters,”—for the two eldest he had an especial fondness, and I will here observe that one, unhappily removed from the world before her time, possessed a talent for oil-painting that few artists have acquired, and that the other bore a striking resemblance in her beauty and amiability, to his cousin, Harriet Grove, of whom I shall have to speak. Mr. Hogg mentions, on the occasion of Shelley’s seeing the attachment and tenderness of two sisters at Oxford, his feelings regarding the sisterly affections, and says he seems to have had his own in his eye. He on this occasion described their appearance, and drew a lovely picture of this amiable and innocent attachment; the dutiful regard of the younger, which partook, in some degree, of filial reverence; but, as more fasile and familiar, and of the protecting, instinctively hoping fondness of the elder, that resembled maternal tenderness, but with less of reserve and more of sympathy.

As a proof of his great sweetness of disposition and feeling for others, I will cite an example of which I was an eye-witness. His sisters, on the occasion of a visit with himself to a young lady of their own age, and a near relation, who was shy, reserved, and awkward, behaved to her as he considered rudely, at which Shelley was much hurt, endeavoured to soothe her, and severely reprimanded his sisters, and persuaded his father, on his return home, to call and make apology for them.

Such was Shelley when noviciated at Sion House Academy. Our master, a Scotch doctor of law, and a divine, was a choleric man, of a sanguinary complexion, in a green old age; not wanting in good qualities, but very capricious in his temper, which, good or bad, was influenced by the daily occurrences of a domestic life, not the most harmonious, and of which his face was the barometer, and his hand the index. He was a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar: Homer, his cheval de bataille. He could construe fluently, in his own way, some plays of Æschylus—Schultz being his oracle—and several of those of Sophocles and Euripides, looking upon the text as immaculate, never sticking fast at any of its corruptions, but driving straight forwards, in defiance of obstacles. The brick wall of no chorus ever made him pull up. In reading the historians, he troubled himself as little with digressions or explanations of the habits and customs of the ancients, or maps. His Latin verses were certainly original, but neither Virgilian nor Ovidian, for I remember an inscription of his on a Scotch mull, which had been presented to him (he took an inordinate quantity of Scotch snuff) by one of his pupils, it ran thus:—Snuffbox loquitur:— “Me, Carolus Mackintosh, de dono, dedit, alumnus, Præceptor, præsensu, accipit atque tenet.”

“To aversion to the society of his fellow-creatures, such as he found them, collected together in societies, where one egged on the other to acts of tyranny, was joined the deepest sympathy and compassion; while the attachment he felt to individuals, and the admiration with which he regarded their prowess and virtue, led him to entertain a high opinion of the perfectibility of human nature; and he believed that all could reach the highest grade of moral improvement, did not the customs and prejudices of society foster evil passions and excuse evil actions.”

That the masters would not listen to his complaints, if he made any, I readily believe; and the senior boys no doubt resented, as contumacy, and infringement of their rights, Shelley’s solitary resistance to them, and visited him with condign punishment. It has been said that he headed a conspiracy against this odious and degrading custom, but I have enquired of some Etonians, his contemporaries, and find that there is no foundation for the report. Indeed, what could a conspiracy of the junior boys, however extensive, effect by numbers against a body so much their superiors in age and physical force?

Tyranny produces tyranny, in common minds; and it is well known in schools, that those boys who have been the most fagged, become the greatest oppressors; not so Shelley: he says:— And then I clasped my hands, and looked around, But none was near to mark my streaming eyes, Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground; So without shame I spake—“I will be wise And just and free—and mild—if in me lies Such power: for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannize, Without reproach or check. Revolt of Islam.

The boy, so delicately organized, with so nervous a temperament, under the influence of a chronic melancholy, whose genius was a sort of malady; this child, so strong and yet so feeble, suffered in every way. Like the martyrs, who smiled in the midst of torture, he sought refuge in his own thoughts, in the heaven of his own soul, and perhaps this inward life aided him in his search after those mysteries to which he afterwards clung with a faith so unshaken.

It is well known how few boys profit much by these great public schools, especially by Eton, the most aristocratic of them all. He says— Nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn.

But an exception to these, Mrs. Shelley says, was one of the masters, Dr. Lind, whom he had in mind, in the old man who liberates Laon from his tower in the revolt of Islam, (and she might have added the Hermit in Prince Athanase,) who befriended and supported him, and whose name he never mentioned without love and veneration, and with whom Shelley says he read the Symposium. Then Plato’s words of light in thee and me Lingered, like moonlight in the moonless East, For we had just then read—thy memory Is faithful now—the story of the Feast. Prince Athanase. But though he did not distinguish himself highly at Eton, owing perhaps to his want of emulation, and ambition of shining above his fellows in the class; he passed through the school with credit. He had been so well grounded in the classics, that it required little labour for him to get up his daily lessons. With these, indeed, he often went before his master unprepared, his out-of-school hours being occupied with other studies.

Stories are told of his chemical mishaps.—I have before me two notes from his father to mine, written in 1808. Shelley had sent for some book on chemistry, which happened to be in my father’s library, but which fell into the hands of his tutor and was sent back. Sir Timothy Shelley says—“I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton!” Might not this extraordinary prohibition have the more stimulated Shelley to engage in the pursuit?

He made himself a tolerable French scholar, and during the last year worked hard at German, that most difficult of modern, I might say of all tongues, and in which, with his astonishing verbal memory, he soon made great advances.

The author of the papers entitled “P. B. Shelley at Oxford,” says, that on visiting him “he was writing the usual exercise, which is presented once a week—a Latin translation of a paper in the Spectator; he soon finished it, and as he held it before the fire to dry, I offered to take it from him; he said it was not worth looking at, but I persisted, through a certain scholastic curiosity, to examine the Latinity of my new acquaintance. He gave it me. The Latin was sufficiently correct, but the version was paraphrastic; which I observed; he assented, and said it would pass muster, and he felt no interest in such efforts, and no desire to excel in them. I also noticed many portions of heroic verse, and several entire verses, and these I pointed out as defects in a prose composition. He smiled archly, and added in his peculiar whisper: ‘Do you think they will observe them?’ I inserted them intentionally, to try their ears. I once showed up a theme at Eton, to old Keate, in which there were a great many verses, but he observed them, scanned them, and asked why I had introduced them—I answered that I did not know they were there—this was partly true and partly false, and he believed me, and immediately applied to me a line in which Ovid says of himself: Et quid tentabam dicere, versus erat. Shelley then spoke of the facility with which he composed Latin verses, and taking the paper out of my hand, he began to put the entire translation into verse. He would sometimes open at hazard a prose writer, as Livy or Sallust, and by changing the position of the words, and occasionally substituting others, he would transmute several sentences from prose to verse, to heroic, or more commonly elegiac verse, for he was particularly charmed with the graceful and easy flow of the latter, with surprising rapidity and readiness.” That he had certainly arrived at great skill in the art of versification, I think I shall be able to prove by the following specimens I kept among my treasures, which he gave me in 1808 or 9. The first is the Epitaph in Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, probably a school task.

Many of these details may appear trivial, but they are not so to the physiologist, inasmuch as they serve to show how the accidental incidents of early impressions, if they did not model, influenced the direction of his mind. Admitting that “Poeta nascitur, non fit,” I am firmly persuaded of the truth of the above observation; for as all animals have brains like ourselves, dependent on organization, and an instructive kind of knowledge, adapted accordingly; and this instructive knowledge, although perfect in its way at the first, being capable of being influenced by new and altered circumstances; why should not, then, the different circumstances of early life assist the character, and give the bent to a poetical imagination? Animals, as well as ourselves, have intellectual qualities,—the difference is in degree, not in kind; but over and above this, they must have a something superadded, to make the difference, which is the faculty of taking cognizance of things wholly above the senses, of things spiritual and moral—a sense independent of the bodily brain, independent of themselves, and having a natural supremacy in the mind over and above all its other powers. I do not mean to say that a La Place, a Newton, or a Shakspeare, if we had sufficient data to trace the progress of their education, could be reproduced, according to the Helvetian doctrine, by following the same course, for as men are born with different constitutions, features, and habits of body, mental organization must be of course also differently organized. Yet no mind can be developed without preliminary education, and, consequently, all the minutiæ of this education must more or less exercise a modifying influence on it, as every physiologist in the natural history of animals can testify.

Shelley, like Byron, knew early what it was to love—almost all great poets have. It was in the summer of this year, that he became acquainted with our cousin, Harriet Grove. Living in distant counties, they then met for the first time, since they had been children, at Field-place, where she was on a visit. She was born, I think, in the same year with himself. She was like him in lineaments—her eyes, Her hair, her features, they said were like to his, But softened all and tempered into beauty.

After so long an interval, I still remember Miss Grove, and when I call to mind all the women I have ever seen, I know of none that surpassed, or that could compete with her. She was like one of Shakspeare’s women—like some Madonna of Raphael. Shelley, in a fragment written many years after, seems to have had her in his mind’s eye, when he writes: They were two cousins, almost like to twins, Except that from the catalogue of sins Nature had razed their love, which could not be, But in dissevering their nativity; And so they grew together like two flowers Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers Lull or awaken in the purple prime.

Young as they were, it is not likely that they had entered into a formal engagement with each other, or that their parents looked upon their attachment, if it were mentioned, as any other than an intimacy natural to such near relations, or the mere fancy of a moment; and after they parted, though they corresponded regularly, there was nothing in the circumstance that called for observation. Shelley’s love, however, had taken deep root, as proved by the dedication to Queen Mab, written in the following year.

But the lady was not alone “the inspiration of his song.” In the latter end of this year, he wrote a novel, that might have issued from the Minerva Press, entitled Zastrozzi, which embodies much of the intensity of the passion that devoured him; and some of the chapters were, he told me, by Miss Grove.

In this wild romance there are passages sparkling with brilliancy. A reviewer—for it was reviewed, but in what periodical I forget—spoke of it as a book of much promise. It was shortly followed by another Rosa-Matilda-like production, entitled St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian.

The Rosicrucian was suggested by St. Leon, which Shelley wonderfully admired. He read it till he believed that there was truth in Alchymy. and the Elixir Vitæ, which indeed entered into the plot of the Wandering Jew, of which I possess a preface by him, intended for the poem, had it been published. He says:—“The opinion that gold can be made, passed from the Arabs to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to the rest of Europe; those who professed it, gradually assumed the form of a sect, under the name of Alchymists. These Alchymists laid it down as a first principle, that all metals are composed of the same materials, or that the substances at least that form gold, exist in all metals, contaminated indeed by various impurities, but capable of being brought to a perfect state, by purification; and hence that considerable quantities of gold might be extracted from them. The generality of this belief in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, is proved by a remarkable edict of Dioclesian, quoted by Gibbon from the authority of two ancient historians, &c.” But if Shelley was at that time a believer in alchymy, he was even as much so in the Panacea. He used to cite the opinion of Dr. Franklin, whom he swore by, that “a time would come, when mind will be predominant over matter, or in other words, when a thorough knowledge of the human frame, and the perfection of medical science, will counteract the decay of Nature.” “What,” added he, “does Condorcet say on the subject?” and he read me the following passage: “‘Is it absurd to suppose this quality of amelioration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement; to suppose that a period must one day arrive, when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accident, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and his decay, will have no assignable limit?’” On such opinions was based the Rosicrucian. It was written before he went to Oxford, and published by Stockdale; the scene, singularly enough, is laid at Geneva, and from this juvenile effort I shall make some extracts in prose and verse, in order to show the elements of what it gave rise afterwards to— Creations vast and fair, As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will.

During the last two years of his stay at Eton, he had, as I have already stated, imbued himself with Pliny the Elder, especially being struck with the chapter De Deo, and studied deeply Lucretius, whom he considered the best of the Latin poets, and with him he referred at that time, as will be seen from the following extract, all creation to the power of Nature. It must be remembered that it is the Rosicrucian who speaks:—

“From my earliest youth, before it was quenched by complete satiation, curiosity, and a desire of unveiling the latent mysteries of nature, was the passion by which all the other emotions of my mind were intellectually organised. This desire led me to cultivate, and with success, the various branches of learning which led to the gates of wisdom. I then applied myself to the cultivation of philosophy, and the éclat with which I pursued it, exceeded my most sanguine expectations. Love I cared not for, and wondered why men perversely sought to ally themselves to weakness. Natural philosophy at last became the peculiar science to which I directed my eager enquiries; thence I was led into a train of labyrinthine meditations. I thought of death—I shuddered when I reflected, and shrunk in horror from the idea, selfish and self-interested as I was, of entering a new existence to which I was a stranger. I must either dive into the recesses of futurity, or I must not—I cannot die. Will not this nature—will not this matter of which it is composed, exist to all eternity! Ah! I know it will, and by the exertion of the energies with which nature has gifted me, well I know it shall. This was my opinion at that time: I then believed that there existed no God. Ah! at what an exorbitant price have I bought the conviction that there is!! Believing that priestcraft and superstition were all the religion which man ever practised, it could not be supposed that I thought there existed supernatural beings of any kind. I believed Nature to be self-sufficient and excelling. I supposed not, therefore, that there could be anything beyond nature. I was now about seventeen; I had dived into the depths of metaphysical calculations; with sophistical arguments, had I convinced myself of the non-existence of a First Cause, and by every combined modification of the essences of matter, had I apparently proved that no existences could possibly be, unseen by human vision.”

This work contains several poems, some of which were written a year or two before the date of the Romance, and which I insert in these memorabilia, more as literary curiosities, than for their intrinsic merit, though some of them may bear comparison with those contained in Byron’s Hours of Idleness. Three of them are in the metre of Walter Scott’s Helvellyn, a poem he greatly admired, although the Lay of the Last Minstrel was little to his taste,

I have marked in italics the passages in these extracts that show his change of opinions—his regret of the publication as a literary composition, and his fear of its tendency, although perhaps Mrs. Shelley is right in including Queen Mab among her lamented husband’s works, from its wide dissemination, and her utter inability to suppress it. Everything is valuable that came from his pen, inasmuch as it assists to show the progress of his master-mind, the elements on which the superstructure of his philosophy was reared. I cannot help observing, en passant, that a copy of Queen Mab was hunted out by his father-in-law, and that the proceedings in Chancery, which I shall have to detail at some length, were principally based on the opinions laid down in that work.

But to proceed: I was acquainted with Sir Thomas Lawrence, not the great painter, but a knight of Malta, whom I met first at Paris, and afterwards in London. He had purchased his knighthood in the French metropolis, where an office was opened for the sale of these honours. Nobility of origin was held as an indispensable qualification for such titles; but it would seem that it was not very rigorously enforced, for in Sir Thomas’s case the proofs were defective on the paternal side, and it was with a consciousness of this fact that he wrote a sort of half-historical romance, entitled the History of the Nairs, in which he endeavours to establish the supremacy of woman.

When I saw him in town, he was always wading at the British Museum, in the stagnant pool of genealogy, endeavouring in spite of his system, to discover the flaw in his escutcheon a mistake, and when he failed in so doing, used to contend that the only real nobility was in the female line. To what absurdity will not an idée fixe impart conviction, or the semblance of conviction!

After the publication of this strange History of the Nairs, he sent it with a letter to Shelley, referring him to a note in Queen Mab hostile to matrimony, and taxing him with apostacy from his principles, in having twice entered that state. This epistle produced an answer; I have not the whole of it, though it was published by Lawrence. Shelley says there, “I abhor seduction as much as I adore love; and if I have conformed to the uses of the world on the score of matrimony, it is” (the argument is borrowed, by the bye, from Godwin, in his Life of Mary Wolstonecraft,) “that disgrace always attaches to the weaker side.”

A decided anti-matrimonialist, the historian of the Nairs was by no means convinced by this argument. One evening he persuaded me to accompany him to the Owenite chapel, in Charlotte-street. In the ante-room, I observed a man at a table, on which were laid for sale, among many works on a small scale, this History of the Nairs, and Queen Mab, and after the discourse by Owen—a sort of doctrinal rather than moral essay, in which he promised his disciples a millennium of roast beef and fowls, and three or four days’ recreation out of the seven, equal division of property, and an universality of knowledge by education,—we had an interview with the lecturer and reformer, whom I had met some years before at the house of a Northumberland lady. On finding that I was connected with Shelley, he made a long panegyric on him, and taking up one of the Queen Mabs from the table, read, premising that it was the basis of one of his chief tenets, the following passage:

“How long ought the sexual connection to last? What law ought to specify the extent of the grievance that should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love one another. Any law that should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and most unworthy of toleration.”

If Lord Melbourne did not hold similar opinions, he at least thought there was no harm in encouraging them, by presenting Mr. Owen to our Queen. The question is, whether, in the present state of society, and with the want of education that characterises the sect of which Mr. Owen is the founder, the Socialists, their tenets are, or are not pregnant with danger. This philanthropist, however, certainly is sincere in believing the contrary; and up to this time experience seems to have confirmed his belief. He has spent his life, and expended his fortune in inculcating them; and a more thoroughly amiable and moral man does not exist. “He has had but one object in both hemispheres,” (to use the words of Frederica Bremer,) “to help the mass of mankind to food and raiment, in order that the mass may make provision for their mental improvement; for when the necessary wants are satisfied, man turns to those of a more general and exalted kind. Hence, when the great daywork of the earth is done with men, the Sabbath will begin, in which a generation of tranquil worshippers will spread over the earth, no longer striving after perishable treasures, but seeking those which are eternal; a people whose whole life will be devoted to the improvement of their mental powers, and to the worship of the Creator in spirit and in truth. Then the day will arrive in which the angels will say, ‘Peace upon Earth!!!’”

This edition of Queen Mab, that has led to the above quotation, bore the name of Brooks as publisher. It contains a beautiful frontispiece illustrative of the death of Ianthe, and as a motto, the well-known line from some Greek dramatist—probably Æschylus—which may be rendered: Give me whereon to stand, I’ll move the earth. Brooks did, or does, live at the bottom of Oxford Street, and I paid him more than one visit. He had a correspondent at Marlow, who knew Shelley, but whose name I have forgotten, from whom he obtained a copy of Queen Mab, which, like the Wandering Jew, had probably been left by Shelley’s inadvertence in his abode here. This copy was exceedingly interlined, very much curtailed and modified, as by a specimen given in a fragment entitled the “Demon of the World,” appended to “Alastor;” and what is still more important and worthy of remark, with the Notes torn out. The copy had been revised with great care, and as though Shelley had an intention at the time of bringing out a new edition, an idea which his neglect of his labour shews he soon abandoned. This emendated work is a great curiosity, and has scattered about the pages rude pen-and-ink drawings of the most fantastic kind, proving the abstraction of his mind during this pursuit. It was a comment that led me to many speculations, suggesting a deep sense of the obloquy of which he had made himself the victim, and betokening a fluctuation of purpose, a hesitation and doubt of himself and of the truth or policy of his theories. That Mr. Brooks (he was the publisher if not the printer of the Owenites) did not make use of the refacciamenti or pentimate in his numerous reprints of Queen Mab, may easily be conceived, for these very alterations were the only objectionable parts to him, and he would have thought it a sacrilege to have struck out a word of the original text, much less the notes. Queen Mab is indeed the gospel of the sect, and one of them told me, that he had found a passage in Scripture, that unquestionably applied to Shelley, and that the word Shiloh was pronounced in the Hebrew precisely in the same manner as his name.

It is much to be desired that Mrs. Shelley should endeavour to obtain this Queen Mab of Mr. Brooks. I have no doubt that he would estimate it at a price far beyond my means, nor have I made any overtures to him for the purchase, invaluable as its acquisition would be to me at this moment.

Before leaving Queen Mab I have a few words to add:—

There is a vast deal of twaddle in Moore’s Life of Byron, respecting early scepticism, where he says, “It and infidelity rarely find an entrance into youthful minds,” adding, “It is fortunate that these inroads are seldom felt in the mind till a period of life when the character, already formed, is out of the reach of their disturbing influence—when being the result, however erroneous, of thought and reasoning, they are likely to partake of the sobriety of the process by which they are acquired, and being considered but as matters of pure speculation, to have as little share in determining the mind towards evil, as too often the most orthodox creeds have at the same age of influencing it towards good.” What the sense of these words marked in italics may be, is beyond my comprehension. But in my way of thinking, it is when the reasoning powers are matured—the effervescence of youth has somewhat cooled down—when the self-sufficiency of scholarship, the pride of being thought to think differently from the generality of the world, the vanity of running a-muck against received opinions, has yielded to reason and judgment, and man begins to know that he knows nothing, that he ceases to arrogate to himself a superiority over his fellows—learns to become humble and diffident; and this is not a state of mind that leads to doubt. But as to the unfrequency of scepticism in youth, Moore never laid down a more false or unphilosophical axiom. Why, he must have forgotten Gibbon, and Southey, and Cowper, and Malherbe, and Coleridge, and Kirke White, and a hundred others, himself included, (vide Little’s Poems,) when he penned this startling and unborne-out proposition. If he means that, absorbed in dissipation, and carried away by their passions, most young men seldom reflect on subjects most worthy of reflection, I agree with him; but neither Byron nor Shelley were of this kind. They did not, as with the τολλος, take for granted what had been inculcated; they were not contented with impressions, they wished to satisfy themselves that their impressions were right, and both fell into scepticism, one from presumption and an overweening, foolish ambition of making himself out worse than he was; and Shelley from what he really thought “a matter of pure spe-culation;” the result, however erroneous, to repeat Moore’s words; “of thought and reasoning.” Little dependence is however to be placed on the profession of faith contained in the two letters Byron wrote to Mr. Dallas, at 20, (in 1808,) in which his object clearly was—an object he carried out all his life, with his biographer even more than any one else—mystification. Voltaire was his horn-book; but in the list of works he says he had studied in different languages, he only confesses to have read his Charles XII., though that scoffer at religion was his delight and admiration, and with him he fell into the slimy pool of materialism.

Shelley’s scepticism produced different fruits—he would never have joined with Matthews, Hobhouse, Scrope Davies, and “beasts after their kind,” in those orgies which were celebrated at Newstead, when with Byron for an Abbot, they travestied themselves in monkish dresses, and the apparatus of beads and crosses, and passed their nights in intemperance and debauchery. No, his way of thinking never affected the purity of his morals. “Looking upon religion as it is professed, and above all practised, as hostile instead of friendly to the cultivation of those virtues that would make men brethren, he raised his voice against it, though by so doing he was perfectly aware of the odium he would incur, of the martyrdom to which he doomed himself.” Mrs. Shelley beautifully remarks, “that older men, when they oppose their fellows, and transgress ordinary rules, carry a certain prudence or hypocrisy as a shield along with them; but youth is rash, nor can it imagine, while asserting what it believes to be right, that it should be denounced as vicious and pronounced as criminal. Had he foreseen such a fate, he was too enthusiastic, and too full of hatred of all the ills of life he witnessed, not to scorn danger.” That fate was at hand. But I anticipate.

On reading these beautifully imaginative lines, who will say with Wordsworth, that there is no poetry in a steam engine?

But “the Wierd Archimage,” as Shelley calls himself, was right in abandoning chemistry. I doubt, with Mr. Hogg, whether he would ever have made a natural philosopher. As a boy he was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place, made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning from the clouds—fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus. But its phenomena did not alone excite his interest. He thought “what a mighty instrument electricity might be in the hands of him who knew bow to wield it, and in what manner to direct its omnipotent energies; what a terrible organ would the supernal shock prove, if we were able to guide it; how many of the secrets of nature could not such a stupendous force unlock!” “The galvanic battery,” said Shelley, “is a new engine. It has been used hitherto to an insignificant extent, yet it has worked wonders already. What will not an extraordinary combination of troughs of colossal magnitude—a well arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect? Shelley also speculated on the uses of chemistry as applied to agriculture, in transmuting an unfruitful region into a land of exuberant plenty; on generating from the atmospheric air, water in every situation, and in every quantity; and of the power of providing heat at will,”—adding, “what a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in the winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply!”

“With such fervour,” adds Mr. H., “did the slender and beardless boy speculate concerning the march of physical science; his speculations were as wild as the experience of twenty years had shown them to be, but the zealous earnest-ness for the augmentation of knowledge, and the glowing philanthropy and boundless benevolence that marked them, are without parallel.”

We had been more frequent correspondents than ever, since he became an Oxonian, and our friendly controversies were carried on with greater animation. But at this period of time the tenor, though not the nature, of them has entirely escaped me, and as I can draw from a most authentic source his metaphysical speculations, I shall make use of these materials in another place when I come to treat of them.

Mr. Hogg says that “Shelley knew nothing of German, but from the glimmering light of translation;” there I think he is mistaken, for on the occasion of this visit he showed me a volume of tales which he had himself rendered from the original. During half an hour that we were together, (I passed the whole day with him) I perused these MSS., and they gave me a very low idea of the literature of that country, then almost unknown in England. It was evident that the books that had fallen into his hands were from the pens of very inferior writers; and I told him he had lost his time and labour in clothing them in his own language, and that I thought he could write much better things himself. He showed and read to me many letters he had received in controversies he had originated with learned divines; among the rest with a bishop, under the assumed name of a woman. “He had commenced this practice at Eton, and when he came to Oxford he retained and extended the former practice, keeping up the ball of doubt in letters, and of those he received many, so that the arrival of the postman was always an anxious moment to him. This practice he had learnt of a physician, from whom he had taken instructions in chemistry, and of whose character and talents he often spoke with profound veneration. It was indeed the usual course with men of learning, as their biographers and many volumes of such epistles testify. The physician was an old man, and a man of the old school; he confined his epistolary discussions to matters of science, and so did his disciple for a long time; but when metaphysics usurped the place in his affections, that chemistry had before had, the latter fell into discerptations respecting existences still more subtle than gasses and the electric fluid. The transition, however, from physics to metaphysics was gradual. Is the electric fluid material? he would ask his correspondent. Is light? Is the vital principle in vegetables?—in the human soul? His individual character had proved an obstacle to his inquiries, even whilst they were strictly physical. A refuted or irritated chemist had suddenly concluded a long correspondence by telling his youthful opponent that he would write to his master and have him flogged. The discipline of a public school, however salutary in other respects, was not favourable to free and fair discussion, and hence Shelley began to address his enquiries anonymously, or rather that he might receive an answer as Philalethes and the like; but even at Eton the postman did not understand Greek, and to prevent miscarriages, therefore, it was necessary to adopt a more familiar name, as John Short or Thomas Long.

“In briefly describing the nature of Shelley’s epistolary contentions, the impression that they were conducted on his part, or considered by him with frivolity, or any unseemly levity, would be most erroneous; his whole frame of mind was grave, earnest, and anxious, and his deportment was reverential, with an edification reaching beyond his age, an age wanting in reverence—an unlearned age—a young age for the lack-learning. Hume permits no object of respect to remain—Locke approaches the most awful speculations with the same indifference as if he were about to handle the properties of triangles; the small deference rendered to the most holy things by the able theologian Paley, is not the least remarkable of his characteristics. Wiser and better men displayed anciently, together with a more profound erudition, a superior and touching so-lemnity; the meek seriousness of Shelley was redolent of those good old times, before mankind had been despoiled of a main ingredient in the composition of happiness, a well directed veneration.

“Whether such disputations were decorous or profitable, may be perhaps doubtful; there can be no doubt, however, since the sweet gentleness of Shelley was easily and instantly swayed by the mild influences of friendly admonition, that had even the least dignified of his elders suggested the propriety of his pursuing his metaphysical inquiries with less ardour, his obedience would have been prompt and perfect.” It is to be lamented that all his letters written at this time should have perished, as they would throw light on the speculations of his active and inquiring mind.

Shelley was an indefatigable student, frequently devoting to his books ten or twelve hours of the day, and part of the night. The absorption of his ideas by reading, was become in him a curious phenomenon. He took in seven or eight lines at a glance, and his mind seized the sense with a velocity equal to the twinkling of an eye. Often would a single word enable him at once to comprehend the meaning of the sentence. His memory was prodigious. He with the same fidelity assimilated, to use a medical term for digestion, the ideas acquired by reading and those which he derived from reflection or conversation. In short, he possessed the memory of places, words, things, and figures. Not only did he call up objects at will, but he revived them in the mind, in the same situations, and with the lights and colours in which they had appeared to him at particular moments. He collected not only the gist of the thoughts in the book wherefrom they were taken, but even the disposition of his soul at the time. Thus, by an unheard-of faculty and privilege, he could retrace the progress and the whole course of his imagination from the most anciently sketched idea, down to its last development. His brain, habituated from earliest youth to the complicated mechanism of human forces, drew from its rich structure a crowd of admirable images, full of reality and freshness, with which it was continually nurtured. He could throw a veil over his eyes, and find himself in a camera obscura, where all the features of a scene were reproduced in a form more pure and perfect than they had been originally presented to his external senses.

“As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigour of his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life most conspicuous. His food was plain and simple as that of a hermit, with a certain anticipation at this time of a vegetable diet, respecting which he afterwards became an enthusiast in theory, and in practice an irregular votary. With his usual fondness for moving the abstruse and difficult questions of the highest theology, he loved to inquire, whether man can justify, on the ground of reason alone, the practice of taking the life of inferior animals, except in the necessary de-fence of his life, and of his means of life, the fruits of that field which he had tilled, from violence and spoliation. Not only have considerable sects, he said, denied the right altogether; but those among the tender-hearted and imaginative people of antiquity, who accounted it lawful to kill and eat, appear to have doubted whether they might take away life solely for the use of man alone. They slew their cattle, not simply for human gusto, like the less scrupulous butchers of modern times, but only as a sacrifice for the honour and in the name of the Deity, or rather of those subordinate divinities, to whom as they believed the Supreme Being had assigned the creation and conservation of the visible material world; as an incitement to these pious offerings, they partook of the residue of the victims, of which, without such sanction and sanctification, they would not have presumed to taste. So reverent was the caution of a humane and prudent antiquity. Bread became his chief sustenance; when his regimen attained an austerity that afterwards distinguished it, he could have lived on bread alone, without repining. When he was walking in London, he would suddenly turn into a baker’s shop, purchase a supply, and breaking a loaf, he would offer it to his companion. ‘Do you know,’ he said to me one day with some surprise, ‘that such a one does not like bread? Did you ever know a person who disliked bread?’ And he told me that a friend had refused such an offer. I explained to him that the individual in question probably had no objection to bread in a moderate quantity, and with the usual adjuncts, and was only unwilling to devour two or three pounds of dry bread in the street, and at an early hour. Shelley had no such scruples—his pockets were generally well stored with bread. A circle upon the carpet clearly defined by an ample verge of crumbs, often marked the place where he had long sat at his studies—his face nearly in contact with the book. He was near-sighted.”

Shelley frequently exercised his ingenuity in long discussions respecting various questions in logic, and more frequently indulged in metaphysical inquiries. Mr. H. and himself read several metaphysical works together in whole or in part, for the first time, and after a previous perusal by one or both of them. The examination of a chapter of “Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding,” would induce him at any moment to quit every other pursuit. They read together Hume’s Essays, and some productions of the Scotch metaphysicians of inferior ability, all with assiduous and friendly altercations, and the latter writers at least with small profit, unless some sparks of knowledge were struck out in the collision of debate. They read also certain popular French works, that treat of man for the most part in a mixed method, metaphysically, morally and politically. “We must bear in mind, however, that he was an eager, bold, and unwearied disputant, and although the position in which the sceptic and materialist love to entrench themselves, offer no picturesque attractions to the eye of the poet, it is well adapted to defensive warfare, and it is not easy for an ordinary enemy to dislodge him who occupies a post that derives strength from the weakness of the assailant. It has been insinuated that whenever a man of real talent and generous feelings condescends to fight under these colours, he is guilty of a dissimulation which he deems harmless, perhaps even praiseworthy, for the sake of victory in argument. It is not a little curious to observe one whose sanguine temper led him to believe implicitly every assertion, so that it was impossible and incredible, exulting in his philosophical doubts, when, the calmest and most suspicious of analists, he refused to admit, without strict proof, propositions, that many who are not deficient in metaphysical prudence account obvious and self-evident. The sceptical philosophy had another charm, it partook of the new and wonderful, inasmuch as it called into doubt, and seemed to place in jeopardy, during the joyous hours of disputation, many important practical conclusions. To a soul loving excitement and change, destruction, so it be on a large scale, may sometimes prove hardly less inspiring than creation. The fact of the magician, who by the touch of his rod, could cause the great Pyramid to dissolve into the air, and to vanish from the sight, would be as surprising as the achievement of him, who by the same rod, could instantly raise a similar mass in any chosen spot. If the destruction of the eternal monument was only apparent, the ocular sophism would be at once harmless and ingenious; so was it with the logomachy of the young and strenuous logician, and his intellectual activity merited praise and reward. There was another reason, moreover, why the sceptical philosophy should be welcome to Shelley,—at that time he was young, and it is generally acceptable to youth. It is adopted as the abiding rule of reason, throughout life, by those who are distinguished by a sterility of soul, a barrenness of invention, a total dearth of fancy, and a scanty stock of learning. Such, in truth, although the warmth of feverish blood, the light burthen of a few years, and the precipitation of experience, may sometimes seem to contradict the assertion, is the state of mind at the commencement of manhood, when the vessel has, as yet, received but a small portion of the cargo of the accumulated wisdom of past ages; when the amount of mental operations that have actually been performed is small, and the materials upon which the imagination can work are insignificant; consequently, the inventions of the young are crude and frigid. Hence the most fertile mind exactly resembles in early youth, the hopeless barrenness of those, who have grown old in vain, as to its actual condition, and it differs only in the unseen capacity for future production. The philosopher who declares that he knows nothing, and that nothing can be known, will readily find followers among the young, for they are sensible that they possess the requisite qualification for entering the school, and are as far advanced in the science of ignorance as their master. A stranger who had chanced to have been present at some of Shelley’s disputes, or who knew him only from having read some of the short argumentative essays which he composed as voluntary exercises, would have said, ‘Surely the soul of Hume passed by transmigration into the body of that eloquent young man, or rather he represents one of the enthusiastic and animated materialists of the French school, whom revolutionary violence lately intercepted at an early age in his philosophical career.’

“There were times, however, when a visitor who had listened to the glowing discourses delivered with a more intense ardour, would have hailed a young Platonist breathing forth the ideal philosophy, and in his pursuit of the intellectual world, entirely overlooking the material, or noticing it only to contemn it. The tall boy, who is permitted, for the first time, to scare the partridges with his fowling piece, scorns to handle the top or the hoop of his younger brother; thus the man, whose years and studies are mature, slights the feeble aspirations after the higher departments of knowledge that were deemed so important during his residence at college. It seems laughable, but it is true, his knowledge of Plato was derived solely from Dacier’s translation of a few of the Dialogues, and from an English version of that French translation. Since that time, however, few of his countrymen have read the golden works of that majestic philosopher in the original language, more frequently, and more carefully; and few, if any, with more profit than Shelley. Although the source whence flowed his earliest taste of the divine philosophy was scanty and turbid, the draught was not the less grateful to his lips. Shelley was never tired of reading passages from the dialogues contained in this collection, especially from the Phædo, and he was vehemently excited by the striking doctrines which Socrates unfolds, especially by that which teaches, that all our knowledge consists of reminiscences of what we had learnt in a former existence. He often even paced about his room, slowly shook his wild locks, and discoursed in a solemn tone with a mysterious air, speculating concerning our previous condition, and of the nature of our life and occupations in the world, where, according to Plato, we had attained to erudition, and had advanced ourselves in knowledge, so that the most studious and the most inventive, in other words, those who have the best memory, are able to call back a part only, and with much pain, and extreme difficulty, of what was familiar to us.”

This doctrine, introduced by Pythagoras, after his travels in India, and derived from the Gymnosophists, was received almost without question by several of the philosophers of Greece; and long before Shelley went to Oxford, had taken deep root in his mind, for he had found it in Coleridge and introduced it into the Wandering Jew. That Shelley should have been delighted in finding it unfolded in the Phædo, I can easily believe. It was a doctrine that vindicated the justice of the Gods; for, by it, the inequalities of conditions, the comparative misery and happiness of individuals, were reconciled to the mind, such individuals being rewarded or punished in this life for good or evil deeds committed in a former state of existence. The objection, that we have no memory of that state, is answered by the question, “Does a child of two years old remember what passed when he was a year old?” But it is Shelley’s opinion that it is permitted to some gifted persons to have glimpses of the past, and he thus records it:

“I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountable connection of which with the obscure parts of my own nature, I have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene that has produced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After a lapse of many years I have dreamed of this scene. It has hung on my memory, it has haunted my thoughts at intervals with the pertinacity of an object connected with human affections. I have visited this scene again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings such as neither singly could have awakened from both. But the most remarkable event of this nature which ever occurred to me, happened at Oxford. I was walking with a friend in the neighbourhood of that city, engaged in earnest and interesting conversation; we suddenly turned a corner of a lane, and the view, which its high banks and hedges had concealed, presented itself. The view consisted of a windmill, standing in one among many pleasing meadows, inclosed with stone walls. The irregular and broken ground between the wall and the road in which we stood, a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common one, the season and the hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought. It was a tame and uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk to the evening fireside and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on me was not such as could be expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen the exact scene in some dream of long.—Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome with thrilling horror.” Mrs. Shelley appends to this passage the following remark: “This fragment was written in 1815. I remember well his coming to me from writing it, pale and agitated, to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it excited.” “No man,” she adds, “had such keen sensations as Shelley. His nervous temperament was wound up by the delicacy of his health to an intense degree of sensibility; and while his active mind pondered for ever upon, and drew conclusions from his sensations, his reveries increased their vivacity, till they mingled with and were one with thought, and both became absorbing and tumultuous, even to physical pain.”

Balzac relates of Louis Lambert a similar phenomenon to the above:—“Whilst at school at Blois, during a holiday, we were allowed to go to the chateau of Rochambeau. As soon as we reached the hill, whence we could behold the chateau, and the tortuous valley where the river wound through meadows of graceful slope,—one of those admirable landscapes on which the lively sensations of boyhood, or those of love have impressed such a charm that we can never venture to look on them a second time,—Louis Lambert said to me,—‘I have seen all this last night in dream.’ He recognised the grove of trees under which we were, and the disposition of the foliage, the colour of the water, the turrets of the chateau, the lights and shades, the distances, in fine all the details of the spot which we had then perceived for the first time.” After some interesting conversation, which would occupy too much space here, Balzac makes Louis Lambert say,—“‘If the landscape did not come to me, which it is absurd to think, then must I have come to it. If I were here whilst I slept, does not this fact constitute a complete separation between my body and inward being? Does it not form a locomotive faculty in the soul, or effects that are equivalent to locomotive? Thus, if the disunion of our two natures could take place during sleep, why could they not equally discover themselves when awake?’ ‘Is there not an entire science in this phenomenon,’ added he, striking his forehead. ‘If it be not the principle of a science, it certainly betrays a singular faculty in man.’”

This holding up of politics as the τε καλον, was natural in one, who had renounced and recanted his faith for political power. I was present at a great dinner of Whigs, where one of them, an M. P., speaking of the nominees of election committees, who act as advocates on the side of their nominators, though they take the same oath as the other members of the committee, and his saying how easy it was for a man determined to believe, bending his mind to believe any thing, alias, making up his mind beforehand how he should vote. Such casuistry would have been lost on Shelley, to whom I detailed these sentiments, which he highly reprobated. The Duke of Norfolk talked to him many times, in order to convert him to politics, but in vain.

Shelley used to say that he had heard people talk politics by the hour, and how he hated it and them. He carried this aversion through life, and never have I seen him read a newspaper, incredible as it may appear to those who pass half their lives in this occupation.

Mr. Hogg remarks, that, “had he resolved to enter the career of politics, it is possible that habit would have reconciled him to many things which at first seemed repugnant to his nature; it is possible that his unwearied industry, his remarkable talents, and vast energy, would have led to renown in that line as well as any other, but it is most probable that his parliamentary success would have been but moderate; but he struck out a path for himself, by which boldly following his own course, greatly as it deviated from that prescribed to him, he became more illustrious than he would have been had he steadily pursued the beaten track. His memory will be green when the herd of every day politicians are forgotten. Ordinary rules may guide ordinary men, but the orbit of the child of genius is especially eccentric.”

Sir Timothy was a man entertaining high notions of genitorial rights, but of a very capricious temper; at one moment too indulgent, at another tyrannically severe to his children. He was subject to the gout, and during its paroxysms, it was almost dangerous to approach him, and he would often throw the first thing that came to hand at their heads. Shelley seems to allude to him, when he says,—

But I have since had reason, from undoubted authority, to change this opinion. On their separation, he delivered her back into the hands of her father and eldest sister. He told them almost in these words, that “his wife and himself had never loved each other; that to continue to drag on the chain, would only be a protraction of torture to both, and that as they could not legally extricate themselves from the Gordian knot, they had mutually determined to cut it. That he wished her all happiness, and should endeavour by sympathy with another, to seek it himself. He added, that having received no fortune with her, and her father being in easy circumstances, he was not at the moment able to make her the allowance he could wish; that the sum he then gave her, was all he could command; that as the child was an infant, he should for a time leave it in their hands, and care; but should at a more advanced age, claim it; and they parted on good terms, though not without reproaches and harsh language from the father.” Little or no blame as to the melancholy catastrophe that succeeded, could therefore be imputed to Shelley; that must fall on her relations, who with the knowledge of her character and conduct, by advice, or other measures, ought to have watched over both. Having once confided her to their superintendence, he might consider, with many others similarly circumstanced, that his responsibility was over. That he did not do so, his compunction, which brought on a temporary derangement, proves. De Quincey, in speaking of this circumstance, to which I alluded in a memoir of Shelley, says that the mention of it arose from a wish to gratify a fugitive curiosity in strangers; and adds, that it appears from the peace of mind which Shelley is reported afterwards to have recovered for a time, that he could not have had to reproach himself with any harshness or neglect as contributing to the shocking catastrophe. Without any compunctious visitings, however, morbidly sensitive as he was, well might it painfully excite him. Such a fate as hers, could not be contemplated even by the most indifferent stranger, without a deep sympathy; much more must the shock have come home to the feelings of one so intimately connected with her.

How pathetically does he in a dirge, not unworthy of Shakspeare, give vent to his agonised heart: “That time is dead for ever, child! Drowned, frozen, dead for ever;— We look on the past, And stare aghast, At the spectres wailing pale and ghast Of hopes that thou and I beguiled To death on Life’s dark river.”

“I have read all the papers left with me, and all the cases cited. With respect to the question of jurisdiction, it is unnecessary for me to add to what I have already stated, that this court has such jurisdiction, until the House of Lords shall decide any dispositions have been unwarranted by the exercise of it.

“I have carefully looked through the answer of the defendant, to see whether it affects the representation made in the affidavits filed in support of the petition, and in the exhibits referred to, of the principles and conduct of life of the father in this case. I do not perceive that the answer does affect the representation, and no affidavits are filed against the petition. Upon the case as represented in the affidavits, the exhibits, and the answer, I have formed my opinion; conceiving myself, according to the practice of the court, at liberty to form it, in the case of an infant, whether the petition in its allegations and suggestions has or has not accurately pre-sented that case to the court, and having intimated in the course of the hearing before me, that I should so form my judgment.

“There is nothing in evidence before me, sufficient to authorise me in thinking that this gentleman has changed, before he arrived at twenty-five, the principles he avowed at nineteen, and think there is ample evidence in the papers and in conduct that no such change has taken place.

“I shall studiously forbear in this case, because it is unnecessary, to state in judgment, what this court might or might not be authorised to do, in the due exercise of its jurisdiction, upon the ground of the probable effect of a father’s principles, of any nature, upon the education of his children, where such principles have not been called into activity, or manifested in such conduct in life, as this court, upon such an occasion as the present, would be bound to attend to.

“I may add, that the case differs also, unless I misunderstand it, from any case in which such principles having been called into activity, nevertheless in the probable range and extent of their operation, did not put to hazard the happiness and welfare of those whose interests are involved upon such an occasion as the present would be bound to attend to. This is a case, in which the matter appears to me the father’s principles cannot be misunderstood; in which his conduct, which I cannot but consider as highly immoral, has been established in proof, and established as the effect of those principles; conduct, nevertheless, which he represents to himself and to others, not as conduct to be considered as immoral, but to be recommended and observed in practice, and as worthy of approbation. I consider this, therefore, as a case in which the father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to be a matter of duty, which his principles impose on him, to recommend to those whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form, that conduct, in some of the most important relations of life, as moral and virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious,—conduct which the law animadverts upon, as inconsistent with the duties of parents in such relations of life, and which it considers as injuriously affecting both the interests of such persons, and those of the community.

“I cannot, therefore, think that I shall be justified in delivering over these children for their education, exclusively, to what is called the care, to which Mr. Shelley wishes it to be entrusted.

“If I am wrong in my judgment which I have formed in this painful case, I shall have the consolation to reflect that my judgment is not final.

“Much has been said upon the fact that these children are of tender years. I have already explained, in the course of the hearing, the grounds upon which I think that circumstance not so material as to require me to pronounce an order.

Let us turn to more cheering contemplations:

With a view of in some degree renovating his health, which had suffered from intense study, his strict Pythagorean system of diet, that by no means agreed with his constitution, and the immoderate use of laudanum, in which he sought for an opiate to his harassed feelings, and in the hope, by the distraction of new scenes, to dull their irritability, on the 28th of July 1814, Shelley, as appears by the second volume of the Posthumous Works, left London, accompanied by the present Mrs. Shelley, the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and another lady. With that contempt of danger from an element ever his delight, which characterised him, he embarked with them in an open boat from Dover, and not without exposure to a gale of wind on the passage, succeeded in reaching Calais, and thence proceeded to Paris, There, after remaining a week, they resolved to walk through France. He went to the Marché des Herbes, purchased an ass, and thus pilgrimaging, the gipsy party started for Charenton. There finding the quadruped useless, they sold it, purchased a mule, and continued their peregrinations.

The destitution and ruin which the Cossacks had, locust like, left everywhere behind them in their pestilential march,—the distress of the plundered inhabitants,—their roofless cottages, the rafters black, and the walls dilapidated, made a deep impression on Shelley’s mind, and gave a sting to his detestation of war and despotism.

Further pedestrianism being rendered impossible by a sprained ancle, he now bought an open voiture, on four wheels, for five napoleons, and hired a man with a mule, with eight more, to convey them to Neufchatel, which, after many inconveniences en route, they reached. A magical effect was produced on the travellers by the first sight of the Alps. They were, says the tourist, “a hundred miles distant, but reach so high in the heavens, that they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white, that ar-range themselves on the horizon during summer,—their immensity staggers the imagination, and so far surpasses all conception, that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they indeed form a part of the earth.”

With the improvidence peculiar to Shelley in pecuniary matters, he found that on his arrival at Neufchatel, his money was exhausted, and after obtaining thirty-eight pounds on the discount of a bill for forty pounds, at three months, (pretty good interest,) they journeyed on to Lucerne. On reaching the lake of Uri, they hired a boat. This romantic lake, remarkable for its deep seclusion and sacred solitude, is thus described: “The lake of Lucerne is encompassed on all sides by high mountains, that rise abruptly from the water. Sometimes their base points downwards perpendicularly, and casts a black shadow on the waves,—sometimes they are covered with thick wood, whose dark foliage is interspersed by the brown, bare crags, on which the trees have taken root. In every part where a glade shows itself in the forest, it appears cultivated, and cottages peep from among the woods. The most luxuriant islands, rocky and covered with moss, and bending trees, are sprinkled over the lake. Most of these are decorated by the figure of a saint, in wretched waxwork.”

After much search after a habitation, they at length domiciled themselves in two unfurnished rooms, in an ugly big house at Brunen, called the Chateau. These they hired at a guinea a month, had beds moved into them, and the next day took possession. It was a wretched place, with no comfort or convenience. It was with some difficulty that they could get any food prepared. As it was cold and rainy, they ordered a fire. They lighted an immense stove, which occupied a corner of the room, and when heated, they were obliged to throw open the windows, to prevent a kind of suffocation; added to this, there was but one person in Brunen who could speak French, a barbarous sort of German being the language of this part of Switzerland. It was with some difficulty, therefore, that they could get their ordinary wants supplied. Shelley’s amusement, meanwhile, was writing.

He commenced a romance on the subject of the Assassins. The fragment will be found in his Prose Works, and evinces much power, being a wonderful improvement on his former attempts of the kind. He drew his inspiration from the scenes that were before his eyes. “Nature undisturbed,” he says, “had become an enchantress in these solitudes. She had collected here all that was divine and wonderful from the armoury of her own omnipotence. The very winds breathed health and renovation, and the joyousness of youthful courage. Fountains of chrystalline water played perpetually among the aromatic flowers, and mingled a freshness with their odour. The pine boughs became instruments of exquisite contrivance, among which the ever varying breeze waked music of new and more delightful melody. Such scenes of chaotic confusion and harrowing sublimity, surrounding and shutting in the vale, added to the delights of its secure and voluptuous tranquillity. No spectator could have refused to believe that some spirit of great intelligence and power had hallowed these wilds to a deep and solemn mystery.” He adds, that “the immediate effect of such a scene suddenly presented to the contemplation of mortal eyes, is seldom the subject of authentic record.”

I have thought that the following passage bears some allusion to himself. “An Assassin, accidentally the inhabitant of a civilized country, would wage unremitting war from principle against the predilections and distastes of the many. He would find himself compelled to adopt means which they would abhor, for the sake of an object which they could not conceive that he should propose to himself. Secure and self-enshrined in the magnificence and preeminence of his conceptions, spotless as the light of heaven, he would be the victim among men, of calumny and persecution. Incapable of distinguishing his motives, they would rank him among the vilest and most atro-cious criminals. Great beyond all comparison with them, they would despise him in the presumption of their ignorance. Because his spirit burned with an unquenchable passion for their welfare, they would lead him, like his illustrious master, amidst scoffs and mockings and insults, to the remuneration of an ignominious death.”

Such were some of his contemplations,—the prognostics, though not of his future destiny—to that extent—of a moral crucifixion. Speaking of the Fragment, Mrs. Shelley says, “There is great beauty in the sketch as it stands,—it breathes that spirit of domestic peace and general brotherhood, founded on love, which he afterwards developed in the Prometheus Unbound;” and she might have added, in other of his works.

It had been the intention of the party to cross the St. Gothard, at the foot of which they were, and make an excursion into the north of Italy, but the idea was soon abandoned. They resolved to return to England, from which they were distant eight hundred miles. Was it possible, with twenty-eight pounds? enquires the tourist;—but there was no alternative—the attempt must be made. They departed from Lucerne in the coche d’eau for Loffenburg, a town on the Rhine, where the falls of that river prevented the same vessel from proceeding any further. There they engaged a small canoe to convey them to Mumph. “It was long, narrow, and flat-bottomed, consisting mostly of deal boards, unpainted, and nailed together with so little care, that the water constantly poured in at the crevices, and the boat perpetually required emptying. The river was rapid and sped swiftly, breaking as it passed on innumerable rocks just covered with water. It was a sight of some dread to see the frail boat winding among the eddies of the rocks, which it was death to touch, and where the slightest inclination on one side would inevitably have upset it.”

After a land-adventure, the breaking down of a caleche at Mumph, they with some difficulty reached Basle, and where, taking their passage in another boat, laden with merchandise, they bade adieu to Switzerland.

“We were carried down,” says the tourist, “by a dangerously rapid current, and saw on each side, hills covered with vines and trees, craggy cliffs, crowned by desolate towers and wooded islands, whose picturesque ruins peeped from between the foliage, and cast the shadows of their forms on the troubled waters without defacing them.”

Having reached Rotterdam, they embarked for England, and encountering another storm on the bar, where they were for some time aground, landed in London, on the 13th August.

I have heard Shelley frequently dilate with rapture on the descent of the Rheuss and the Rhine. The remembrance of both, never faded from his memory, and furnished additional stores to his poetic mind, to be treasured up for after days, and reproduced in forms of surpassing sublimity and loveliness.

Yet though his imagination had been en-chanted by the aspect of Nature in all her wonders, his bodily health was rather deteriorated than improved by the fatigues of this painful journey; the first part of it performed on foot beneath the burning suns, and through the arid plains and dusty roads of France; and the latter under exposure to the chill blasts of the snowy Alps, and the cold air of open boats. Money difficulties, the worst of all the evils of this life, had also contributed to blunt in a great degree the charm; for the harass of ways and means lies like a weight of lead on the spirit, and palsies enjoyment. He had spent during the six weeks, sixty pounds, and was obliged even to go on credit at Rotterdam for his passage money, in order to be enabled to set foot on his native shores.

When arrived there, he had to look forward to four months before he could hope to receive a single pound note of his anticipated allowance. His father’s heart was steeled in obduracy, and with that hatred between fathers and sons which seems hereditary in the family, Sir Timothy shut his purse and his doors against him.

The estate, as it was supposed, was strictly entailed; consequently his coming into the property depended on his surviving his father. His own life was not insurable, and was in so precarious a state that he had no possibility of raising money on his contingency. He was now destined, therefore, to suffer all the horrors of destitution. He says in the Cenci,— “The eldest son of a rich nobleman, Is heir to all his incapacities,— He has great wants, and scanty powers.”

How he contrived to live during almost a year in the metropolis, I know not; but he pathetically describes his situation in Rosalind and Helen:— “Thou knowest what a thing is poverty, Among the fallen on evil days; ’Tis crime, and fear, and infamy, And houseless want, in frozen ways Wandering, ungarmented, and pain; And worse than all, that inward stain, Foul self-contempt, which drowns in tears Youth’s starlight smiles, and wakes its tears, First like hot gall, then dry for ever. And well thou knowest, a mother never Would doom her children to this ill,— And well he knew the same.”

Under the prospect of being forced to support himself by a profession, he applied his talents to medicine, which he often told me he should have preferred to all others, as affording greater opportunities of alleviating the sufferings of humanity. He walked a hospital, and became familiar with death in all its forms,—“a lazar house, it was,”—I have heard him quote the passage— “wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased—all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture—qualms Of heart-sick agony—all feverish kinds;” and where “Despair Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch.” And here, he told me, he himself expected it would have been his fate to breathe his last. His wants were, indeed, few; he still continued, contrary to the advice of his physician, his vegetable diet; for none but a Pythagorean can tell with what a repugnance he who has once tried the system, reverts to the use of animal food. But few as his wants were, his means were scarcely able to supply them, and he has been often known to give a beggar the bread required for his own support.

He was not at that time acquainted with one, of whom I have often heard him speak with a gratitude and respect so justly due, and who is as much distinguished for the qualities of his heart as his talents;—why should I not name him?—Horace Smith. To his generous sympathy Shelley was throughout the latter part of his life greatly indebted. His purse was ever open to him, and in those pecuniary embarrassments, which his extreme generosity to others often entailed on him, he never applied to his valued friend in vain.

But at the beginning of the year 1815, his worldly prospects brightened; the Shelley set-tlement, which is well known by lawyers, and quoted as a masterpiece of that legal casuistry called an entail, was found to contain an ultimate limitation of the reversion of the estates to the grandfather. A celebrated conveyancer, I believe the friend whom I have already mentioned in a former part of these memoirs, has the credit of having made this important discovery; and the consequence was, the fee simple of the estate, after his father’s death, was vested in Shelley.

He was thus enabled to dispose of it by will as he pleased; and not only this, he had the means of raising money to supply his necessities. Sir Timothy was well aware of his son’s position, but was not prepared for the discovery of it. The news fell upon him like a thunderbolt, he was furious; but being desirous of benefitting his family, by the advice of a solicitor, made some arrangement; but whether on a post obit, or what terms, I know not, with Shelley, for an annuity of eight hundred pounds a-year. Doubtless he took care to have good security for the same.

After living some time under Leigh Hunt’s roof, in the spring of 1817, Shelley took a house at Marlow, and there passed nearly a year. His choice of Buckinghamshire, and of this town, as an abode, was chiefly owing to its being at an easy distance from London, and on the banks of his favorite river the Thames. Here it was, that in addition to Prince Athanase, some minor lyrics, and part of Rosalind and Helen, he composed “The Revolt of Islam,” and wrote a pamphlet, now lost, on the occasion of the Princess Charlotte’s death, entitled, “The Hermit of Marlow.” In the spring of 1835, I made an excursion to Marlow, in order to visit scenes, that were among the sources of inspiration of Laon and Cythna, as the first edition of The Revolt of Islam was entitled. The house he inhabited was pointed out to me, by almost the first person, a middle-aged man, of whom I enquired. It was in a retired street, and commanded no view—a comfortable abode, with gothic windows, and behind it a garden and shady orchard plot, of some extent, carpeted with the greenest turf, which must have afforded a delightful retreat in the summer noon. Not only the town itself, with its church and bridge, and old buildings, is highly picturesque, but the environs are strikingly beautiful, and remarkable for their fine country seats; Daney, so called from a Danish camp having once existed here, whose entrenchment may still be traced,—Hanneker, built by Inigo Jones, and many other noble residences, inhabited by families of wealth and distinction, diversify the landscapes, and make them an enchantment. Nor must I forget the fall of the river, over an artificial embankment immediately above the town, where the eye crossing the richest meadows, rests on the lovely beech groves of Bisham Abbey. “In no place are riches and poverty presented in more prominent contrast. Lace-making is the occupation of the poor, women being the operatives, who lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they are badly paid. The poor-laws ground to the dust those who had just risen above pauperage, and were obliged to pay them. The changes produced by peace following a long war, were heavily felt; the trade which had been their support, flowing into other channels, produced great destitution and misery, which a bad harvest contributed to enhance.” Shelley had a very early sympathy for the working classes. I remember the very harrowing effect which Southey’s Don Espriello’s Letters produced on him in 1810 or 1811; one of the most frightful, faithful pictures ever drawn of the wretchedness, vice, and immorality that seem necessary concomitants of an overproduction of manufactures. The impression this feelingly written work made on Shelley, was ineffaceable, and gave rise to the apostrophe in Queen Mab,— “Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade No solitary virtue dares to spring, But poverty and wealth with equal hand Scatter their withering curses, and unfold The doors of premature and violent death, To pining famine, and full-fed disease, To all that shares the lot of human life, Which poisoned body and soul scarce drags the chain That lengthens as it goes, and clanks behind.” And again: “His host of blind and unresisting dupes The despot numbers, from his cabinet These puppets of his schemes he moves at will, Even as the slaves by force or famine driven, Beneath a vulgar master, to perform A task of cold and brutal drudgery— Hardened to hope—insensible to fear— Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine, Mere wheels of work and articles of trade.”

In a note appended to these passages, penned with all that sincerity and conviction of truth, that uncompromising spirit that characterises all his writings, a note in which he deprecates the luxury of the rich, calling it “a remedy that aggravates, while it pollutes the countless divisions of society,” he adds that “the poor are set to labour—for what? Not for the food for which they famish—not for the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels—not those comforts of civilization, without which, civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage, oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him. No! for the pride of power—for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society.”

In this town of Marlow, he had an opportunity, not of visiting quite such loathsome dens as described in these “Letters of a Spaniard,” where the factory lords stifle their victims in the great hotbeds of crime and pollution, Manchester and Leeds,—but he saw enough to shock and disgust him. He did all in his power to alleviate the condition of the poor lace-makers of Marlow; “he visited them in their damp and fireless abodes—he supplied them with blankets and coals and food and medicines, and from tending one of the sick, caught the opthalmia, which nearly deprived him of sight.”

These facts I had confirmed by a lady still resident there, one of its great ornaments, who did ample justice to Shelley’s memory, and related many individual anecdotes of his benevolence and charity, that called for her warmest sympathy and admiration. I may add, that his name is still perpetuated among the inhabitants, who are proud of having harboured the poet, and counted him among their number. I was surprised indeed, considering the low and disgraceful state of education in England, to find that any of them were acquainted with his works, and hailed the circumstance as a pledge of his immortality,—and an immortal work is the Revolt of Islam.

He had originally, it would seem, after the Divine Comedy, intended to have written it in terza rima, of which he made an experiment in Prince Athanase; but soon after abandoned that metre, as too monotonous and artificial, and adopted instead the stanza of Spencer, which he wields as none have ever done before him. The fragment of Prince Athanase is valuable, as the first conception of a great picture by a great master. In this sketch of the prince, we find the germs of the character of Laon. Athanase is a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, animated by a resolution to confer the boons of civil and religious liberty on his fellow men; and the poet doubtless meant to have created for him a companion endued with the same enthusiasm.

A lovelier creature than Cythna, heart never conceived—a purer love than those of Laon and Cythna words could not express. The story I shall not analyse—it is indeed treated with the simplicity of Grecian art, and might have furnished Canova or Thorwalsden with a subject for a series of bas reliefs.

This poem occupied six months. It was composed as he floated in his skiff on the Thames, reclined beneath its willow and alder fringed banks, or took refuge from the noonday solsti-cian heats, in some island only the haunt of the swan. A Marlow gentleman told me, Shelley spent frequently whole nights in his boat, taking up his occasional abode at a small inn down the river, which I imagine must have been at Cookham. We find everywhere scattered about this poem, strikingly faithful drawings of the scenery near and about Marlow; and with the Revolt of Islam in my hand, I for nearly a month, traversed the stream up and down, from the sequestered and solemn solitudes of the deep woods of Clifden, on the one hand, to the open sunniness of the enamelled meadows of Henley on the other, and often fancied myself in the very spots so graphically drawn. The opening in that most graceful dedication,— “So now my summer task is ended, Mary, And I return to thee,”— proves that he had been passing this summer in great isolation from his family, and is a tribute to the virtues of one of the noblest-minded of her sex,—“a child of glorious parents,” as he styles her, and inheriting much of the talent of both, which has gained for her a name, reflecting honour on either.

The life which Shelley led at Marlow, occasionally varied by short trips to London, was, as far as the society of the place was concerned, a most isolated one. Among his principal amusements, were boating and pistol practice, and it was complained that he “frightened the place from its propriety;” and one of his neighbours pretended that she was afraid of going out for fear of being shot; no doubt a very false alarm. Among his visitors may be mentioned, Mr. Peacock, and his old college friend, Mr. Hogg; to the latter of whom we are indebted for filling up so important a chasm in Shelley’s history, his Oxonian career,—materials, of which I have largely availed myself. The first of these gentlemen has not had the reputation to which Nightmare Abbey, and his other novels, justly entitled him. “They were too good for his age,” as Byron said. But there is a work of Mr. Peacock’s, to which a more glaring injustice has been done,—I allude to Rododendron. The first time I met with that exquisite poem, was at Paris, where I saw it lying on a lady’s table. She told me it was her favourite poem, and that she read it several times every year, and with increased pleasure.

It is something to have contributed to the happiness of one human being. Shelley agreed with her as to the merits of Rododendron, for he says,—“It is a book from which I confess, I expected extraordinary success.” But although containing passages that throw into shade all that Rogers and Campbell in their cold and stilted Didactics have produced, it fell dead from the press. Let the author console himself in this age of reviews and coteries, with the reflection, that the Epipsychidion met afterwards with a similar fate,—that it rose from its ashes, and that his may yet do so; if it should not, I hope that in the island where Ariosto places all the lost treasures of earth, may be preserved among those neglected works, which have like straws been swept down the current of time, for the recreation of “the Translated” Rododendron.

In six months of this year, to write and correct the press of such a work as Laon and Cythna, was no slight task; perhaps the mental excitement gave a diversion to his thoughts, and it must have required a rare power of self-condensation and abstraction, to have enabled him to write under the different afflictions that beset him. The publicity of the proceedings in Chancery, coupled with the death of his wife, raised a host of detractors against him; Queen Mab was universally decried, his children made over to strangers—and to crown all, his health in a very precarious state. He had formed an idea that the situation of his house at Marlow was an insalubrious one—that a warm climate was absolutely essential to him; and this, and various other reasons, among which, the conviction that the breach between himself and his relations was irreparable, weighing more than all the rest—induced him to come to a resolution of quitting England, with scarcely a hope of revisiting it.

Not less affecting are the lines written In Despondency.* How horrible is the calm in the tempest of his affection—how exquisite the pathos conveyed by the closing stanza:— “Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are. I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care, Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till Death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air, My heart grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o’er my outworn brain its last monotony.”

The line stands thus in my copy—outworn for dying.

And again, after her death, whether a violent or a natural one I know not, what a desolation of spirit there is in—

Not less charming are Shelley’s remarks on the group of the Bacchus and Ampelus in the same gallery.

“Look! the figures are walking as it were with a sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, and this is expressed in the motion of their delicate and glowing forms. One arm of Bacchus rests with its entire weight on the shoulder of Ampelus, the other, the fingers being gently curved, as with the living spirit that animates the flexible joints, is gracefully thrown forward to correspond with the advance of the opposite leg. He has sandals, and buskins clasped with two serpents’ heads, and his leg is cinctured with their skins. He is crowned with vine-leaves, laden with their crude fruit, and the crisp leaves hang with the inertness of a faded leaf over his neck and massy, profuse, down-hanging hair, which gracefully divided on his forehead, falls in delicate wreaths on each side his neck, and curls upon the breast. Ampelus, with a young lion’s or lynx’s skin over his shoulders, holds a cap in his right hand, and with his left half encircles Bacchus, as you may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the playground, with that tender friendship for each other that the age inspires. The countenance of Bacchus is sublimely sweet and lovely, taking a shade of gentle and playful tenderness from the arch looks of Ampelus, whose cheerful face turned towards him, expresses the suggestion of some droll and merry device. It has a divine and supernatural beauty, as one who walks through the world untouched by its corrupting cares. It looks like one who unconsciously confers pleasure and peace. The countenance of Ampilus is in some respects boyish and inferior, that of Bacchus expresses an imperturbable and godlike self-possession—he seems in the enjoyment of a calm delight, that nothing can destroy. His is immortal beauty.”

In this city he saw one of those republics that opposed for some time a systematic and effectual resistance to all the surrounding tyranny of popedom and despotism. “The Lombard League,” he says, “defeated the arms of the despot in the field, and until Florence was betrayed into the hands of those polished tyrants the Medici, freedom had one citadel, where it could find refuge from a world that was its foe.” To this cause he attributed the undisputed superiority of Italy in literature and the arts, above all its contemporaries; the union and energy and beauty which distinguish from all other poets the writings of Dante; the restlessness of fervid power which surpassed itself in painting and sculpture, and from which Raphael and Michael Angelo drew their inspiration.

It was during his stay in Florence, that he first saw the critique in the Quarterly Review of 1818, on his Laon and Cythna, or a Revolution of the Golden City, a Vision of the Nineteenth Century, as it was first entitled; better known as the Revolt of Islam: a review, be it here said, that has always endeavoured to crush rising talent—never done justice to one individual, whose opinions did not square with its own in religion or politics.

A friend of mine, the late Lord Dillon, mentioned to me an anecdote of Shelley, with reference to the article in question, which is too characteristic to be passed over in silence. His lordship observed at Delesert’s reading-room, a young man very earnestly bent over the last Quarterly. It was Shelley, and when he came to the end of the paper, to the irresistibly ludicrous comparison of himself to Pharaoh, where the Crispinus pompously says, “Like the Egyptians of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of mighty waters closes in from behind, a still deepening ocean is before him, for a short time are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard, his despair, but he poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him in the same ruin, finally he sinks like lead to be forgotten.” When he came to this specimen of bathos, this stick after the explosion of the rocket, Shelley burst into a convulsive laughter, closed the book with an hysteric laugh, and hastily left the room, his Ha! ha’s ringing down the stairs.

As the Edinburgh Review was unprophetic as to Byron, its great rival’s predictions about Shelley were equally falsified. It has been the crying evil of all times, that early genius has been ever depressed. There is scarcely a great poet from the time of Milton, down to the present day, who has not proved a mark for the invidious malice of his contemporaries. But among all authors of a past or present age, none has been more unjustly handled than Shelley, as this April number before me testifies. If it was written, as Byron supposed, by one who afterwards borrowed most largely from him whom he vituperates, and who has been raised far above his petty standard—elevated on stilts—in the pages of that very veridical review which assumes to be the oracle and guide of literature, his depreciation of one whom he feared might one day make him hide his own diminished head, will be more easily intelligible, though the condemnation of his scepticism came with an ill grace from an individual, and that person* a priest, who has since endeavoured in a more systematic way, to sap the very foundations of Christianity, by depriving of its prophetic character, the Old Testament, and resolving all its miracles into the effects of natural causes; for which he was visited, and justly, with the loss of his professorial chair in Divinity. Poetry—at least poetry