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faces or shaking middle-aged heads over this escapade of a youth just nineteen years of age, we shall do much better to regard it as a beautiful example of chivalry shining through juvenility; or, if the calculating habit is still strong upon us, we may compute what percentage of faultlessly Christian young heirs of opulent baronets would have acted like the atheist Shelley, and married a retired hotel-keeper's daughter offering herself as a mistress. To deny that the act was foolish would be absurd under any circumstances, and doubly so when we reflect upon the ultimate issue of it to Shelley and Harriett themselves: let us then distinctly recognize that it was foolish, and no less distinctly that it was noble.

VII. MARRIED LIFE WITH HARRIETT.

The bridegroom and bride took groundfloor lodgings in George Street, Edinburgh, a handsome house on the left side of the recently built street, and were soon joined there by Hogg. The poet had borrowed £25 from Mr. Medwin (his connexion by marriage, a solicitor at Horsham, and father of his schoolfellow and subsequent biographer), but without letting him into the secret of the approaching elopement : he was expecting also to receive £75 at the end of the month. All supplies from his father were now cut off. But Mr. Westbrook made some allowance to the young couple which has been stated (probably very much over-stated) at £200 per annum ; it was clearly not always forthcoming in time of need. Besides this, Shelley raised money on his expectations from time to time; and must be viewed as now living in a state of permanent embarrassment-not far removed, however, from a modest sufficiency, save at moments of exceptional pressure. In a letter of 5th July 1812 he speaks of himself as having an income of £400 per annum from his relatives; but there is no ground for thinking that by any means as much did really come in to him year by year during his first marriage.

accrue to her. Recovered. Found he could not agree. Separated." The more obvious motive for marrying-that of avoiding obloquy to the woman, and impediments in any future effort to do good-is distinctly put forward in a letter of Shelley to Godwin, 28th January 1812 (Hogg, vol. ii. pp. 63-4), and in other letters that I have seen, in which Shelley treats the whole affair as natural and right, save only the act of formal marriage-a truckling to custom which needs and receives reiterated apology. The statement of Dr. Polidori that the poet in early youth expected a very short lease of life is fully confirmed by a remark made by Mrs Shelley (p. 91) relative to Queen Mab, and the period, 1812-13, when it was written. "Ill-health made him believe that his race would soon be run; that a year or two was all he had of life."

In October,* Hogg returned to York, and the Shelleys accompanied him they all three took lodgings with some dingy milliners of advanced age-the Misses Dancer, in Coney Street. Bysshe (he was designated by this name in his own family, and as yet by Harriett) went to London and Cuckfield to negotiate with his father. For the while, nothing could mollify the offended parent, and the poet returned to York: but towards the beginning of 1812 the allowance of £200 was renewed, accompanied by a gracious message from Mr. Shelley senior "that his sole reason for so doing was to prevent his son's cheating strangers.” This meagre but convenient result closed a series of attempts at coming to terms, in the course of which Bysshe gave a noble proof of his ideal purity of principle. About the beginning of December Captain Pilfold told him of a meditated proposal from his father and grandfather of an immediate income for him of £2000 per annum (Shelley wrote of it as a capital fund of £120,000) on condition that he would entail the estate on his eldest son, or, in default of issue, on his younger brother John. This Shelley rejected, not only with peremptory decision, but with consuming indignation. That he should be supposed capable of entailing all this "command over labour" upon a possible fool or scoundrel!

Meantime, and just before his return to York, Miss Westbrook had arrived there as pre-arranged, and had taken possession of the establishment, and especially of Harriett, who had always been much under her control, and looked up to her with a long-confirmed habit of trustful and almost daughterly affection. Besides, she was quite destitute of housewifery. Shelley found himself at once an infinitesimal quantity; Harriett was a cipher, and Hogg a zero. Eliza Westbrook, overruling everything that everybody else wanted to do, solicitous for Harriett's hitherto unapparent nerves, dominating her by the terrible query "What would Miss Warne say?"-and brushing her own harsh but glossy black hair for hours in her bedroom-is an inimitable portrait limned by the equally skilful and ruthless hand of Mr. Hogg. That she may have meant well he allows; and more than this will not readily be conceded by the reader who regards Shelley, and his comfort and proper position in his own house, as of somewhat more consequence

* Hogg gives the date as "the end of October:" I believe it was really the beginning of that month, or perhaps the end of September.

*

than the managing and fussing propensities of this mature spinster. Her undisputed function as regulator of the household economy appears in the small fact that, when she was soon afterwards with the Shelleys in Dublin, Eliza kept the common stock of money in a blind corner of her dress, and told it out as occasion required.

About the beginning of November, Shelley, with his wife and sister-in-law (the latter probably supplying the funds on this occasion), went off to Keswick, in the Lake-country of Cumberland: scenery and economy both attracted him thither. They lived partly in a small furnished house, Chesnut Cottage, at a rent of thirty shillings a week, which was afterwards reduced. The Duke of Norfolk (through whom Shelley had already tried to make terms with his father) invited all three to Graystoke, and did his best, in a kindly and handsome spirit, to promote their comfort. Southey also called upon Shelley; and they met-to use the elder poet's own phrase-" upon terms, not of friendship indeed, but of mutual good will." Southey admired Shelley's talents at this time, and believed his heart to be kind and generous. The writings of the future Laureate, as likewise of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Landor's Gebir, were among those for which Shelley, in early youth, had a particular predilection of the older English poetry he then knew very little. By the time of his sojourn in Cumberland, however, Shelley had come to regard Southey-not as yet Wordsworth-as guilty of tergiversation, and this feeling increased into indignant disgust, before his departure, in consequence of some fulsome adulation of George the Third which the author of Wat Tyler had just been publishing: but in personal intercourse Shelley prized him, and could even, soon after their first meeting, speak of him as “a great man." De Quincey was another casual acquaintance at Keswick. Here the Shelleys and Miss Westbrook remained till the beginning of February 1812.† Bysshe could not be long anywhere without having an adventure of some sort. Accordingly, to accept his own account contained in a letter of 26th January, a robbery had just then been attempted on his person, and he was only saved from undefined

*Miss Westbrook married eventually, I am informed.

I have seen a letter of Shelley's, written from Keswick, inscribed outside "Single sheet, by God," for every postman to read. He had had reason to consider himself overcharged by the post under the old regulations concerning single or double sheets. This is exquisitely Shelleyan.

ill-consequences by happening to fall within the limits of his house. The same letter mentions (for the first time, I think) that he had been taking laudanum medicinally; possibly in this instance-and not in this one alone-the laudanum and the idea of the perilous adventure may have been connected as cause and effect.

From Keswick, on the 3rd of January, Shelley began one of his wonted volunteered correspondences-this time with the eminent publicist and novelist William Godwin. Soon before leaving Eton he had read that author's Political Justice; and he looked upon the book as having exercised an important influence on his character, rousing him from merely romantic notions, and showing that he had duties to perform. Shelley was now, spite of some dissuasion from Godwin (who evidently responded to his letters in a friendly and judicious spirit, though the answers are not on record), meditating a journey to Dublin, with a view to furthering Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Union; he had already prepared an address to the Irish people. He was also writing (as one of his printed letters expresses it) "An Enquiry into the Causes of the Failure of the French Revolution to benefit Mankind." From other sources of information I learn that this was in fact a tale or novel, by name Hubert Cauvin: he had written about two hundred pages of it by the 2nd of January, but in all probability it was never finished. One of his assertions to Godwin regarding his father is very startling. "My father... wished to induce me by poverty to accept of some commission in a distant regiment; and, in the interim of my absence, to prosecute the pamphlet [the Necessity of Atheism], that a process of outlawry might make the estates, on his death, devolve to my younger brother." He speaks of it as an entailed estate of £6000 per annum; of this, it seems, the feesimple vested, upon his father's death, in Shelley, who could dispose of it by will,—and, besides the entailed estate, there was other property to a similar amount which could be cut off from Percy. From his statement above quoted, we may perhaps assume, as a fact in Shelley's career, that his father, after the Oxford esclandre, had wished him to enter the army; but for the rest Hogg's terse observation is indisputable. "It is only in a dream that the prosecution, outlawry, and devolution of the estate, could find a place. . . . It would have been too large a requisition upon the reader's credulity to ask him to credit them

in the father of Zastrozzi or of St Irvyne." Fortunately for himself, Hogg had probably not read St Irvyne, or he would have found that that name designates a locality, and not a man.

The Irish project, at any rate, was "not all a dream." Shelley arrived in Dublin, with Harriett and Eliza, about the 24th of February 1812, after a tedious and stormy voyage which had driven them to the North of Ireland. His address was 7 Lower Sackville Street, and afterwards 17 Grafton Street. He at once issued, with his name, his Address to the Irish People-a mean-looking pamphlet of twenty-two pages, for which, it appears, no publisher would venture to be responsible. The edition was 1500 copies. Shelley pitched his diction in a purposely low key, to suit his readers; the tone is juvenile as well as commonplace, but does not tend to advocating any forcible or illegal acts on the contrary, there are the usual tritenesses about the violence which destroyed the French Revolution, and which should on no account be imitated by the Irish patriots, about a peaceful progress towards perfectibility, and the like. The pamphlet had a considerable sale, and met with some newspaper eulogy. It was Shelley's custom to throw copies from his balcony to passers-by who looked "likely" recipients, and to distribute the pamphlet in the street: on one occasion, walking out with Harriett, he popped a copy into a lady's hood, making his bride "almost die of laughing." The Address was followed by another pamphlet, of eighteen pages-Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists who, convinced of the inadequacy of the moral and political state of Ireland to produce benefits which are nevertheless attainable, are willing to unite to accomplish its Regeneration. By Percy B. Shelly. Here again the youthful agitator thought he had guarded against the dangers and disadvantages of associations (much enforced by Godwin) by providing for the publicity of meetings, and the optional secession of members. Nothing, however, save total abandonment of the Irish scheme, could satisfy the author of Political Justice: so, about the middle of March, Shelley, who most sincerely reverenced Godwin from afar, withdrew his pamphlets, and prepared to retire from the scene and field of Hibernian politics, profoundly moved by the misery and ignorance he had witnessed in Dublin. Meanwhile he had attended in person at least one political meeting, on the 28th of February, in Fishamble Street Theatre, with a view to the

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