numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinions in relation to religion and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet. But they wore their rue with a difference. Everyone of them adopting some of the articles of the faith of their general church, had each nevertheless some predominant crotchet of his or her own, which left a number of open questions for earnest and not always temperate discussion. I was sometimes irreverent enough to laugh at the fervour with which opinions utterly unconducive to any practical result were battled for as matters of the highest importance for the well-being of mankind. Harriet Shelley was always ready to laugh with me, and we thereby both lost caste with some of the more hot-headed of the party.'1

It was but too true. Harriet was 'no philosopher,' and the fact was beginning to be discovered. She had actually laughed at the follies of the blue-stocking coterie. But if we seek for any further signs or grounds of alienation, it would be difficult to discover them-the inferences which Professor Dowden draws from certain poems are very far-fetched—and, at any rate, there could be little real alienation between him and Harriet when he went through the ceremony of re-marriage on March 24, 1814, to avoid any difficulty which might arise in case the former marriage had not been valid. This was only four months before he finally deserted his wife. On April 18 Mrs. Boinville writes to Hogg, 'Shelley is again a widower; his beauteous half went to town on Thursday.'2 Such language would not have been used if there had been any alienation between them. About the end of May or beginning of June, while his wife was at Bath, Shelley was in London on business, and there he met Mary Godwin, daughter of Godwin by his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. He fell violently in love with her, and in spite of the entreaties of Harriet, in direct opposition to the wishes of Mary's father, he left with her for the Continent secretly on July 28. We may conclude the history of Harriet here. Shelley is, we believe, freed from the accusation of having left her without means of support; so far he acted on what he imagined were principles of honour, and he did not intend entirely to desert her. With a strange ignorance both of a woman's character and of the ordinary usages of Western society, after he had inflicted upon her what was at the very least a terrible insult, he suggested that she should come and live near them-he would have even liked her to remain in his house. When she persisted in refusing this generous offer she was called 'unreasonable,' and Shelley begins to pose as the wronged person. Two years afterwards 2 Ibid. p. 410.

' Dowden, vol. i. p. 38

she committed suicide. We are informed she had degraded herself by another connexion; if so, we really fail to see that she had done more than her husband had done first. The moral indignation of those who defend him and condemn her is certainly misplaced. We are informed that Shelley was not in any way responsible for her death. We absolutely refuse to believe this. If she did fall after he deserted her, it was entirely owing to the lessons he had taught, and to the misery and loss of self-respect that his cruel desertion had caused. When he heard of her death his remorse was acute, he began to recognize the meaning of his heartless conduct.

Stated as we have stated it, Shelley's conduct was not only immoral, it was in the highest degree selfish. We will now examine the excuses which his admirers make for his conduct. In the first place, we are told that Harriet had been unfaithful to him, or, rather, that he thought she had been. The evidence for this rests on an unsupported statement of Godwin; on a manuscript note in her diary made by Jane Clairmont recording a statement of Mary's that she had been persuaded by Shelley to flee with him, because he said that Harriet had been unfaithful; and lastly, a doubtful allusion made by Shelley in a letter to Southey which certainly contains some untrue statements. Professor Dowden acknowledges that the charge was absolutely groundless. We really doubt whether Shelley ever believed it himself; he certainly only did so because he wished to do so. In any case he is equally culpable whether he invented-or rather imagined-the charge, or believed it on no evidence at all. But we are told that Harriet had herself left Shelley. The only authority for this statement is Thornton Hunt. His testimony is not accepted when he says anything detrimental to Shelley's character. The statement is quite inconsistent with the evidence both of Peacock and Hogg, and it is surely incompatible with a letter written by Harriet at the beginning of July, asking anxiously after her husband because she had not heard from him for four days. Nor, again, can we give much credit to Shelley's own statement made in the Chancery suit, 'Delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by the most incurable dissensions.' In the same paper he states that Queen Mab was published two years before it first appeared. It is one of the many instances in which Shelley saw facts through the distorted glass of his own feelings. Neither from his letters nor other evidence do we get any support for the statement, and we have Peacock's distinct assertion that until he met Mary Godwin there were no signs of any real discord. We

are quite willing to admit that there had been breaking of illusions on both sides, that Harriet had begun to see that Percy was sometimes ridiculous, that Percy had discovered that Harriet was without philosophy; it is true, probably, that he had never really loved Harriet, and that he fell suddenly and violently in love with Mary; but in none of these facts can any adequate excuse be found for his conduct.

We are sometimes told that Shelley did not believe in the sanctity of marriage, and that because he believed that only so long as two persons love one another they should live together, he is thereby justified. He merely carried out into practice the views which he had honestly (and perhaps rightly) arrived at. No one can resist the convictions of reason; no one can be condemned for acting according to his convictions. This is a doctrine which is becoming popular, and is certainly convenient, especially when the teaching of reason and passion harmonize. We will suggest another example. Suppose a man to be as firmly convinced that over-population is the cause of certain social evils at the present day, just as Shelley thought marriage was the cause of other evils. He would certainly have good authority for holding such views. Supposing, impelled purely by such lofty notions, he was then to kill the two orphan children of his elder brother and become the possessor of a large property; or suppose, not to take such an extreme case, he was to go down a crowded street in a poor district when the children were out of school and was to begin a wholesale murder. He would have much to say on his side, but the world would hold him to be an inhuman monster. Certainly it is very pleasant if it is sufficient to hold an immoral opinion to justify an immoral action. The fact is that Shelley had sinned, and sinned grievously; he had broken not only the code of society, but his own; he had not only stolen Mary from her father's house, he had also deserted Harriet. However leniently we may judge him, we must not hide this from ourselves. He had sinned, and the penalty he had to pay was the penance of a lifetime. He had to endure the loss of friends, the calumny and hatred of the world; he was deprived of the children whom he loved by a court whose judgment was rendered necessary by his conduct and opinions. He found himself continually exposed to misrepresentation and suspicion. His poetry found few readers, his ideals no sympathy. He had cut himself off from any possibility of influencing his contemporaries. If he had sinned in heedlessness, he paid a terrible expiation.

But if on this charge we must condemn Shelley, on others

even worse which were made against him, and to which we need only refer, it is equally obvious that he was not guilty. There is not a particle of evidence of any value to support them. We learn very clearly how the suspicions arose. They were greedily devoured by a public which believed every scandal of the 'Satanic' school, but no good evidence has ever been brought forward in their favour, and the testimony of Shelley's own wife, of Trelawny, of Peacock, even of Byron, is enough to refute them. But let us pass to pleasanter subjects.

The most striking feature in the life of Shelley is the continued marks of progress that it shows. As a boy there was much that was attractive about him. He was full of eager passion to satisfy his mental appetite; there was much strong sympathy for suffering, and violent, if erratic, affectionateness. But at the root of all was an absolute refusal to submit to any sort of discipline, or to acknowledge any form of authority. We are told that he loved his father when quite young, but that love seems soon to have disappeared when obedience was demanded. Already at school he had gained the title of atheist, probably because of the habit he had learnt of cursing his father and the king. Oxford demanded that he should read Aristotle, so he resolutely persisted in devouring Plato. He himself says, in an often quoted pas

sage:

'Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught,

I cared to learn.'

In this line of autobiography he certainly has given a truer account of his earlier life than is the habit of himself and other poets. Any one who attempted to restrain him he dubbed a tyrant, and he invariably refused to learn anything he was taught. No doubt part of his passion for science arose from the fact that it was forbidden at school, and hardly taught at Oxford. It was his boast that he had 'heaped knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,' and in this grandiloquent way he accurately illustrates one of the worst defects of his character.

The closing years of his life present us with an altered Shelley; there is much, indeed, of the old Adam there, much impetuosity, much violence of language, and want of restraint. But there is a great change. Experience, sufferings, the inevitable discipline of the world had begun to work; his character is beginning to form, his intellect to mature; above all, his poetical powers burst out with surprising richness.

Almost all that is really great in his poetry is the work of these years in Italy, and in all he wrote there is a continual work of progress, a progress as much the result of greater thoughtfulness as of greater poetic skill.

In the Ode to the West Wind in 1819 he writes:—

'A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee-tameless, and swift, and proud.'

And the melancholy verses in Adonais in which the poet describes himself are well known :

''Midst others of less note came one frail form,

A phantom among men, companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness
Acteon-like; and now he fled astray

guess,

With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way
Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.

'A pard-like Spirit, beautiful and swift,

A love in desolation masked-a Power
Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour.
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,

A breaking billow ;-even whilst we speak

Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly; on a cheek

The life can burn in blood even while the heart may break.'

We only ask our readers to contrast such passages as these from the poems of later life with representations of the poet's self taken from early works, such as Alastor. The poetry of the earlier period describes the conventional tragic poet in the language of immature genius. Not only is the work of the later period superior artistically, it is also more genuine. It does not deal in stagy melodramatic heroes; it is the real outpouring of a true character. Lyric poetry is always egotistic. It may often reflect only a passing feeling, but it must represent one that is genuine. Shelley's later poems are softer in their tone, and the offspring of true self-knowledge

'Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong,

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.'

And the beautiful side of Shelley's character is that neither his sufferings nor his errors had taught him to be a cynic.