foundation of his Society of Philanthropists: and here he spoke for more than an hour in the presence of O'Connell and other celebrities. Shelley was truly impressive in discussion, or in grave and elevated conversation: Medwin says "in eloquence he surpassed all men I have ever conversed with," and according to Trelawny "he left the conviction on the minds of his audience that, however great he was as a poet, he was greater as an orator." Even "his ordinary conversation is akin to poetry," says the loving Lieutenant Williams. But it is probable that in this instance in Dublin he did not shine as a speaker. Chief Baron Woulfe recollected his speaking "at a meeting of the Catholic Board" (perhaps the same occasion), pausing now and anon, and delivering his slow sentences as so many disconnected aphorisms. It may also have been at the Fishamble Street gathering that Shelley claimed for Protestants rights not inferior to those of Catholics-and no doubt they already enjoyed much more than an equality: but the Catholic audience were savage, and silenced and threatened their undaunted instructor. This did not augment his Irish enthusiasm; neither did personal intercourse with the renowned Mr. Curran, for whom Godwin had sent him a letter of introduction, and whom he found a sufficiently prurient and buffoon-like old gentlemanqualities always and peculiarly distasteful to Shelley. In after years, an obscene story, or ribaldry of set purpose, would suffice to make him rise from his chair, and leave the room. He stayed in Dublin long enough, it would seem, to receive a hint from the police that his absence would be a convenience; long enough also to begin, with "a literary friend," a voluminous History of Ireland, of which 250 pages had been printed by the 20th of March. Nothing further is known of this performance. He had likewise had a project of taking a share in a newspaper. Somewhere about the end of March the Shelleys and Eliza left Dublin. They passed through the Isle of Man; ranged about North and South Wales in search of a residence; paused at and again left a "haunted" house at Nant-Gwillt near Rhayader; flitted through Cwm Elan; and at last, from the 5th of July, settled down for a short while at Lymouth in North Devonshire. They had a small unpretending cottage in a beautiful locality. At the end of August they left. Godwin, * The speech is to be found in the Dublin Evening Post for 29th February 1812. after much urging, came down on the 18th of September to pay them a visit, only to find they had vanished. His sympathies and intellectual curiosity had been greatly excited by the letters Shelley had addressed to him. The next and rather less brief sojourn was at Tanyrallt, near Tremadoc in Carnarvonshire, where Shelley hired a commodious cottage or country-house belonging to a gentleman named Madocks, who was engaged on extensive works for reclaiming land from the sea-several thousand acres. Here, and apparently at Lymouth previously, Shelley, with his usual unreflecting enthusiasm of goodwill, received an additional inmate—a Miss Elizabeth Hitchener. This lady was a deist and republican, who kept a school in Sussex, at Hurstpierpoint, and whom Shelley invited away from the sphere of her operations with no motive seemingly save admiration of her independence of mind -an admiration which, indeed, for some months before and after his elopement with Harriett, exceeded all bounds of proportion and sound judgment. It is to be presumed that he supported her at Tanyrallt, and he certainly subsidized her afterwards: for, as "the Brown Demon" (such is the sole title which this estimable person obtains in printed Shelleyan records) proved sovereignly distasteful to Eliza, and hence to Harriett and Shelley himself, the connexion was severed in November of this same year, and Shelley felt bound to indemnify her to some extent for her damaged prospects. This was not now from love; for he disposes of the Brown Demon in one monumental sentence -"What would hell be, were such a woman in heaven?" A much more signal instance of his splendid generosity and public large-heartedness occurred about the same time. An uncommonly high tide broke through the embankment of Mr. Madocks's earthworks, to the great dismay and peril of the cottagers. Shelley went about personally soliciting subscriptions (a task which was likely to be especially unpleasant to him, as his letters speak of his neighbours as being in a high degree bigoted and prejudiced), and himself headed the list with £500-much more than a year's precarious income. He also hurried up to London early in November to push the subscription there, and had the satisfaction of saving the work. Here, after a long interval in which they had lost sight of each other, he again saw Hogg, who was now studying in the Temple: here also he made Godwin's personal acquaintance, and stayed awhile in his house. A letter of 19th February 1813, written to Mr. Hookham the publisher, after the poet's return to Tanyrallt, marks another act of genuine liberality, though only on a small scale. He was "boiling with indignation" at the tyrannical sentence of fine and imprisonment (£1000 and two years) passed upon Leigh Hunt and his brother John for an alleged libel on the Prince Regent printed in the Examiner; and he proposed a public subscription to pay off the fine, and sent for the purpose £20, which appears to have been about all the money he had available at the time even for his own requirements. The Hunts honourably declined to avail themselves of the proposal, and of a subsequent offer of 100 from Shelley during their imprisonment. This was not the first time that Shelley had had something to do with Leigh Hunt; for, on the occasion of the failure of a government prosecution against the Examiner, he had written to him from Oxford (2nd March 1811), without any personal acquaintance, "to submit to his consideration a scheme of mutual safety and mutual indemnification for men of public spirit and principle." By the date of the sentence for libel he had met Hunt, but not on an intimate footing. The residence at Tanyrallt came to an end in a startling and mysterious manner. On the night of the 26th of February an attempt to assassinate Shelley in his own house was made, or was supposed or alleged to have been made. For some unexplained reason, Shelley, on retiring to bed that night, had expected to have occasion for pistols, and had loaded a brace. Hearing a noise in one of the parlours, he got out of bed with his pistols, and saw a man who fired upon him. A struggle ensued, in which Shelley twice returned the fire, with dubious result: the ruffian, vowing outrage and murder on Eliza and Harriett, ran away. But he returned about three hours afterwards, and shot through Shelley's night-gown and the window-curtain; another struggle ensued, with sword and pistols; a newly-engaged Irish * There is nothing like understanding and attending to the facts of a case, whichever direction they may bear in. It has often been said that the attack made by Leigh Hunt upon the Prince Regent was some slight affair of ridicule or depreciation; calling him "a fat Adonis of sixty," according to Hogg. This is quite untrue: the assault was as virulent as it was well-deserved. One phrase no doubt is "that... this Adonis in loveliness' was a corpulent gentleman of fifty;" but (besides other severities) the very next sentence has anything but a bantering tone :— In short, that this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal Prince' was a violator of his words, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity." · man-servant named Daniel arrived, and the assassin again made off. Such is the account given by Harriett in a letter to Mr. Hookham, who had been implored to send funds to enable the Shelleys to quit their Cambrian Castle Dangerous, and retreat to Dublin.* The Shelleys went to the solicitor-general of the county," and had an investigation set on foot. No trace could ever be found of the assassin. The Shelleyan theory was that a certain Mr. Leeson,t a man whom they avoided as "malignant and cruel to the greatest degree," was at the bottom of the affair. The Leesonian and irreverent theory was at least as tenable primâ facie-viz., "that it was a tale of Mr. Shelley's to impose upon the neighbouring shopkeepers, that he might leave the country without paying his bills." People in general, along with Messrs. Hogg, Madocks, and Peacock, and Mr. Browning among later analysts, have disbelieved the story, and attributed it to an excited imagination, or nerves unstrung by laudanum : Hogg suggests that the Irishman Daniel may possibly have had something to do with it. The night was one of rain, and "wind as loud as thunder," which may have started, in Shelley's perturbed brain, the notion of pistol snappings: it is a fact, however, that some pistol was really fired. One singular point (hardly hitherto dwelt on) is that Shelley expected, on going to bed, to need his firearms: if the expectation was a mere fantasy, the subsequent assumed actual need of them may have been the same. But Lady Shelley and Mr. Thornton Hunt discover no ground for scepticism: "Miss Westbrook was also in the house at the time, and often, in after years, related the circumstance as a frightful fact." This last evidence is of great weight, and must give us pause before we dismiss the whole story as delusive. Miss Westbrook became one of Shelley's bitterest enemies, and certainly would not, out of any consideration for him, have upheld" in after years" his account of the matter. But it is conceivable that, having at first committed herself to a figment, she found it impossible afterwards, for her own sake if not for Shelley's, to recant. Here I must leave A preliminary brief and agitated letter from Shelley to Hookham is dated 3d March in Hogg's Life-in the Shelley Memorials it is given without any date. I think 3d March must be incorrect; for it seems clear the missive was dispatched immediately after the event, and, if so, on 27th February. This is the name in the Shelley Memorials: in Hogg's Life it is Luson. VOL. I. this still debateable mystery, not having any such space as would be needed for really setting forth its evidences for and against. A short stay in an uninviting house, No. 35 Great Cuffe Street, Dublin, preceded a tour to Killarney, uniting enjoyment with discomfort—more satisfactory at any rate to the Shelleys and Miss Westbrook than to Hogg, who, arriving in Dublin by invitation, learned that they had left for the lake-trip. And, when Shelley and Harriett (in brief respite from Eliza, who remained at Killarney) returned on purpose to the Cork Hotel, Dublin, on the 31st of March, Hogg had started back to London. These little incidents may stand as a sample of the hurried and unconcerted movements in which Shelley was continually engaging. The spouses left Dublin again about the 4th of April; and why they had ever gone thither, unless to be far from Tanyrallt, or as a stage towards a holiday at Killarney, is not apparent. They experienced a storm near the Isle of Man, when Shelley, in the judgment of the skipper who would receive no payment from him, saved the ship and its crew of three by his energetic and judicious exertions.* They reached the house of Mr. Westbrook in Chapel Street in May. Eliza soon joined them in London, where they took to living in hotels for awhile; but she was apparently not just now a fixed member of their household. They afterwards lodged in Halfmoon Street; seeing much of Hogg, and of other society, including some literary acquaintances-nothing of Shelley's own relatives. Somewhere about this time, but presumably a little later, Shelley indulged his wife in a whim to set up a carriage; and the culpable extravagance was very near sending him to prison for debt. On or about the 28th of June Harriett was delivered of her first child, Ianthe Eliza,† at Cooke's Hotel, Dover Street: it was a very easy confinement. There was some blemish in one of Ianthe's eyes; her mother did not nurse her, but handed her over to the cares of a wet-nurse whom Shelley disliked; and Eliza, whom he was now getting to loathe, was continually *It is not quite clear when this incident happened. Medwin (Life, vol. i. p. 177) says it was in November, and after the first Dublin sojourn; in the Shelley Papers he says it was in 1813 or 1814. If it was really in 1813, it must have been in going to or returning from the second Dublin sojourn. It cannot have been in 1814, nor yet in the month of November. Perhaps the whole story is apocryphal. † Now Mrs. Esdaile. |