THE REAL SHELLEY.
VOL. II.

THE REAL SHELLEY.

NEW VIEWS OF THE POET’S LIFE.

BY
JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
AUTHOR OF
‘THE REAL LORD BYRON,’ ‘A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,’
‘A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS,’ &c. &c.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1885.
All Rights reserved.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

THE REAL SHELLEY.

CHAPTER I.

WILLIAM GODWIN.

Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies—Godwin’s Early Story—From Socinianism to Deism—In the Service of Publishers—Hack-Work—Political Justice—Caleb Williams—Temperance and Frugality—Godwin’s two imprudent Marriages—His consequent Impoverishment—His personal Appearance—His Speech and Manner—His morbid Vanity—His Sensitiveness for his Dignity—His Benevolence and Honesty—Good Husband and good Father—Looking out for a suitable Young Woman—Mary Wollstonecraft—Godwin’s Regard for her—Mary in Heaven—A Blighted Being.

To guard against imputations of error, that may be unjustly preferred against this work on the authority of another man of letters, it is needful for me to call attention to certain inaccuracies of Mr. Kegan Paul’s chief literary performance. In Chapter VII., Vol. II., of William Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries, Mr. Kegan Paul remarks, ‘The attraction which Godwin’s society always possessed for young men has often been noticed, nor did it decrease as years passed on. Two young men were drawn to him in the year 1811, fired with zeal for intellectual pursuits, and desiring help from Godwin. They were different in their circumstances, but were both unhappy, and both died young. The first was a lad named Patrickson, the second Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ In this characteristic sentence, Mr. Kegan Paul makes at least three blunders. As Patrickson was corresponding with William Godwin in December, 1810, the youth was drawn to the man of letters before 1811. As Shelley never saw William Godwin, never wrote him a line, before 1812 (though Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy states otherwise, on the strength of a misread passage of one of the Oxonian Shelley’s epistles), he certainly did not make Godwin’s acquaintance in 1811. As he was corresponding with him for many months before he set eyes on him, Shelley was not in the first instance drawn to the author of Political Justice by his social charms. It is characteristic of Mr. Kegan Paul that the page on which he declares Patrickson to have made Godwin’s acquaintance, no earlier than 1811, faces the very page that exhibits the greater part of a letter from the man of letters to his ill-fated protégé, dated ‘Skinner Street, London, December 18th, 1810.’

At the opening of the next chapter of his book of blunders, Mr. Kegan Paul holds stoutly to his statement that Shelley and Godwin were in correspondence twelve months before they exchanged letters. Instead of being headed ‘1812-14,’ as it would have been, had it not been for this droll misconception, Chapter VIII., Vol. II., of the book is headed ‘The Shelleys, 1811-14,’ and opens with a short paragraph containing these words, ‘The first notice of Shelley in the Godwin Diaries is under date January 6th, 1811, “Write to Shelley.”’ To heighten the confusion, for which I am slow to think Godwin’s diary in any degree accountable, the biographer says in his next paragraph, ‘Shelley was at this time living at Keswick, in the earlier and happier days of his marriage with Harriet Westbrook.... He had already, in this manner, made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, when, in January, 1811, he wrote thus to Godwin’:—the letter thus submitted to the reader’s notice being Shelley’s well-known first letter to Godwin, which appears in Hogg’s Life under the right date, ‘January 3rd, 1812,’ but in Mr. Kegan Paul’s medley of mistakes under the wrong date of ‘January 3rd, 1811.’ As Shelley’s first letter to Leigh Hunt was dated 2nd March, 1811, it was not written before 3rd January, 1811. As Leigh Hunt took no notice of that letter, Shelley did not make Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance by writing it. Though Leigh Hunt saw and spoke with Shelley on one or two occasions of earlier time, he cannot be fairly said to have made his acquaintance before a day long subsequent to 3rd February, 1815.

What an assemblage of errors in half-a-page of print! It is conceivable that the usually careful Godwin in his diary gave the wrong number to the new year,—a mistake made occasionally even by precise journalists. But if it was so, instead of being misled by the slip into a series of bad blunders, Mr. Kegan Paul should have detected and amended it. Here is the list of blunders:—

Blunder No. 1.—A wrong date of 1811 for 1812 at the head of the chapter.

Blunder No. 2.—The same wrong date to the extract from the diary.

Blunder No. 3.—The same wrong date in the author’s original writing.

Blunder No. 4.—The same error in the date given to the letter.

Blunder No. 5.—The biographer’s own mistake of saying that Shelley was living at Keswick in January, 1811,—months before his expulsion from Oxford.

Blunder No. 6.—The biographer’s own mistake of saying that Shelley and Harriett Westbrook were husband and wife on 3rd January, 1811,—eight calendar months before the date of their wedding.

Blunder No. 7.—The biographer’s own mistake of saying Shelley’s first letter to Leigh Hunt was dated before 3rd January, 1811.

Blunder No. 8.—The biographer’s own mistake of saying Shelley made Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance by writing that letter.

Blunder No. 9.—The biographer’s own mistake (of years), touching the date when Shelley made Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance.

Nine errors of fact in half-a-page of light print by a gentleman who has put himself before the world as an authority on matters of Shelleyan story, and who in doing so has done not a little for the obscuration of the record. Mr. Kegan Paul is one of those accurate writers, from whom Mr. Froude has warned me not to differ. In due course something more will be said of Mr. Kegan Paul’s services to Shelleyan research, but for the moment readers are invited to give their attention to a more notable man of letters.

Born at Wisbech, Co. Cambridge, on 3rd March, 1756, William Godwin was in his fifty-sixth year when he received Shelley’s letter of entreaty for sympathy and guidance. The son of a Dissenting minister, who never rose to any eminence or a higher stipend than 60l. a-year in his vocation, William Godwin was reared amongst people of lowly fortune and rude manners, in the eastern counties, receiving in his boyhood, from teachers of no singular efficiency, an education neither greatly better nor greatly worse than the training ordinarily given to English boys of his social degree in the later half of the last century. On escaping from these schoolmasters, one of whom he had served in the capacity of an usher, the future man of letters went to the Hoxton College in order to qualify himself for his father’s calling; and on leaving that seminary he officiated for a few years as a Non-conforming minister, preaching and otherwise labouring in a way of life for which he soon discovered his unfitness, first at Ware in Hertfordshire, then at Stowmarket in Suffolk, and then at Beaconsfield, Co. Bucks. A volume of sermons, published some while after their delivery to rural congregations, still remains in evidence that if Godwin in his days of irregular reverence was as good a preacher as the average Non-conforming pulpiteers of his period, Dissenters were edified in George the Third’s earlier time with worse sermons than is generally supposed.

Ere long the young minister discovered that he could not believe what he was bound to teach. That from manhood’s threshold he was more than slightly disposed to religious scepticism is shown by the curious disputation he held on paper, during his last year at Hoxton, with a fellow-student, the question of the strictly private and confidential controversy being the existence of the Deity. Could he have proved to his satisfaction the existence of the Almighty, Godwin conceived he would be troubled by no doubt of the truth of Christianity, nor by any disposition to quarrel with the refinements of Calvinistic doctrine. Under these circumstances Godwin took the negative side in the secret controversy, hoping that his arguments would be demolished and his faith settled by his fellow-collegian. The result of the conflict does not appear. Possibly the paper war satisfied the doubter that he could conscientiously enter the ministry. If so, it only suppressed for a period the doubts that determined Godwin a few years later to seek another means of livelihood. At Beaconsfield (1783) he was converted to Socinianism by Priestley’s Institutes. Five years later he had passed through Socinianism into Deism.

On becoming a Unitarian he took the ordinary course of a young man who, too poor to live in idleness, and too honest to live by daily falsehood, possesses studious tastes and literary aptitude. Coming to London he sought employment of the publishers, and contrived to live hardly, painfully, temperately, as a book-maker and publisher’s hack, whilst he persisted in the labours of a student. Producing in his twenty-eighth year a Life of Lord Chatham, for which he got nothing, and the Defence of the Rockingham Party, for which Stockdale paid him five guineas, he went on reading strenuously and writing as he best could,—throwing off articles for the English Review at two guineas a-sheet, turning out forgotten novels for which he was paid from five to twenty guineas, translating for Murray the French MS. Memoirs of Simon Lord Lovat; doing whatever work came to hand, till he was appointed at sixty guineas per annum to write the historical part of Robinson’s New Annual Register, and to contribute articles to the Political Herald,—two engagements that, coming to him in his thirtieth year, gave him at the same time a sense of success and a sense of financial security.

The poverty and hardship, in which he had been trained from childhood till he dropt the title of ‘Reverend’ and determined to live honestly by the pen instead of living dishonestly by the pulpit, were serviceable to the booksellers’ hack, whom they had taught how to live with comfort and contentment on a precarious number of weekly shillings. The young man, who dined sufficiently well on a chop and potato, and conceived himself to have dined luxuriously after consuming a large beefsteak and a pint of porter, had in some respects the advantage of literary competitors, who together with higher culture had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge a taste for higher living. On approaching middle life he could, however, have afforded to relinquish the frugal habits formed during his early struggles. The persevering hack, who steadily prosecuted various studies whilst toiling for the publishers; the religious inquirer, who passed through Socinianism on his way from Calvinism to Deism; the resolute Radical, who sought the justification of his political sentiments in philosophical principles, whilst living in close friendship with Thomas Holcroft, and cordial good fellowship with Thomas Paine, was a man, certain to achieve eminence sooner or later in the republic of letters. If it came to him less than soon, celebrity came to Godwin none too late for its perfect enjoyment. He was still in his thirty-eighth year, when he published Political Justice,—the work for which Robinson is said to have paid him, at different times, sums amounting to a thousand guineas; the work that made him famous as a teacher of philosophical Radicalism. If it made him the best-abused man of the three kingdoms, this daring and in some respects superlatively unsound book rendered him the idol of political enthusiasts in every quarter of the country. Unalluring in design, repellent in style, usually guarded in expression, sold at a price that kept it from the hands of the multitude whom it was intended chiefly to benefit, the frigid and passionless work, whose principles could not fail to make it regarded with disfavour by the majority of the wealthier class, possessed no feature or quality, apart from its attractive title, its aims and its general audacity, to humour the popular taste and win popular applause. For such a work shrewd judges of the book-market might well have predicted commercial failure. It was, however, successful from every point of view. Successful for its immediate and later effect on the readers it was especially intended to influence, it was fortunate in a sale that exceeded the anticipations of author and publisher, and fortunate in the determination of the Government to take no measures to check its circulation.

Published in 1793, Political Justice was still rising in public esteem, when Godwin produced (in May 1794) Caleb Williams; a novel that was largely indebted for its singular popularity to the influence of the political treatise. The books may be said to have run together, and united in placing their author amongst the most famous writers of his generation,—the success of the novel stimulating the success of the scientific study, whilst admiration of the philosopher’s reasonings quickened the interest in his work of fancy. Whilst readers hastened eagerly from the tale of terror to the work of unemotional demonstration, others passed with curiosity from the volumes of the political philosopher to the pages of the enthralling story. In the annals of English letters there is no other case of an author, achieving almost at the same moment so sensational a celebrity in two such different departments of literary enterprise.

In the days when Political Justice and Caleb Williams were new literature, eminently successful authors derived less emolument from their most popular writings, than comes now-a-days to authors of inferior merit from works of only average popularity. But putting him in pecuniary ease for the moment, Godwin’s double triumph (though he sold the novel for a curiously small sum) placed him in a position that, to a man of his industry and frugal habits, was a promise of security from financial discomfort, so long as he retained his power of working, and persisted in the ways of prudence. That he was not likely to fall into poverty through self-indulgence appeared from his way of living when fortune smiled upon him. Remaining in the little house in Somers Town, where his yearly expenditure never exceeded 130l., he showed no disposition either for the pleasures of luxury or the pleasures of ostentation.

How came it that the man of letters, so averse to every kind of prodigality, dropt in a few years into the very troubles from which his industry and temperance seemed certain to preserve him, and, after falling into poverty in life’s middle term, whilst the productions of his pen were still fairly remunerative, passed the long remainder of his laborious years in one, vain humiliating conflict with financial embarrassment? The answer is that, with every good reason for persisting in celibacy, and no single sound excuse for surrendering the advantages of singleness, he made two imprudent marriages,—the second of which was only a few degrees less imprudent and unfortunate than the earlier alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft. In other than financial respects Godwin suffered severely from these unions. It might almost be thought that the divine powers, who have been assumed to concern themselves especially with the affairs of lovers, determined to punish the arch-maligner of lawful matrimony, by luring him into the estate he had decried, and then rendering him a signal example of some of the evils that may ensue from wedlock. It is strange that the man, who in celibatic freedom spoke so hardly of marriage, endured in later time so much from the honourable estate he had warned others to avoid. Strange also that, instead of being confirmed in his philosophic disapproval of wedlock by what he endured in his own person from marriage, he survived his repugnance to the whilom detestable institution, and towards the close of his career stoutly maintained he had never regretted either of the marriages for which he paid so dearly.

Though it is impossible for a sane biographer to write of William Godwin with enthusiasm, or any kind of cordial admiration, no fair one can deny that, if he was deficient in the graces requisite for a hero of biographical romance, the author of Political Justice possessed several admirable qualities. To take a fair view of the man, who suffered severely for kindness shown to Shelley, readers should toss aside as a mere humorous fabrication Miss Mitford’s story of the way in which the bookseller of Skinner Street used to go ‘down on his knees, flourishing a drawn dagger’ at Shelley’s feet, and ‘threaten to stab himself if his dutiful son-in-law would not accept his bills.’ They must also throw away as vile tattle all the stories of William Godwin’s delight at finding himself the father-in-law of a young gentleman who might some day be a baronet. Whatever his failings, William Godwin was no such creature as these anecdotes imply,—no such snob as snobs have declared him. In the financial difficulties of his later time, and in the moral debasement that almost invariably results in some degree from long exposure to such difficulties, he was capable of begging for gifts from exalted persons, and getting up a pecuniary testimonial in acknowledgment of his own public services. But these were the acts of his declining age, when his brain was losing its alertness and his pen its cunning; when publishers treated him coldly as a man ‘no longer what he was,’ and children (not his own) hung about him, asking him, not only for bread, but for costly education. They were also acts done in a period when men of letters were taught by social usage to be something less than self-dependent. At his worst, Godwin never (like Leigh Hunt) sought the gifts of rich people in order that he might enjoy indolence and luxuries. Ever industrious to the utmost of his ability, and ever glad to be so, Godwin at the worst sought help only that he might be more helpful to those who were dependent on him. Moreover, Godwin was one of the men who have so strong a title to the world’s tenderness and even to its reverence, that whilst gratitude enjoins us to judge them at their best, justice forbids us to judge them at their worst.

Flattered on Northcote’s canvas, and flattered still more in Mr. Kegan Paul’s photograph of Northcote’s picture, William Godwin’s presence was on the whole by no means agreeably impressive; but for the badness of the worst feature of his more remarkable than pleasing countenance he was almost compensated by the goodness of his eyes. ‘He has,’ Southey wrote in 1797, ‘large noble eyes, and a nose,—oh, most abominable nose! Language is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation.’ Interfering with the effect of a shapely mouth, this grotesquely elongated nose seemed set on moving down to the chin of corresponding prominence. From the portrait to which reference has been made, Godwin seems in his earlier middle age to have had a visage remarkable rather for tenuity than massiveness; but Hogg’s account of the philosopher’s appearance affords evidence that delicacy was no characteristic of the Skinner-Street bookseller’s personal aspect. It would have been well if, on dropping his title to reverence, the young littérateur had also dropt the garb and manner that long afterwards reminded beholders of his original calling. When he dined tête-à-tête, and for the first time with William Godwin, Hogg observed that the ‘short, stout, thickset old man, of very fair complexion,’ and a head no less remarkable for baldness than magnitude, had altogether the ‘appearance of a Dissenting minister;’—a statement to be regarded as sufficient testimony that the author of Caleb Williams had not altogether the appearance of a gentleman, at least in the opinion of Mr. Hogg, ever disdainful of Dissenters.

Another thing to come under the saucy young Templar’s notice was that, whilst having altogether the ‘appearance of a Dissenting minister,’ his companion lacked the colloquial address of a gentleman of society and breeding. His articulation wanted distinctness, and his uneasy utterance was attended by a show of effort and distress, that might almost be called an impediment. But though painful on being noticed for the first time, this difficulty ceased to trouble listeners when they grew accustomed to it, and even gave an agreeable distinctiveness to a somewhat harsh and discordant voice.

William Godwin’s moral nature resembled his appearance and manner, in comprising several agreeable and commendable qualities, without being altogether pleasing or in any degree remarkable for dignity. To the last, also, it resembled them in affording indications of the humility of his original condition and earlier circumstances. The man of intellect, whose costume and bearing reminded people that he had formerly been a Dissenting minister in small market-towns, never survived the influence of the rural conventicle; never outlived the social influences of the humble and unrefined people, who had surrounded him in his days of ministerial service. The egregious vanity, that animated him from youth to old age, was not the almost generous infirmity to be observed in the elegant and refined, but the mean and despicable vanity of the rude and vulgar-minded. Ever accessible to flatterers, he swallowed the grossest adulations with keen relish;—with ludicrous greed, if it were prepared for his palate by feminine artifice. When the postman laid a letter on his Skinner-Street shop-counter, the philosopher’s countenance flushed if he saw himself designated in the superscription ‘Mr. Godwin,’ instead of ‘William Godwin, esquire.’

On the other hand, he had numerous good qualities. He was, upon the whole, truthful and honest; just to men he disliked and principles he disapproved, and altogether the benevolent man he commended himself for being. In all that related to, his opinions on politics, religion, and the social virtues, and his ways of promulgating and enforcing those opinions, he was sincere as sunlight, and absolutely cantless. The only fault of his sympathetic and judicious benevolence was that it sometimes exceeded his means. Alike in the days when he was a needy hack, in his brief term of prosperity, and in the long period of his financial difficulties, poor people hung about him and had money from him. Beneficent to his indigent relatives, he was no less beneficent to persons not of his kindred. The interest he displayed in young men, and the pains he took for their mental, moral, and material welfare, cannot be too highly commended. From the date of his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was a bright example of domestic virtue. A good husband to that curious woman, who, during their brief association, tried him not a little with her captious and querulous temper; he was a good husband to his second wife, who (though by no means so bad a person as the wilder Shelleyan enthusiasts would have us believe) tried him for a long period almost as vexatiously as Mary Wollstonecraft tried him for a short one. A man is not to be extolled for being good to his own children. But it is much to Godwin’s credit that, whilst he was a good father to his daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and to his son by his second wife, he was quite as good a father to his three step-children—to Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny, to Charles Clairmont (the second Mrs. Godwin’s son by her former husband), and to Charles’s sister Jane,—the Jane Clairmont alias Claire of Byronic story.

But though he is to be respected for all these good, honest, wholesome qualities, it remains that Godwin’s unemotional nature and unrefined homeliness forbid the biographer to write rapturously about him. No considerable man of letters has, in recent times, been more curiously wanting in the mental, moral, and personal graces, which the fancy is apt to associate with famous followers of the higher arts. Though he wrote many novels (one of them being a tale of no uncommon vigour), he was curiously wanting in romantic fervour and imaginativeness. Though he was ambitious of writing for the stage, and made several essays in dramatic literature, he was absolutely devoid of poetical sensibility. Capable of firm, though cold, friendship, he was absolutely incapable of love. When it occurred to him, in his twenty-ninth year, that he might as well have a wife to cook his daily chop and look after his shirt-buttons, he commissioned his sister to look out for a suitable young woman. In middle-age, when he slipped from ordinary friendship into a closer alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was careful to provide himself with a peculiar and private lodging at a convenient distance from their common home in ‘The Polygon,’ Somers Town, in order that he might be able to spend most of his time well out of her way. Some ten or twelve months later, Mary Wollstonecraft was on her death-bed, sinking tranquilly, even happily, out of this life, under the soothing influence of an anodyne, given her a short time before by her medical attendant. ‘Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven!’ she ejaculated, in gratitude for the effect of the medicine, to her husband, standing over her. ‘You mean, my dear,’ he replied with more self-command than tenderness, ‘that your physical sensations are somewhat easier.’ It is all well, and very amusing, for Mr. Kegan Paul to gush over the ‘blight’ that came to Godwin’s heart and life, from his ‘untimeous’ loss of the woman he never loved,—the woman whose tenderest feelings for him differed widely from the emotions of love. But readers of this page can need no assurance that the materialist, who reproved his wife so drolly for thinking herself in heaven, never took her to his embrace because he thought her an angel.

CHAPTER II.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars—Mary’s earlier Story—Woman of Letters—Her Five Years’ Work—Her Attachment to Mr. Johnson—Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism—Anti-Jacobin on the Free Contract—Godwin’s Apostasy—From Blackfriars to Store Street—The Slut becomes a modish Woman—Her Passion for Fuseli—Her Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli—Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr. Knowles—Rights of Woman—Plain Speech and Coarseness—Mary goes to Paris—She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance—Her Assignations with him at the Barrier—Their Association in Free Love—Mr. Kegan Paul speaks deliberately—His Apology for Mary’s Action—He falls between Two Stools—Wife in the eyes of God and Man—Letters to Imlay—Badness of Mary’s Temper—Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay—Her Sense of Shame at her Position—Birth of her illegitimate Child—Her Withdrawal from France—Her Norwegian Trip—Her Wretchedness and Rage—Dissolution of the Free Love Partnership—Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide—Was she out of her Mind?—Her Union with Godwin in Free Love—Their subsequent Marriage—Their Squabbles and Differences—Their Daughter’s Birth—Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death—Mrs. Shelley’s biographical Inaccuracies.

On or about St. Michael’s Day of 1787, a woman, whose dress betrayed an unfeminine indifference to the refinements of costume, and whose intelligent countenance possessed no beauty superior to ordinary comeliness, took possession of her new quarters in a small house in George Street, Blackfriars, which had been hired for her occupation, and provided with a few needful articles of furniture, by Mr. Joseph Johnson, the bookseller and publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard. No longer young, though courtesy would still style her so, this woman,—whose abundant brown-auburn tresses showed no threads of grey, whose clear and clever brown eyes would have been more effective had not one of them suffered from a slight paralytic drooping of the lid, whose complexion preserved a girlish freshness, and whose countenance would have been more agreeable had it not been for certain indications of sadness and asperity,—was in the middle of her twenty-ninth year, when she crossed the threshold of her new home for the first time. At that season of her history, no casual observer of her face was likely to regard it with admiration; but few attentive scrutinizers of its lineaments failed to discover in them the signs of intellectual force. To take a fair view of this woman’s future behaviour, and see how far she has been misrepresented by censors and flatterers, it is needful to glance at her earlier story.

The granddaughter, on her father’s side, of a Spitalfields manufacturer, the daughter of a man rich enough to live in idleness, Mary Wollstonecraft began her life’s battle with a miserably slender education and an embittering sense of having been defrauded of her birthright to gentility by her father’s vicious weakness. Regarding herself as a gentlewoman by reason of her grandfather’s opulence and the respectability of her mother’s ancestors, this daughter of a drunken father (with several children,—three sons and three daughters) found herself in a position that, denying her the enjoyments to which she had once thought herself entitled, required her to shift and provide for herself in default of a father capable of providing for her. It is not surprising that the girl, with a fervid and far from amiable temper, thought contemptuously of a sire, so careless for his wife’s happiness and the interests of his offspring. Other matters quickened her sense of life’s hardship. At the threshold of her twenty-second year she lost her mother (whom her self-indulgent father speedily replaced with a second wife), and became the indignant witness of the domestic troubles of her favourite sister, Eliza, who was married to a dissolute and brutal man, named Bishop. Under these circumstances, she could think her father and brother-in-law exceptionally bad men; or, rating them as average examples of masculine nature, she could form an equally unfavourable and unjust estimate of the sex they discredited. For a while Mary Wollstonecraft took the latter course. Had she possessed an admirer in the ranks of the hateful sex, she would no doubt have taken the other view of her sire and her sister’s husband. But in those days the woman, who became almost handsome in middle age, missed little of downright ugliness, and from personal experience knew nothing of masculine homage. The woman of quick temper and vehement emotionality may be presumed to have felt acutely the neglect coming to her from her want of girlish attractiveness.

Going out into the world, when fortunate girls are choosing their bridesmaids, Mary fought poverty in various ways,—now in the company of her friend Fanny Blood and Fanny’s mother (who took in needlework), now in the company of her sisters, and now in the dwellings of strangers. For a while she earned her livelihood with the needle. Then the sisters kept a school at Stoke Newington, one of London’s northern suburbs,—a school that declined to return the compliment and keep the enterprising sisters. Newington Green is memorable in Mary’s annals for other matters, besides this ungrateful seminary for young ladies. It was there that she wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, for which she received ten guineas; and it was from the same Green that she started for her run to Lisbon, at the entreaty of her vehemently beloved Fanny Skey (née Blood), who lived just long enough to die in her friend’s arms. On Mary’s return from Portugal to the north London suburb, the unremunerative school was given up; and parting from her sisters, Mary went off to Ireland to serve a dame of fashion and high quality (Lady Kingsborough) in the capacity of governess to her ladyship’s daughters, with a yearly salary of 40l.,—a situation procured for her by the Rev. Mr. Prior (an Assistant-Master at Eton, and one of the several clergymen who befriended her at the outset of her career); the situation in which she found time to go forward with her French studies, and write some stories for her publisher; the situation in which, though treated with abundant kindness, Mary was more than slightly miserable (as a young woman of her quick and querulous temper was bound to be anywhere). Thus she had spent her time from the middle of her twenty-second to the middle of her twenty-ninth year. She had worked by turns with her needle and her pen; she had failed at school-keeping, and been miserable as a governess, in a great family; and now she has just settled herself in the little house in George Street, Blackfriars, with the intention of earning her livelihood as a bookseller’s hack and author by profession.

Johnson, the bookseller and publisher, showed himself a shrewd man of business in engaging the young woman, who had been introduced to him by the scholarly and benevolent Rev. John Hewlett. Seeing from the little books he had already taken of her that she possessed the ‘literary knack,’ seeing also, from personal intercourse with her, that she was industrious and resolutely set on winning a position amongst women of letters, the publisher came to the conclusion that she would prove a more serviceable instrument in his hands than any of the tippling scholars he was in the habit of employing to write essays, translate French pamphlets, and dress manuscripts for the press. The woman, who, in her delight at finding herself in regular literary employment, regarded her publisher as her benefactor,—the woman, who seldom ate meat and rarely drank anything but water or tea, was a more intelligent, punctual, and manageable scribe, than any hack Mr. Johnson could have picked from the taverns, frequented by indigent men of letters. Temperate, sedulous, quick with her pen, and especially desirous to please her employer, the clever woman was glad to work twelve hours a-day in her tiny tenement, and deemed herself well rewarded by fair payment and the almost parental interest the publisher took in her proceedings. Working strenuously six days of the week, she usually dined on Sunday at Mr. Johnson’s table, where she met some of the most notable scholars, artists, and writers of the period.

For five years she led this laborious and upon the whole not unhappy life, re-writing the English translation (from the Dutch) of Young Grandison; translating Necker on Religious Opinions and Lavater’s Physiognomy from the French; compiling the French Reader; producing Elements of Morality from the German; working at a novel, entitled The Cave of Fancy; throwing off countless articles and critical notices for The Analytical Review; putting into English numerous French political pamphlets, that, keeping her au courant in the public affairs of France, quickened her sympathy with the revolutionary movement, and her admiration of the revolutionary leaders of that country; and together, with other original essays, sending through the press the Answer to Burke, and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written during the first outcry against the first part of The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine, whose acquaintance she had made before she was so imprudent as to christen her comparatively inoffensive essay after his notorious book, and thereby to associate herself in the popular imagination with the man of evil fame, and with the work that only a few months later was declared by the King’s Bench jury ‘a false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious libel.’ In the five years, during which she was thus busily employed, Mary Wollstonecraft helped her brother and sisters largely with her earnings, whilst in order to do so she denied herself comforts to which she cannot have been wholly indifferent, and pleasures which so lively and emotional a woman must have desired. Mr. Johnson, in his later time, was of opinion that she could not have spent in this period less than 200l. on her needy relatives; and there is no reason to think the publisher’s rough estimate excessive. The woman, who, whilst subsisting chiefly on vegetables and exercising a severe economy in every department of her strictly personal expenditure, used in this manner so large a proportion of her slender and toilsome earnings was, at least, a woman to be honoured on certain grounds and from certain points of view.

During the first four of these five years, Mary Wollstonecraft remained in the modest quarters, in George Street, taken and furnished for her in 1787 by Mr. Johnson, of whose tender and humane treatment of her she wrote with gratitude and affection. Writing and speaking in this strain of his goodness and tenderness, she was at no pains to conceal from the bookseller the feelings with which she regarded him. But though she sometimes styled it ‘love,’ there is no reason to think her liking for the staid and rather formal publisher resembled in any way or degree the idolatrous admiration she soon displayed for Fuseli the painter, or the passionate tenderness she somewhat later lavished on Imlay, the American man of letters. It was the affection a woman, of Mary’s essentially generous nature and peculiar circumstances, would necessarily feel for the man, greatly her senior, who had befriended her with equal delicacy and kindliness; had instructed her without assuming any air of authority over her; and had helped her out of difficulties, and introduced her to remunerative employment and congenial friends, without letting her feel herself patronized. At the end of her fourth year in the little house in George Street (Michaelmas, 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft moved to Store Street, where she resided till her departure for France in December, 1792, seeing probably something less of the Radical bookseller, but feeling no less affectionately towards him, working no less sedulously for him.

During these five years Lady Kingsborough’s whilom governess changed considerably in her views of life and society, her mental characteristics, and her appearance. Partly due to time and natural development, these changes were in a greater degree due to the influence of her professional pursuits, of the books she read, of the circles in which she found recreation, and of the friendships she formed in those circles. Strongly disposed to liberalism before she settled in George Street, she would probably, under any circumstances, have developed into an ultra-liberal. It was therefore a matter of course, that the publisher’s hack, who in the way of her profession became a translator of revolutionary pamphlets, quickly adopted the views and conclusions of the revolutionists and republicans. It was also a matter of course that the emotional and sympathetic woman, who affected powerfully the sensibilities of those she encountered, was in like manner affected by them. Nor is it surprising that the woman who, after entering her thirtieth year, became better looking every year she lived, was in the earlier term of middle life more thoughtful of her appearance, and more anxious to exhibit it to the best advantage, than she had been when she was a plain and unattractive young person. In this last respect the change in Mary Wollstonecraft was almost comically striking to those who, on greeting her as a former acquaintance in Store Street, had not seen her since the opening of her second year in George Street. During her residence in Blackfriars, dressing with severe economy (partly in order that she might have more money to give to her brothers and sisters, and partly because personal vanity was still foreign to her nature), she was the veriest caricature of a philosophical sloven. Her costume in the streets consisted of an ill-fitting habit of such coarse cloth, as was generally worn by London milk-women of the succeeding generation, a badly kept beaver hat, black stockings and clumsy shoes. Indoors she wore the same coarse habit when the weather was cold. In summer she sate at her desk in a cotton dressing-gown, or with no garment over her stays. On changing the place of her abode she changed her dressmaker and consulted a milliner. A slut in Blackfriars, she dressed like a woman of fashion in Store Street. Though he was not the sole cause of it, Fuseli was largely accountable for this in Miss Wollstonecraft’s outward style.

Of all the numerous acquaintances she made in the coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, the three persons to influence Mary Wollstonecraft most powerfully and enduringly were Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and William Godwin. Long before William Godwin loved her, so far as it was possible for a man of his cold nature to love any woman; long before it ever occurred to her that she would live to be his wife, or even to have a liking for him, William Godwin’s declarations against marriage converted her to an open approval of the doctrines of Free Love, making her a Free Lover in principle, some while sooner than the time when she became a Free Lover in practice.

Of all this philosopher’s doctrines on social questions, none were more acceptable to his admirers than those that aimed at discrediting lawful wedlock, as an arrangement fruitful of misery and moral disease; fruitful of no kind of felicity, that would not flow in clearer and more liberal streams from a system of virtuous concubinage, under which spouses would be drawn together by love and a sense of mutual affinity, and remain at liberty to part from one another, as soon as they should cease to love, and should discover their unfitness for, one another. Whilst vicious libertines applauded the doctrines that seemed to justify, or at least to palliate, their immorality, and extolled the arrangement with which it was proposed to replace the old-fashioned wedlock, because it seemed to them an arrangement under which a profligate might have half-a-hundred mistresses in succession, without incurring the annoyances of social obloquy, virtuous libertines—enthusiasts of both sexes, wholly pure of wicked passion, with no fire of lust in their veins, no taint of lasciviousness in their blood—saw in Free Love the one wholesome remedy for certain of the worst ills of civilization. An entire bookcase might be filled with the literature that streamed from the press in commendation of Free Love (as a righteous substitute for debasing matrimony), during the last twenty years of the last century. The Anti-Jacobin made good fun of this literature on 18th December, 1797, in the letter written to the Anti-Jacobin’s editor, by Miss Lætitia Sourby, about certain deplorable changes for the worse in her papa’s temper, principles, and demeanour.

‘But’ (says Miss Lætitia) ‘to return to my father—who is now always reading Books and Pamphlets that seem quite wicked and immoral to my mind and my poor Mother’s, whom it vexes sadly to, hear my Father talk before company, that Marriage is good for nothing, and ought to be free to be broken by either party at will. It was but the other day that he told her, that if he were to choose again, by the New Law in the only Free Country in the world, he would prefer Concubinage—so he said in my hearing.’

Thus it was that the Anti-Jacobin ridiculed the Free Lovers and their literature at the close of the very year in which they were thrown into lively commotion by William Godwin’s shameful act of apostasy from his own lovely doctrines, in making Mary Wollstonecraft his lawful wife at St. Pancras Church:—a commotion curiously comparable with the stir of surprise and indignation, that greatly agitated the favourers of the Free Contract only a few years since, when Marian Evans (after living in free promise with George Henry Lewes till his death) gave herself to an excellent gentleman, and took him for better and worse not in Free Contract, but in holy matrimony, duly solemnized in a place of public worship, in accordance with the ordinances and requirements of the Church of England. The favourers of the Free Contract (who had for many years talked of Marian Evans and her genius as though they had a peculiar property in them, and of her nom-de-plume as though it were sheer profanity to hint that George Eliot could be wrong about anything) were comically moved and troubled by the incident, which told them how little (with all their fussy talkativeness) they had known of the great novelist’s reverence for the sanctity of marriage, and for every usage tending to hallow it in the minds of men and women. In like manner were the enemies of Marriage disturbed some ninety years since on hearing that, after all he had written and said against lawful wedlock, and after living with her for months in Free Love, William Godwin had taken Mary Wollstonecraft to St. Pancras Church.

Having accepted Godwin’s doctrines touching Marriage, and become a Free Lover in principle, during her residence in George Street, Mary Wollstonecraft conceived a strong sentiment of affectionate admiration for Henry Fuseli; a sentiment so fervid that, instead of being able to nurse it secretly in her breast, she was constrained to reveal it to him, and entreat him to give her place in his heart. Born in 1741, Fuseli was eighteen years her senior, and about fifty years of age, when he was thus entreated for affection by a woman, who at the time of making the prayer knew he was a happily married man. In justice to Miss Wollstonecraft it must be clearly put on the record, that Fuseli could have complied with the precise terms of her entreaty, without doing aught that would have rendered him guilty of conjugal infidelity, in the legal sense of the term. Averring to her friends (for beside worrying Fuseli with love-letters, she spoke freely of her passion for him to divers of her friends) that she fully recognized Mrs. Fuseli’s right to the person of her husband, Mary Wollstonecraft only desired that she and he should live together in sentimental union; that he should admit her to his confidence as a spiritual partner, and she be suffered to worship him as her spiritual mate; that they should cherish one another with mutual platonic fondness. It is not surprising, or much to her discredit, that she admired thus dangerously a man of Fuseli’s genius, personal attractiveness, and conversational brilliance; though it certainly does not speak much for her delicacy that she was so communicative to him and others respecting her passion and his cruelty in declining to respond, to it. What might have happened, had Fuseli been less resolute in the right way, may be left to the reader’s imagination. Enough for the present writer to speak of what actually took place. Touched by love, piqued by the coldness of the man she adored, Mary strove to lure him into regarding her case more tenderly and mercifully. Taking blame to herself for the ill-success of her suit, it occurred to her that she would fare better if she were more careful of her personal appearance. Hence the choice of a new dressmaker and the conference with a fashionable milliner.

Moving to a brighter quarter of the town, Mary arrayed herself elegantly. At the same time she rained down letters on the man who, neglecting to answer them, sometimes kept them for days together in his pocket without opening them. More than once Fuseli expostulated with her on her unworthy behaviour, and begged her to act more reasonably. ‘If I thought my passion criminal,’ she answered, ‘I would conquer it, or die in the attempt; for immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness, and my soul turns with disgust from pleasure tricked out in charms which shun the light of heaven.’ Mary’s last attempt to achieve her purpose may surely be taken as evidence that she spoke sincerely of the purity of her passion. Going straight to Mrs. Fuseli, she implored the lady to receive her into her family, adding, ‘As I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal arises from the sincere affection I have for your husband; for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.’ Naturally Mrs. Fuseli declined to accede to the proposal, and thought it best for her and her husband to withdraw from an engagement to accompany Mary on a six weeks’ trip to Paris.

This is the outline of John Knowles’s account of an affair that, known to many people through Mary’s extravagantly indiscreet communicativeness, was of course told in various ways, more hurtful than the true way to her character. The evidence of the story, so true to Mary Wollstonecraft’s human nature, is unimpeachable. Who was the narrator of the story? Fuseli’s intimate friend, executor, and biographer, John Knowles, Fellow of the Royal Society, was also Mrs. Fuseli’s intimate friend, after her husband’s death. A gentleman of high place in the Navy Office, of good social position, of known integrity, Mr. Knowles gives his account of Fuseli’s relations with Mary Wollstonecraft in the biography of the artist, which he wrote at Mrs. Fuseli’s request and with her assistance, from the great painter’s papers. The account, thus given to the world, and given (be it observed) in Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest, even more than for the sake of the painter’s reputation, is introduced to the readers of the biography with these words: ‘Several publications having gone so far as totally to misrepresent the nature of his intercourse with this highly gifted lady, it becomes the duty of his biographer to give a plain statement of facts.’ Written to clear Fuseli and his fair friend of imputations, more discreditable to her than to him, this plain statement is supported in several of its principal assertions by quotations from Mary’s letters to Fuseli; for the accuracy of which passages the historian of unimpeachable credit, and conscientious carefulness, pledges his honour in these words, ‘This and subsequent quotations respecting Mrs. Wollstonecraft are taken from her letters to Fuseli.’ One of these quotations (already given in this work) is the passage from one of her letters in which she avows her passion for the painter, whilst declaring that, were it criminal, she would conquer it, or die in the attempt. In another of the quotations she declares her hope of uniting herself to the painter’s mind. In a third quotation, after the failure of her application to Mrs. Fuseli, Mary begs the painter’s pardon ‘for having disturbed the quiet tenour of his life.’ A fourth quotation gives the whole of the angry letter (signed ‘Mary’) in which, after her return from France to England (and long after the death of her passion for the painter), she scolds Fuseli for not returning a visit she paid him;—a letter curiously in harmony with Mr. Knowles’s narrative. Thus the character of the narrative is supported by the high character of the narrator; by his singularly good opportunities for ascertaining the truth; by the fact that he was Fuseli’s most confidential friend; by his intimacy with Mrs. Fuseli; and by the conclusive quality of his superabundant documentary evidence. The statement is in perfect harmony with Mary Wollstonecraft’s career. It is a statement in which Fuseli, his wife, John Knowles, and Mary Wollstonecraft herself, may be said to stand forth as witnesses to its truth. Yet further, the statement is supported in its most important assertion by Godwin himself, who speaking, in his memoir of his first wife, of her intimacy with Fuseli, expresses a strong opinion that, had he been unmarried, she would have wished to become the painter’s wife.

How are this statement and the superabundant evidence of its accuracy dealt with by one of the several gentlemen who, not content with white-washing and painting Shelley into a respectable member of a respectable county family, and white-washing Mary Godwin into a suitable wife for so respectable a member of so respectable a county family, must needs whitewash Shelley’s second mother-in-law into a suitable mother for so suitable a wife for so respectable a member of so highly respectable a county family? In his Life of William Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul ventures to say that ‘Mr. Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else that he says of her, that his testimony,’ respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s intimacy with Fuseli, ‘may be wholly set aside.’ This astounding statement is made by a gentleman who does not give a single fact in support of the baseless charge of inaccuracy. It is directly the reverse of fact that Mr. Knowles is extremely inaccurate in what he says about Mary Wollstonecraft. In the memoir of Mary, forming the preface of his edition of her Letters to Imlay, Mr. Kegan Paul calls Knowles’s careful and accurate statement a ‘preposterous story,’ i.e. a story contrary to nature and reason; a wrong, foolish, monstrous, absurd story. Fortunately Mr. Kegan Paul gives his reasons for thus stigmatizing a truthful story and conscientious writer. (1) Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘I have failed to find any confirmation whatever of this preposterous story.’ (2) He says, ‘I find much which makes directly against it, the strongest fact being that Mary remained to the end the correspondent and close friend of Mrs. Fuseli.’ What reasons for declaring the story ‘preposterous’! It is proved completely, proved (as the phrase goes) up to the very hilt; but it must be false because Mr. Kegan Paul has failed to discover any additional confirmatory evidence of its truth,—evidence needed by no discreet reader. It must be false, because Mrs. Fuseli corresponded with Mary to the last! This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s strongest fact, making directly against the statement.

This strongest fact is quite accordant with Knowles’s statement, that Mary wanted from Fuseli nothing but such affection as he might have given her without breaking his marriage vow;—the statement made for the demolition of the stories that she had been guilty of criminal intercourse with him. Had the statement countenanced and confirmed these scandalous stories, the fact of Mrs. Fuseli’s intimacy with Mary would no doubt have made against Knowles. But according to the statement, there was no reason why Mrs. Fuseli should have ceased to be friendly with Mary, though at the close of 1792 she thought Mary had better keep away from Fuseli’s house and presence for a short time. On the other hand according to the statement, there were several reasons why Mrs. Fuseli should think generously and tenderly of Mary, who in the heat of her wild and fantastic passion had not wronged her, or wished to wrong her; had dealt frankly and fairly with her, and thrown herself upon her with entreaties for sympathy. As he admits this fact is his strongest fact against the story, Mr. Kegan Paul admits he has no facts whatever wherewith to discredit the story which he ventures to call ‘preposterous.’ The explanation of the matter is this. Published in 1831, the statement was offensive to Mrs. Shelley, who was just then writing a lot of fantastic, and inaccurate, and romantic nonsense about her mother, declaring her ‘one of those beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray,’ &c., &c. In a pet Mrs. Shelley condemned the truthful story as preposterous. Hence, it became an article of the Field Place creed and duty to think and declare the story preposterous. It follows that, writing in the interest and for the pleasure of Field Place, Mr. Kegan Paul took Mrs. Shelley’s view of the story and thought it preposterous. Thinking the story preposterous, it was natural for Mr. Kegan Paul to discover egregious inaccuracy in one of the most conscientious and careful biographers of English literature.

Before they cross the Channel in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, and take a look at revolutionary Paris, readers of this work should be told something more of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. In christening this book after Thomas Paine’s notorious work, and thereby rendering him the sincerest kind of flattery, Mary Wollstonecraft did herself a serious injury; for the inappropriate title caused her to be associated in public sentiment with her friend’s evil repute and evil principles,—an association from which she suffers to this hour. So named, the treatise on feminine disqualifications and grievances was naturally assailed with excessive virulence by all persons, who held Paine in abhorrence. Appearing under an inoffensive title, the treatise would have displeased the majority of educated Englishwomen, and been severely handled by reviewers; but it would not have sent its author down to posterity hand in hand with the scurrilous politician and flippant freethinker.

The Rights of Woman is a statement of woman’s need for a higher and healthier education; a demand that women should have equal educational advantages with the other sex; should be raised by education as nearly as possible to intellectual equality with men, and for this end should from earliest childhood be taught from the same books and trained in the same schools as persons of the male gender. The proposal that girls should be educated in the same schools with boys; that young women should pursue their higher studies in the same classrooms and colleges with young men; that from infancy to adult age, the young of both sexes should be reared and trained side by side, was a proposal certain ninety years since to provoke angry disapproval;—certain, even in these days of liberality and innovation, to cause fierce disputes, should it be put forward, as a serious suggestion to be acted upon by people of all classes throughout the country. But this bold and startling proposal was not the chief cause of the outcry against the Rights of Woman. To show their urgent need of a better education, the author gave a picture of the women of her period and country that stung them to fury, and in so doing, caused their fathers, and sons, and brothers, to rise in wrath against so merciless an assailant of the gentler sex. Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge against Englishwomen was that they were frivolous, silly, deceitful, mean-natured, violent in their tempers, querulous, peevish, indolent, immodest, uncleanly in their habits, wanting in delicacy; so wanting in common decency as to be in the habit of exposing their persons shamelessly to one another, although they affected to be unutterably shocked if by any accident they let a man get a view of their ankles. All this Mary Wollstonecraft said of Englishwomen of her own social degree; and she said it coarsely. No wonder there was an outcry against the author of the Rights of Woman! No wonder that simple English ladies spoke of her bitterly, as the arch-libeller of their sex; spoke of her with mingled terror, disgust, and indignation! No wonder that honest English gentlemen sided cordially with these simple English ladies.

Some of the coarseness of this censor of her sex may, no doubt, be regarded as a mere affair of superficial style, and was referable to the tone of the coteries in which she had been living for several years:—the coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, where speech was even more free than thought. But some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s coarseness was due to natural want of refinement and a vein of vulgarity that, instead of playing only on the surface of her life, had its source in the depths of her soul. Her view of men and their feelings was as sordid as her view of women and their failings. Her conception of love as a force in human affairs would have discredited a chambermaid. Having its source in sensation, the tenderest and most delicate passion rose and fell with the variations of bodily desire. The result of purely physical causes, it waxed and waned with increase and decrease of nervous excitement. According to Miss Wollstonecraft’s view of the relations of the sexes, wives were so many toys preserved for the diversion of the men who had appropriated them for their enjoyment, in compliance with a nervous disposition that, always more or less transient, was certain to perish in no long time. From its nature the sexual affection was the most inconstant and fickle of human forces. On marrying, every woman is admonished to anticipate the inevitable moment when her husband’s tenderness will cease, her power of pleasing come to end,—the time when, on discovering her inability to charm her proprietor any longer, she will, most likely, survive her desire and desist from her efforts to please him. ‘When the husband,’ says Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come—her desire’ (i.e. the young wife’s desire) ‘will grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, will give place to jealousy or vanity,’ On a later page of her treatise, she says in the same hopeless strain, ‘Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.... The most holy band of society is friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, that “rare as love is, true friendship is still rarer.”’ Provided with the higher knowledge, brighter cleverness, finer tact, coming to her from higher education, a woman would be able to hold her husband’s love for the longest possible period, and in some cases be able to retain his friendship after he has ceased to love her. In all cases, where the former lover declines to sink in the sober friend, the woman of higher education would be able to make herself fairly comfortable, without either his love or his friendship. It was mainly on these grounds, and for these considerations, that Mary Wollstonecraft insisted on woman’s right to better training.

What doctrine,—what a teacher for Englishwomen! It was by such doctrine that Mary Wollstonecraft hoped to raise her sex from slavery and debasement to freedom and dignity. Such was the teacher of whom Mrs. Shelley wrote, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud.’ It must be remembered that The Rights of Woman is the only important original work by her pen that deserves serious consideration,—the solitary work in which she made a strenuous effort to influence the life and future of humanity. The busy woman of letters produced translations, compilations, slight essays, brief tales, critical notices by the score. A clever letter-writer, she produced during her life a charming volume of letters touching Sweden and Norway; and left behind her, for posthumous publication, other Letters to Imlay,—letters curiously and dismally in harmony with the sentiments and feeling of the essay on English womankind. But The Rights of Woman was her sole important original work. The one work, to be studied for information respecting her social theories, it is the one work by which she must be judged as a social teacher. Whatever their merits (and the works are by no means meritless), her other writings afford nothing to justify her younger daughter’s estimate of her services to humanity. From what has been said of The Rights of Woman, readers may judge whether it was a work ‘to gild humanity with a ray’ of moral sunshine, or a work to darken and depress humanity with dismal notions.

Unobservant of his heroine’s deep-seated and ingrained coarseness of sentiment, Mr. Kegan Paul cannot shut his eyes to what I term her superficial coarseness,—the coarseness of diction that is in some degree, though by no means altogether, referable to the tone of the coteries in which she had lived chiefly for some five years.

‘It may, however,’ he says of her book, ‘be admitted that her frankness on some subjects is little less than astounding, and that matters are discussed which are rarely named even among members of the same sex, far less printed for both.... Yet for extreme plain speaking, there was much reason and excuse. The times were coarser than ours, the days were not so far distant when the scenes were possible and the dangers real which Richardson’s novels portray.’

Readers may infer from these admissions (by a biographer who would fain have us think Mary Wollstonecraft an angel) that the plain speaking to which Kegan Paul refers is extremely plain. Mr. Kegan Paul’s admissions on these points are significant of much more than he says, to the disadvantage of the angelic Mary. Significant also are the commonplaces with which he palliates what he is constrained to acknowledge. From these commonplaces one might imagine gentlewomen of George the Third’s time were so tainted with prevailing coarseness, as to be incapable of thinking and writing like gentlewomen. Sufficient evidence to the contrary may be found in the writings of Catharine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Sophia Lee, Harriet Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, Frances Burney, Lætitia Barbauld. Madame D’Arblay could exhibit the want of refinement, noticeable in the vulgar of her time, without ceasing to write like a woman of refinement. Though Elizabeth Inchbald lived in the same cliques as Mary Wollstonecraft, her pages are innocent of the ‘plain speaking’ that revolts the reader of The Rights of Woman and the Letters to Imlay. The simple fact is that, though her worst failing was aggravated by the society she kept, Mary Wollstonecraft sometimes wrote coarsely because she sometimes thought coarsely.

It is not surprising that at the close of 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris, the capital to which all Englishmen and Englishwomen of revolutionary sentiment had for some time been looking with keen interest and enthusiastic hopefulness. ‘Well up’ in contemporary French politics, the woman, who had translated the pamphlets of French politicians into English, and was known in Paris as their translator, naturally wished to see the people who had engaged so much of her thought, and to pass a few weeks in the capital where, without having seen it, she was no stranger. The Rights of Woman had been translated into French and praised by Parisian reviewers. It was sold on the boulevards and at the bookstalls on the quays, as a companion-book to The Rights of Man. At Paris she would be welcomed as a celebrity, honoured as one of the very few Englishwomen, clever and brave enough to be revolutionary,—the only Englishwoman who had at present rendered the Revolution good service with her pen. In the reception accorded so recently to Thomas Paine, by the garrison and municipality of Calais, and by the National Convention at Paris, she saw the honour and enthusiasm with which she would be welcomed at the port and the capital. Even though they forbore to plant the tricolour in her bonnet, the people of the department of Calais would hail her on landing as the friend and fellow-worker of Tom Paine, whom they had so lately chosen to represent them in the National Convention. At Paris she would receive the homage due to her literary success, and be welcomed as a daughter of ‘the Revolution.’

In the spring of ’92 she and the Fuselis had planned a six weeks’ trip to Paris. Through incidents, of which enough has been already said, this plan for a summer’s trip came to nothing. It remained for Mary Wollstonecraft to relinquish her scheme of going to Paris, to make it with other companions, or to go to France by herself. To relinquish the scheme she could not; for the course of events made her more and more desirous to go to Paris. Possibly she tried and failed to find other companions of the voyage. Anyhow she started for France alone on the 8th of December, 1792, going thither alone, and arriving at the capital, in the midst of the series of exciting incidents that closed with the King’s execution.

Going thither openly and in her own name (a name of notoriety in Paris), she made her abode first under the roof of Madame Fillietaz, née Bregantz, a lady in whose school at Putney, Eliza Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Bishop), and Everina Wollstonecraft, had been assistant-governesses. Thus suitably placed in the house of her sisters’ former employer, she remained there for awhile, working hard at the language in whose accent she was greatly deficient. On getting a sufficient command of the French tongue, she went into Parisian society, and was so engrossed by its excitements that, instead of staying for only a few weeks, she remained at Paris for months, staying over February, though she had received ample warning that, if she would return to England, she should leave France promptly, before the declaration of war. Safe for the moment alike from danger, and the dread of it, Mary stayed on, congratulating herself on being the eye-witness of events of which she meant to be the historian. Entering France for a brief stay she remained in the country for two years and four months.

Going much into the world, she made the acquaintance (during the spring of 1793, if not earlier) of Captain Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United States of America,—a handsome, clever gentleman of war, letters, and commerce; a soldier who had led his company in the struggle for American Independence; an author who had produced in a series of excellent letters a Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America; a smart adventurer, who had come to Europe to act for the sale of land in America, and push his way to fortune in commercial enterprise. With a smooth and plausible tongue, Captain Imlay made a favourable impression on Mary, who (now grown into an almost handsome woman) found no difficulty in making a similar impression on him. In the course of their sentimental conversations on love and marriage, it struck both of them that it would be well for them to enjoy the former without assuming the fetters of the latter. It was enough for the handsome American that Mary returned his passion. As she consented to love him, and give him all he required, it was not for him to dictate the terms on which he would accept her kindness. As she had conscientious and philosophic objections to marriage, he was too gallant to draw her into an estate so repugnant to her sense of right. They loved one another. Mutual love was a sufficient sanction for the fulfilment of its own desire. As they loved one another, it was better for them to do so on terms, that would leave them at liberty to retire from one another when their mutual love, ‘the most evanescent of all human passions’ (vide Rights of Woman) should have perished. They agreed to dote on one another, not in lawful wedlock, but in Free Love.

Mr. Kegan Paul takes two different and quite irreconcilable views of Mary’s action in this business. In the first place, he insists that she determined to associate herself with handsome Gilbert Imlay, because she disapproved of lawful marriage. ‘She ran counter,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says, in the Memoir, p. v., ‘to the customs of society, yet not wantonly or lightly, but with forethought, in order to carry out a moral theory gravely and religiously adopted.’ Further on, p. xxxviii., Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘Her view was that a common affection was marriage, and that the marriage-tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die.’ Hence Mr. Kegan Paul’s readers are in the first place required to believe that Mary acted on and from religious principle in this business, and to honour her for so acting on and from principle, although ‘she yet made the grand mistake of supposing that it is possible for one woman to undo the consecrated custom of ages; to set herself in opposition to the course of society, and not be crushed by it.’ In the second place, and almost in the same breath, Mr. Kegan Paul declares that religious principle was not Mary’s motive in this affair; but that she went into Free Love with Imlay, because a legal marriage could not have been readily effected between him and her, as she was the subject of a sovereign with whom France was at war; and that she would probably have insisted on being lawfully married—i.e. would have acted against her principles—if that course had at the same time been practicable and safe. It is obvious that if she acted on and from principle, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go to Imlay’s arms in Free Love, merely because the way by lawful marriage was for the moment blocked; and that if she would have married him if she could, she is not to be commended for sacrificing herself in this matter on the shrine of religious principle. It is too much to require us at the same moment to admire her for acting courageously from principle, and at the same moment to believe she would have acted against her principle, had there been no legal impediment to the latter course. Mr. Kegan Paul should have seated himself on one stool or the other. He is undergoing the proverbial punishment of the man who tries to sit between two stools.

What are Mr. Kegan Paul’s grounds for saying that a legal marriage with Imlay was certainly difficult, apparently impossible, to Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris, in the spring of 1793? His grounds for this quite erroneous opinion are (1) that she was a British subject; (2) that England and France were at war; (3) that her position as a British subject was full of danger; (4) that even if a marriage with Imlay was possible to her, she could not have made it without declaring her nationality to the civil officer; (5) that in Madame de Stael’s novel of Corinne, Lord Nelvil could not marry Madame d’Arbigny, because to marry her he would have had to declare himself to the civil officer. In answer to these considerations, it is enough to say (1) that, though she was a British subject, Mary Wollstonecraft, as the child and favourer of revolution, and a famous writer, enjoying the friendship of Thomas Paine, and other powerful members of the National Convention, was in the spring of 1793 exempt from the perils and inconveniences pertaining to ordinary British subjects living at that time in Paris; (2) that, even had her position been perilous, it would not have been rendered more so by the declarations requisite for a marriage, as so celebrated an Englishwoman, living openly in Paris, was already well known to the civil functionaries; (3) that the case of the English nobleman in Madame de Stael’s novel does not apply to circumstances of the Englishwoman in Paris,—Mary being a woman already known to the civil officer, and a woman, whose nationality would, on the moment of marriage, merge in the nationality of her husband, and remain therein during coverture. Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong alike in his facts and his law. Though she was at war with England, France was in cordial alliance with the United States of America; and the citizen of those States could have married Mary Wollstonecraft almost as easily in Paris as he could have married her in New York. Mr. Kegan Paul’s hypothesis that Mary might have found it difficult and perilous to marry Imlay is a mere fancy, arising from misconceptions.

Further, Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe that one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s reasons for making a contract of Free Love with Gilbert Imlay was that she might have the security that would pertain to her from appearing to be the American gentleman’s wife. The answer to this is, that instead of giving her the position and appearance of being his wife, the contract of Free Love (on its becoming known to her friends in France) only gave her the position and appearance of being his mistress; that her friends in France never regarded her as Imlay’s wife; and that no security (in the sense suggested by Mr. Kegan Paul) either came, or could be expected to come, to her from her notorious position, though, to palliate her action to her sisters, she used language in some letters that would countenance a different opinion. Events moved rapidly in France. Before the end of the year Thomas Paine had been turned out of the Convention and was in prison, whence he had reason for thinking he would be sent to the guillotine. Secure enough for the moment in the spring of 1793, Mary Wollstonecraft’s position became perilous some months later; and there is abundant evidence that when her position became uneasy, and even hazardous, her relations with Imlay neither gave her security, nor diminished her sense of insecurity.

Mr. Kegan Paul assures the gentle matrons and the young gentlewomen of England that from the commencement of her association in Free Love with Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft was his wife! In his biography of William Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul says of her position towards Imlay, and her letters to him:—

‘She believed that his love, which was to her sacred, would endure. No one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife.... But they are the letters of a tender and devoted wife, who feels no doubt of her position.’

In the Memoir of the heroine, whom he thus exhibits to the admiration of our wives, and sisters, and daughters, Mr. Kegan Paul says:—

‘The kindness he’ (i.e. Imlay) ‘showed Mary Wollstonecraft disposed her to look on him favourably; she soon gave him a very sincere affection, and consented to become his wife. I use this word deliberately, although no legal ceremony ever passed between them.’

In these passages Mr. Kegan Paul states much that is the reverse of fact; much also that is disproved by the letters which he so strangely misrepresents.

Containing many passages that are winningly piquant and innocently charming; affording abundant evidence that their writer’s affections were strongly concerned in this wretched liaison; betraying no few indications of a spirit almost to be styled high-mindedness; yielding superabundant evidence of the writer’s cleverness and brilliancy, these letters are not the letters of a refined woman, or the letters of a woman who considers herself the wife of the man to whom they are addressed. Still less are they the letters of a woman who feels herself secure of her position. Had she been a woman of nice refinement, she could not have written so lightly and copiously as she does of matters that a gentlewoman of refinement tells only to her physician, her nurse, her closest female friends, and shrinks from naming to her husband. Had she been the woman of singular refinement we are asked to believe her, she would have been less communicative to her correspondent about her health. Regard for the feelings of my readers forbids me to speak, even in the most guarded terms, of the more disagreeable details of these too circumstantial communications. In this respect, the letters are just such letters as, in the absence of positive testimony, the author of the Rights of Woman might be imagined to have written to the man, with whom she was living in Free Love. Instead of being the letters of a woman who considers herself a wife, she does not venture, even in her confidential communications to Imlay, to style herself his wife, whilst hinting how strongly she wished to be privileged to do so. Instead of being the letters of a woman ‘feeling herself secure of her position,’ nothing in them is more striking and pathetic than the evidence how painfully aware she was, that she held her admirer by only the slenderest thread.

Mr. Kegan Paul says that she believed Gilbert Imlay’s love would endure. What a strange belief for a woman who thought no man’s love capable of endurance; who wrote in the Rights of Woman that ‘love, from its nature, must be transitory,’ and was ‘perhaps the most evanescent of all passions;’ who had taught in the same book that every woman should anticipate the inevitable death of her husband’s love for her! Anyhow, ere the first four of the seventy-seven letters to Imlay had been written, she knew him to have been a fickle lover:—

‘I have found out,’ she wrote from Paris to Imlay at Havre, in September, 1793, in the fourth of the long series of letters, ‘that I have more mind than you, in one respect: because I can, without any violent effort of reason, find food for love in the same object, much longer than you can. The way to my senses is through my heart; but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a short cut to yours.’

Surely, this is good evidence that, from an early date of their acquaintance, she knew he was a fickle worshiper of womankind and a libertine. Moreover, what a confession to be made by Mr. Kegan Paul’s bright example of feminine purity and delicacy,—the woman who is said by Mr. Kegan Paul to have come to Paris without having had any affair of the heart! She had learnt in September, 1793, that the way to her senses was through her heart, and that she could ‘find food for love in the same object’ longer than her correspondent could. A great deal for a woman to learn between the end of December and the middle of the following September! It must, however, be admitted that Paris, at the end of the last century, was a school where a woman picked up such knowledge fast.

Mr. Kegan Paul is sure that, from the commencement of her association with Imlay in Free Love, Mary Wollstonecraft considered herself as his wife ‘in the eyes of God and man;’ and Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘using this word deliberately,’ styles her the wife of Gilbert Imlay. Let us look into this matter. At the commencement of this virtuous association, Gilbert and Mary were not living under the same roof; but having separate places of abode, they met secretly by assignation for the enjoyment of their conjugal privileges. One of their places, perhaps their only place, of assignation, was a certain ‘barrier’ of the French capital, near which barrier the act occurred, that resulted in the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter in April, 1794. The pleasure of these meetings at the barrier was referred to by Mary, when, in the twenty-third of the famous series of letters, she wrote on 22nd September, 1794, from Paris to Imlay:—‘Bring me, then, back your barrier-face, or you shall have nothing to say to my barrier-girl.’ On the following day, she wrote in the same vein:—

‘I desired you, in one of my other letters, to bring back to me your barrier-face—or that you should not be loved by my barrier-girl. I know that you will love her more and more, for she is a little affectionate, intelligent creature, with as much vivacity, I should think, as you could wish for.’

When writing thus to her already cold and remiss partner in Free Love, Mary pined to see once again the radiant face of the lover, whose ‘barrier-girl’ was with her at Paris,—a five-months’ infant, delighting in three things, ‘to ride in a coach, to look at a scarlet waistcoat, and hear loud music.’

Mary and Gilbert were still living apart and meeting one another by assignation, when she wrote to him on some unknown day of August, 1793:—

‘You can scarcely imagine with what pleasure I anticipate the day, when we are to begin almost to live together; and you would smile to hear how many plans of employment I have in my head, now that I am confident my heart has found peace in your bosom.... I will be at the barrier a little after ten o’clock to-morrow.’

By this time they had arranged ‘almost to live together,’ but they had not begun to do so. Mary’s disagreeable communicativeness about her attacks of faintness and the movements of her little ‘twitcher’ leaves no room for question that her child, born at Havre in April, 1794, was not born prematurely. It is therefore a matter of certainty that Mary was on the way to become a mother, before the lovers ceased to have separate places of abode and to meet by assignation. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it must be admitted that this was a curious way of living for the woman, who already considered herself the wife of Imlay in the eyes of God and man. Anyhow at first Mary did her best to escape the eyes of man.

After living under the same roof with her for some six weeks, Captain Imlay (for the prosecution of affairs of business, and possibly also in pursuit of pleasure) went off to Havre, where he had commercial concerns, and to other places requiring his presence; Mary being left to her own devices for several months in Paris, whence she wrote to her partner in Free Love some of the most interesting of the letters, of which Mr. Kegan Paul speaks so highly. Misrepresenting matters so as to adapt them to his fanciful conception of Mary’s life and character, Mr. Kegan Paul also commits errors without any apparent object for doing so. For instance, he says, ‘Towards the close of 1793 Mary joined Imlay at Havre, and there in the spring of 1794 gave birth to a girl, who received the name of Fanny, in memory of the dear friend of her youth;’ saying this in spite of the evidence afforded by the letters he is editing, that Mary remained at Paris well into February, 1794. From Paris she wrote Imlay one published letter in September, 1793; one published letter in November, 1793; four published letters in December, 1793; four published letters in January, 1794; four published letters in February, 1794. All these fourteen letters were written by her at Paris; the last of them (penned at the moment of her departure from the capital for Havre) ending with these words:—

‘I am well, and have no apprehension that I shall find the journey too fatiguing, when I follow the lead of my heart. With my face turned to Havre my spirits will not sink; and my mind has always hitherto enabled my body to do whatever I wished—Yours affectionately, Mary.’

In an editorial note Mr. Kegan Paul admits that all these letters were written during Mary’s ‘separation of several months from Imlay;’ and yet in the Memoir he represents that the separation ended in December, and that she joined Imlay at Havre ‘towards the close of 1793.’ This is the way in which the writers, whose care has been commended so enthusiastically by Mr. Froude, deal with their evidences. Doubtless they are accurate enough for Mr. Froude, and quite as accurate as he is himself.

The letter she wrote to Imlay from Paris on 30th December, 1793 (Monday night) contains this remarkable passage, to which the reader should give his best attention:—

‘A melancholy letter from my sister Eliza has also harassed my mind—that from my brother would have given me sincere pleasure; but for.... There is a spirit of independence in his letter, that will please you; and you shall see it, when we are once more over the fire together. I think that you would hail him as a brother, with one of your tender looks, when your heart not only gives a lustre to your eye, but a dance of playfulness, that he would meet with a glow half made up of bashfulness, and a desire to please the ——; where shall I find a word to express the relationship which subsists between us? Shall I ask the little twitcher? But I have dropt half the sentence that was to tell you how much he would be inclined to love the man loved by his sister. I have been fancying myself sitting between you, ever since I began to write, and my heart has leapt at the thought! You see how I chat to you.’

Written in her brightest, tenderest, most womanly vein, this exquisite piece of writing shows not only the affectionateness of Mary’s nature, but also how far she was from considering herself a wife in the eyes of God and man, and how acutely she felt the shame and inconveniences of her position towards Imlay. One would like to see the words omitted from the passage,—probably the words of a declaration that she could not enjoy her younger brother’s letter from the sense of humiliation coming to her from thinking, how she could nerve herself to tell him of the relation, in which she and Imlay stood to one another. ‘Where,’ she writes with pathos and tact, ‘shall I find a word to express the relationship which subsists between us?’ She wants a word she could give her brother, without fearing it would drive all care for her from his heart. Had she considered herself a wife in the eyes of man, she would not have wanted the word. ‘Shall I ask the little twitcher?’ asks the woman, within four months of her accouchement. Could a woman ask more touchingly and winningly for the lawful marriage, that would make her what she wanted to be in the eyes of the world; would save her child from the ignominy of shameful birth; would give her the name she could utter to her brother, without burning blush and scalding tears? ‘Considered herself a wife in the eyes of God and man!’ Did she so consider herself? Then why this touching prayer to the man whom she dared not call her husband, even in the privacy of a letter, beginning with ‘My Best Love?’

There is another passage in the letters, to be remembered in connexion with the foregoing evidence that, instead of considering herself a wife in the world’s eyes, she could not even consider herself a wife in Imlay’s eyes. ‘Finding,’ she wrote to him from Paris on 1st January, 1794, ‘that I was observed, I told the good women, the two Mrs. ——s, simply that I was with child: and let them stare! and ——, and ——, nay, all the world may know it for aught I care! Yet I wish to avoid ——’s coarse jokes.’ Had she been a wife in the eyes of society (as Mr. Kegan Paul insists she was), the ladies would not have stared, would have seen no cause to stare, on the announcement of the matter, with which Mary caused them to open their eyes with astonishment. Had she been regarded as a wife by her Parisian friends, she would have had no cause to fear coarse jests about her health. It is clear the woman, who could not venture to style herself ‘his wife’ even to Imlay, had not ventured to style herself his wife to her Parisian friends.

Now-a-days the less scrupulous of our Free Lovers make so free with the queen’s English as to style themselves husband or wife, and declare themselves married people, without having gone through any form of marriage. Speaking deliberately, Mr. Kegan Paul says they have a right to do so, the word wife being in his opinion strictly applicable to a female Free Lover. Speaking deliberately, I say they have no right to apply to a woman, who is not lawfully married, a familiar title assigned by social rule and law of language, as a description of their legal estate, to women who are lawfully married; or, on the other hand, to apply the correlative title to men who are not lawfully married. I say they have no right to change at their will the signification of familiar English words, so as to bring them into accordance with their notions touching the relations of the sexes.

In the dictionaries of the English language ‘husband’ is defined as ‘a man contracted or joined to a woman by marriage;’ ‘wife’ is defined as ‘a woman who is united to a man in the lawful bonds of wedlock;’ and ‘marriage’ is defined as ‘the legal union of a man and woman for life.’ The world accepts these definitions, acts upon them, and will, I trust, continue to act upon them. Speaking deliberately, I say (Mr. Kegan Paul notwithstanding) that persons who use these words for the misdescription of Free Lovers, with an intention to deceive their hearers, are guilty of falsehood. I say this deliberately, though Marian Evans (noble creature though she was, and exemplary in all matters, apart from her miserable association with George Henry Lewes) used to speak and write of him as her ‘husband.’ Possibly Marian Evans did not so misdescribe her relation to George Lewes with an intention to deceive. I have no evidence that she ever so misdescribed herself and Lewes to any person, without having reason to think the person cognizant of the facts of the case. And I do know that to certain gentlewomen, she was honourably communicative on the matter, so that they might not associate with her, under a misapprehension respecting her domestic position. But her conduct cannot affect the obligation of Free Lovers to be truthful. Having the courage of their opinions, they should tell the world openly what they are. They might style themselves ‘bosom-friends,’ or call themselves ‘free husbands and free wives.’ But they have no right to call themselves ‘husbands’ and ‘wives.’ Out of respect for themselves and their principles they should refrain from the ordinary untruthful practice of ‘kept mistresses’ and their keepers.

Ninety years since the woman (who according to Mr. Kegan Paul considered herself a wife in the eyes of God and man) did not presume to style herself Imlay’s wife even to her own sisters. All she could do was to speak of herself truthfully as living in France under his ‘protection,’ when on 10th March, 1794, she wrote from Havre to her sister Everina, ‘If any of the many letters I have written have come to your hands or Eliza’s, you know I am safe, through the protection of an American, a most worthy man, &c.;’—words committed to paper, when she was within a few weeks of giving birth to her illegitimate child. To her own sister Mary Wollstonecraft described herself as a woman living under ‘protection.’ Mr. Kegan Paul published the letter in which she thus describes herself; and yet he says she considered herself as wife in the eyes of her fellow-creatures.

It has been already remarked that Mary Wollstonecraft had an unhappy temper. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it is admitted that his angelical Mary was ‘excitable and hasty-tempered, apt to exaggerate trifles, sensitive to magnify inattention into slights, and slights into studied insults.’ Put into plain terms this is an admission that she was a violent-tempered and bad-tempered woman. She was no woman to live happily with a man, either as wife or Free Lover. Even before their first brief term of cohabitation, she had tried Imlay by her caprice and pettishness. In the letter (of August, 1793), in which she anticipates the delight of ‘beginning almost to live together’ with him, she says:—

‘Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in you; and your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of feeling, that has sometimes given you pain. Yes, I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again fall into the miserable state which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.’

Let the reader consider these words. In Letter vi. (a genuine love-letter), dated from Paris to Imlay at Havre, she writes: ‘No; I have thy honest countenance before me—Pop—relaxed by tenderness; a little—little wounded by my whims.’ In Letter xi., of January, 1794, she entreats, ‘with eyes overflowing with tears and in the humblest attitude,’ to be pardoned for worrying her admirer with unreasonable epistles to which he has replied in a ‘kind and rational letter;’—adding, ‘It is time for me to grow more reasonable, a few more of these caprices of sensibility would destroy me.’ In the same month she writes to him:—

‘Yesterday, my love, I could not open your letter for some time; and, though it was not half as severe as I merited, it threw me into such a fit of trembling, as seriously alarmed me.... One thing you mistake in my character, and imagine that to be coldness which is just the contrary. For, when I am hurt by the person most dear to me, I must let out a whole torrent of emotions, in which tenderness would be uppermost, or stifle them altogether; and it appears to me almost a duty to stifle them when I imagine that I am treated with coldness.’

The letters abound with similar evidence that, quarrelling from an early date of their association, they went on quarrelling and making it up, till they grew heartily sick of one another, and saw little of one another. At the most, be it observed, the whole period of their association (from their first introduction to one another till their final parting) did not exceed two years and ten months, and at the fullest computation they did not spend more than twelve months of this time in one another’s society. Whilst Mary was at Paris, Imlay was for months together at Havre, or other places, away from her. For the greater part of her stay at Havre, he was at Paris. Soon after her return to Paris, he went off to London. Running from England to France to see her for a short time, he returned by himself to England. Soon after her return to England, she went off with her child and nurse in the summer of 1795, for her trip to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

I am no apologist for Imlay. In a memoir I wrote of Mary Wollstonecraft twenty-eight years since, I called him ‘a pitiful scamp;’ and though I may doubt whether I should have spoken of him quite so disdainfully, I am still disposed to think him a mean-spirited, though clever, creature. The evidence respecting his character and ways of life is far from complete. Hitherto only one side has been told of the story of his relations with Mary Wollstonecraft; her side of the story, dressed and redressed by her friends and admirers. From the insufficient evidence, he appears to have differed morally in no important respect or degree from the ordinary run of the men, who used to be styled men of the world, men of pleasure, and men of gallantry. Whilst it is certain that Mary Wollstonecraft entered the association with no confidence that it would last ‘for ever,’ there is no reason to suppose that he entered it with any desire for its permanence. Whilst it is certain that the faults of her temper were largely accountable for the unhappiness of the association, it is fair to assume there were corresponding faults of temper on his side. If he was not qualified to make any woman happy for long, Mary Wollstonecraft was not a woman to live happily with any man for any long time. There can be no question they were an ill-assorted couple; but with any man Mary would have been unhappily matched. It is not wonderful that Imlay had not been associated for many months with the woman, who worried him incessantly with her temper, before he began to think of withdrawing from the association.

In leaving Mary Wollstonecraft, Imlay took a step that, from the commencement of their association, must have been foreseen as a probable contingency by the woman, who regarded love as the most evanescent of the human passions. In leaving her he merely exercised the right of retirement, which had been reserved alike to him and her by the conditions of their lawless contract. Yet his disposition to leave her was no sooner known to the Free Lovers of her English acquaintance, than they began to think very ill of him. On being assured of his purpose to quit her, because he could not live harmoniously with her, they were quick in declaring him a prodigy of conjugal faithlessness. It is not manifest at the first glance why these enthusiastic advocates of the Free Contract were so indignant with him for retiring from the partnership in accordance with the terms on which he had entered it,—i.e. on the understanding that he should be at liberty to get out of it when he pleased, and that Mary should be at liberty to retire from it when she pleased. The advantage claimed by the Free Lovers for their conjugal arrangement over marriage is, that spouses have this liberty of withdrawing from one another on the death of their mutual affection. Why, then, was Imlay so severely blamed for using the liberty especially reserved to him by the contract he formed with Mary,—by the terms that may be fairly called her own terms? The Free Lovers spoke of him as though, instead of entering into a contract of Free Love with a middle-aged (thirty-four years old) woman, who was a Free Lover in principle before she knew him, he had engaged the affections of a young girl, and lured her into lawful wedlock. They stigmatized him as the heartless betrayer of virginal simplicity and innocence. They charged him with monstrous wickedness in retiring from the contract, which by their own rule he was free to withdraw from as soon as he liked.

The fact is the Free Lovers of ninety years since were angry with Imlay for leaving Mary, not because he acted in violation of their principles or broke the terms of his contract with Mary, but because his rupture with the woman of letters afforded a strong example of the badness of their conjugal method, and tended to discredit their substitute for lawful marriage. The opponents of Free Love were and are in the habit of insisting that libertines would use its freedom, to desert their conjugal mates for slight causes. Imlay’s secession from Mary countenanced this view of Free Love. The opponents of Free Love opposed it on the ground that, if conjugal partnerships could be withdrawn from at pleasure, they would be entered into lightly and without due preliminary inquiry and forethought. The levity with which Mary entered into a contract of Free Love with Imlay, soon after making his acquaintance, and before she learnt his real character (as her friends insist), countenanced this view. Hence the rage of the Free Lovers against Imlay, who retired from the partnership, whilst Mary wished to retain him in it.

Though it seems to have revived some months later, and after its temporary extinction to have regained all its original passionateness, it is not to be imagined that Mary Wollstonecraft’s love of Gilbert Imlay continued to burn steadily after the death of his affection for her. All the more instructive and pathetic are the efforts she made, for her child’s sake, and her own honour’s sake, to hold him to herself, for months after his first manifestation of a desire to be quit of her. Striving to make herself useful to him, in the hope that a care for his selfish interests would retain him in the partnership from which he wished to retreat, she took an interest in his commercial concerns, and went on the voyage to Denmark and Norway, not more for the sake of her own health, than for the advantage of his affairs in those countries. This she did (as Mr. Kegan Paul says) after ‘Imlay’s affection had ceased, and his desertion’ (retirement would be a better word) ‘had practically begun.’ Striving to be useful to him, she tried to please him, even feigned still to love him, though strong affection for him had perished from her heart. To qualify her to do business for him in the foreign lands for which she was bound, Imlay gave her a power-of-attorney, in which he styled her ‘Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife,’—‘a document,’ says Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘which in many cases and countries would be considered as constituting marriage:’ as though it gave the poor woman a colour of matronly honour in history, and were somehow or other a proof that she had, from the commencement of the Free Love contract, ‘considered herself his wife in the eyes of God and man.’ No doubt the document would have been proof of marriage in Scotland to this century, and in other countries previous to the Council of Trent. But Imlay and Mary were not living in Scotland. Nor were they living in times prior to the Council of Trent. The power-of-attorney was signed by Imlay when he had made up his mind never to make her his wife; and she took it abroad with her, when she knew he had ceased to love her and had not made her his wife. For those who peruse them, by the light of the hints given in these and previous pages, there is pathetic instruction in the letters Mary sent her no-longer-loving ‘protector’ from abroad. They are the letters of a woman alternately hoping against hope to revive in Imlay’s breast his old love of her, and despairing to hold him much longer as a friend or even as an acquaintance. From pity, kindness or self-interest (possibly from all three) he wrote to her sometimes in the language of a lover,—letters animating her with hopes, to be dashed by the next post. Returning to England (not in late autumn, as Mr. Kegan Paul asserts, but) on 4th October, 1795, she soon found the vanity of all her hopes and efforts to retain him. By this time Imlay had formed another attachment, had entered into another contract of Free Love,—a fact all the more galling to Mary, because he called his new passion a sacred passion, and justified it with the familiar arguments of the Free Lovers. Resolute to exercise his Free-Love right to retire from the association that had become distasteful to him, he was set on fulfilling the moral engagements of the new partnership in mutual tenderness. His language and tone on these matters were the more exasperating to Mary, because of their conformity to the doctrines of her own philosophic school. In justice to him it must be admitted, even by Mary’s partisans, that he showed no wish to shirk the pecuniary sacrifices, expected from a man of honour, when he transfers his affections from an old to a new mistress. Offering her, pressing upon her, money for her necessities, he undertook to make proper settlements on Mary and her child. With proper spirit she rejected indignantly these offers for herself, though she consented to his proposal to make a settlement on their child. But the bond he gave for this purpose was of no advantage to the child, as neither the principal nor interest of the promised sum was paid; probably because the man of divers financial speculations fell into poverty.

There are passages in the concluding Letters to Imlay fit to be given in evidence that, as the hour of their final separation drew nearer, Mary’s love for him revived and regained all its former force; and it is conceivable that, under the influence of jealousy of the object of Imlay’s new attachment, Mary loved him again in a wild, tempestuous way, as all hope of recovering him to herself and her child died in her breast. Certainly she acted like a woman driven to distraction by the anguish of despised and disappointed love. On the other hand, she did nothing more than many a violent woman has done under the goadings and torture of wounded vanity and injured pride. In her rage and misery, Gilbert Imlay’s whilom mate in Free-Love went one cold and dismal winter’s day to the river’s side near Putney Bridge. On coming to the scene, where she intended to escape from life, she either walked into the river and stood in it, or walked on the Bridge in the pouring rain, until the skirts of her clothing were saturated and heavily charged with water. This having been done, so that a few minutes later her garments should operate as a dead weight in drawing her beneath the tide’s surface, and, at the same time, deprive her limbs of the power to struggle against the cold current, she climbed the parapet of the Bridge,[1] and threw herself into the deep stream. This deliberate attempt at self-murder was, however, unsuccessful, Mary being picked up and saved by the watermen of a passing boat.

Self-murder being a form of wickedness denied by the moral and social proprieties to all persons in their minds, not belonging to the lower orders, and being, therefore, a departure from righteousness that would disqualify Mary for her place of honour in the annals of a respectable county family, it has been decreed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s admirers that she was out of her right mind, to the extent of not knowing what she was doing when she thus attempted to kill herself. Is it not written in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book that Mary’s attempt to drown herself was made when she was ‘driven to despair and was for a time quite out of her mind?’ In connexion with this verdict, it is well to remember that, some time before going down to Putney, Mary wrote a very powerfully worded letter to Imlay, saying therein, ‘I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence. But I shall plunge into the Thames, where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek.’ After writing this quite lucid and well-worded letter, Mary went down to Putney; and, after providing in the most deliberate manner for the achievement of her purpose, she climbed over the side of the Bridge and threw herself into the deep water. When she did all this she was so completely out of her mind, that she should not be deemed accountable for her actions, and cognizant of what she was doing. This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s view of the matter.

It is impossible to trace precisely the course of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life in the last three months of 1795 and the first month of 1796 (from the stormy, hysterical, changeful epistles, that conclude the series of published Letters to Imlay, and other letters of the same period, which I have examined for the illustration of her story); but in December she was still writing to him with a faint, flickering hope of recalling him to her side. On some day of December, subsequent to the 8th of that month, she wrote to him in these words:—

‘Imlay, believe me, it is not romance, you have acknowledged to me feelings of this kind. You could restore me to life and hope, and the satisfaction you would feel would amply repay you. In tearing myself from you, it is my own heart I pierce; and the time will come, when you will lament that you have thrown away a heart that, even in the moment of passion, you cannot despise. I would owe everything to your generosity, but, for God’s sake, keep me no longer in suspense! Let me see you once more.’

This letter is followed by another, written in the same month, ending with ‘I part with you in peace.’ But the final parting was still later. Even so late as 26th January, 1796, she is writing to Mr. A. Hamilton Rowan in terms which indicate a faint, lingering hope that even yet Imlay would at some time of the future, change and return to her. ‘Mr. Imlay,’ she says, ‘would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but unless he returns to himself, I would perish first;’—words showing that, even so late as the last week of January, 1796, she could think of what she would do if Imlay should return to himself, i.e. to her.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by William Godwin, the daughter who lived to be Mrs. Shelley and mother of the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, was born on 30th August, 1797, just five calendar months after the marriage (celebrated at old St. Pancras Church, on 29th March, 1797), that united the author of The Rights of Woman and the author of Political Justice in lawful wedlock, when they had already been living several months together in Free Love. The date of the commencement of their association in Free Love is unknown; but whilst it must have been as far back as December, 1796, there is reason for thinking the free-contract was entered into some weeks earlier. It follows, therefore, that the woman who leapt from Putney Bridge in the winter of 1795-6, and had not absolutely despaired, on 26th January, 1796, of seeing her Free Lover Imlay return to himself and her, in something much less than a year, probably in so short a time as nine months, possibly in a much shorter time than nine months, was living in Free Love with her old friend William Godwin,—who was in his forty-first year when he thus took Mary Wollstonecraft Imlay, ætat. thirty-seven, under his protection.

An extant note shows that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft, or, at least, accepted an invitation to meet her, at the residence of their common friend, Miss Hayes, in January, 1796; and there is reason to believe that the appointment agreed to by this note of acceptance was the first occasion on which Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft since her return from Norway. That their acquaintance was of much older standing, and had been much more fruitful of intercourse, than Mr. Kegan Paul represents, and Mrs. Shelley imagined, is certain. That Godwin now renewed his acquaintance with her under circumstances, disposing him to think far more favourably of her than he had heretofore done, is also certain. On meeting her again in 1796, the philosopher, who had made her a Free Lover, recognized a martyr to his anti-matrimonial doctrines in the woman, whom he had some four years earlier regarded as too talkative and eager for admiration. Bound, by his principles, to approve the terms of her association with Imlay, he could not withhold his sympathy from a woman who had suffered so severely from her devotion to Free Love doctrine. Approaching her as a fair disciple, who had suffered for the truth’s sake, and for the cause of which he was the chief living representative and vindicator, he desired to show his respect for her, and to comfort her. ‘I found a wounded heart; as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it,’ he wrote to her soon after their lawful marriage, in reference to the renewal of their acquaintance. They are notable words: indicating, as they do, who made the first advances to the state of mutual regard, that resulted in their marriage. He found in her what he was prepared to find—a wounded heart. The owner of the wounded heart cast herself on the philosopher, who desired to soothe its sorrow.

Recalling their course from friendship to love, Godwin wrote after her death:—

‘The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey, in this affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love.’

Though in the privacy of the domestic circle a husband may sometimes jocularly charge his wife with having made the first advances to the offer, or even the offer itself, that resulted in their marriage, no man of common self-respect, or with the slightest care for his wife’s reputation, could seriously assure the public, she so far ‘overstept the delicacy which is so severely imposed’ on her sex, as to have pursued him and dragged him into marriage, or even to have given him any kind of intimation that she required an offer of marriage from him. The more remarkable, therefore, is it, that in words, written with a view to publication, whilst expressly guarding his former wife from the imputation of any such indelicacy, Godwin states so positively that the first advances from their friendship to love were not made by him alone; that his suit for affection in no degree preceded hers; that in the progress to warmer feeling they moved together step by step. This historic statement, made for the world’s consideration, must be read in conjunction with the serious statement put on paper for her eye alone:—‘I found a wounded heart. As that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.’ Here is the statement of the whole case. Godwin’s expressions of sympathy caused the ever-impetuous, and often too demonstrative woman to throw herself on his sympathy; his ambition to heal her wounded heart was preceded by her display of feeling. Few readers of the two statements will question that, notwithstanding what Godwin says to the contrary, the first advances were made with unmistakable significance by the lady.

Passing in this manner from Imlay to Godwin, in less than a year from her final separation from the former, Mary Wollstonecraft was living with the latter in Free Love at his house in The Polygon, Somers Town, in the last month of 1796. So living with him, was she (to use Mr. Kegan Paul’s words) a wife in the eyes of God and man? She certainly was not so in the eyes of man. She and Godwin had lived in this manner for weeks, for months, before any clear announcement of the nature of their intimacy was made to their most intimate friends. People who had the entrée of the little house in Somers Town, gossiped together,—asking one another what it meant. Had Godwin, in his compassion for Mary’s forlorn condition, merely brought her to his house as a guest for a long visit, or as a housekeeper, or in a closer and more affectionate relation? What the various gossips said, and how they said it, may be left to the reader’s imagination. In February, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, living as the somehow or other mistress of Godwin’s house in The Polygon, entertained her sister Everina for some time; but so far was she from considering herself a wife in the eyes of man, she did not venture to reveal the nature of her position in the house even to her own sister. Throughout her visit in ‘The Polygon,’ Everina was kept in the dark, and she went off to her place of governess in the Wedgwood family, at Etruria, without having learnt that her sister and Godwin were living in Free Love. In the following month (March, 1797), Southey, whilst in London, saw Mary Wollstonecraft, and on the 13th of that month wrote of her to Cottle:—

‘Of all the lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay’s countenance is the best, infinitely the best; the only fault in it is an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display,—an expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm, in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and although the lid of one of them is affected by a little paralysis, they are the most meaning I ever saw.’

Speaking of the Free Love association as marriage, Mr. Kegan Paul says that its existence was ‘understood’ in Godwin’s circle at the date of Southey’s letter to Cottle. Doubtless Godwin’s circle ‘understood’ what was going on in his house; but the understanding was in no way due to Godwin’s communicativeness. The understanding was the result of vigilant observation, surmise, inference, conjecture, gossip, tattle. The association was a sly, furtive, secret, deceptive business till the legal but secret marriage in old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797, and for some days afterwards. How uncertain the ‘understanding’ was, how far some of Godwin’s closest friends felt that after all they might be mistaken in the ‘understanding,’ appears from the fact, that, in his reply to the letter in which Godwin briefly announced his recent marriage in St. Pancras Church without mentioning the lady’s name, so intimate a friend as Holcroft wrote, ‘I cannot be mistaken concerning the woman you have married. It is Mrs. W. Your secrecy a little pains me.’

How did the marriage, into which Godwin sneaked in this fashion, turn out? Was it, during its short course, a happy marriage? Was its tenour such as to justify an opinion that it would, on the whole, have been a happy union, had Mary’s life been prolonged for another ten or twenty years? Mr. Kegan Paul answers these questions confidently in the affirmative. Gushing over Mary’s untimeous end, he speaks of Godwin’s life as blighted by her death. It is therefore needful to state clearly, that brief though it was, the marriage was by no means a happy union, and that it was fruitful of incidents which at least make it certain that Godwin would have found Mary Wollstonecraft a very difficult woman to live with, had her days been so prolonged. This stands out clearly on the record.

No sooner had Mary Wollstonecraft carried the point, for which she may be assumed to have played steadily from the moment of her discovery that she was likely to have another child; no sooner had she induced Godwin, at a great sacrifice of his doctrine against matrimony, to take her to old St. Pancras Church, than she gave the reins to her unhappy temper, and began to worry him precisely as she had in former time worried Imlay. No more than three weeks had passed since that marriage, when she spoke to Godwin (certainly no inconsiderate and unkindly man; certainly a husband who had given proof of his wish to render her a happy woman) in such a strain, that he retired in acute distress from his house in The Polygon to his quite needful retreat in Evesham Buildings (or Place; it is described in both ways). From the study, with which he had fortunately provided himself, he wrote his wife a brief and pathetic note,—averring that he had studied her happiness in everything; imploring her to act so that he should not be wholly disappointed in her; and reminding her that he had not undertaken to heal her wounded heart until she had cast herself upon him.

Admitting that during their brief married life Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had several lively quarrels; and admitting that they arose from her ‘extreme sensitiveness and eager quickness of temper,’ Mr. Kegan Paul requires us to consider the outbreaks of her passionate querulousness as nothing more serious than ‘slight clouds,’ How differently the biographer speaks of the second Mrs. Godwin’s similar exhibitions of ill-temper! Slight clouds! What a pretty phrase for an ugly fact. Anyhow they were clouds no less significant than slight. It must have been a dismally significant cloud that caused Godwin to write her such a letter!

Let the reader consider the particulars of one of this angelical Mary’s exhibitions of ill-temper; an affair mentioned lightly by Mr. Kegan Paul as a ‘little outburst.’ In the June of 1797, Godwin (a man with a right to a short summer’s holiday, if ever a hard-working man had a right to one) went for a driving tour of just two weeks and three days in the company of his particular friend Mr. Basil Montagu. Hiring a horse and gig, they drove through parts of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire, into Staffordshire, visiting Beaconsfield, Oxford, Birmingham, and Stafford, in the earlier days of the excursion; and in the closing days of the brief vacation taking peeps at Derby, Coventry, and Cambridge. Let it be borne in mind that the tour was made in times long before the country was covered with telegraph wires, and when country towns had not three or four postal departures and deliveries a-day. Also, be it remembered, that Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had mated on the understanding, that they should not have too much of one another’s company, or pester one another with incessant attentiveness. It had been arranged that Godwin, an early riser, should go from his bed in The Polygon to his study in Evesham Buildings at an early hour, and in the ordinary way of his life should not after leaving bed see Mary before their four-o’clock dinner. It had been arranged between them that each should be free to go into society without the other, going by themselves to different parties, going apart on the same evenings to different theatres, or to different parts of the same theatre. Settled even to minute particulars had it been that they should show their superiority to ordinary husbands and wives, by doing what they liked, and exacting no petty services from one another. Free in their love they would be free in their lives.

Driving out of London for this tour on Saturday, 3rd June, Godwin returned to London on Tuesday, 20th June, having in the interval written his wife six long letters. He wrote to his wife on the 5th, 7th, 10th, 12th, 15th, and 17th of June. The letters were no brief and hasty notes; they were long letters of bright, cheery chat, and affectionate gossip; letters showing he thought much of her during his absence from her, and wished to make her by means of his pen the sharer of his enjoyments. All these long letters came to Mary’s hands; and she knew he was not a rapid writer, capable of dashing off a long epistle in twenty minutes. There had been no hour or day fixed upon precisely for his return, though the tour had been spoken of beforehand as a fortnight’s ‘outing.’ Time having been lost by unforeseen accidents and contretemps, as time is apt to be lost in such trips, Godwin (the husband who, by special agreement, was to retain as much as possible of his bachelor freedom after marriage) stayed out three days longer than his wife expected. He did not return to The Polygon on Saturday night; Mary fretted all Sunday. He did not return on Sunday night; Mary went to bed to fret and fume over his cruel neglect of her. Rising on Monday with a clouded brow, she spent the day musing over her wrongs, and resolving on measures to preserve herself from such inhuman treatment in the future. On Monday night (whilst the cup of Godwin’s iniquity was only two-thirds full) she wrote her husband a piece of her mind in a letter to catch his eye and conscience either on his arrival at his own door, or at his last resting-place on his homeward way. To see the angelic Mary in one of her tantrums, readers should refer to Mr. Kegan Paul’s book, and peruse this letter, dated ‘June 19th, Monday, almost 12 o’clock.’ Though absence had, for a while, quickened her affection for him, coldness and neglect had diminished it. The letters he had sent her might serve to remind him where he had been, but they were no mementos of love for her to value. If tenderness for her had animated him on his departure from town, it had evaporated during his trip. Though she had requested him to let her know beforehand the time of his return, he had tormented her by keeping her in suspense. Godwin having written to her copiously about the people he had seen in his brief tour, it seemed well to the amiable Mary to charge him with being influenced by ‘the homage of vulgar minds.’ In waiting to see a show at Coventry, instead of hastening back to Somers Town, he had offered her an affront. What had happened on the way that it took him from Saturday to Sunday night to make the journey from Coventry to Cambridge? And now he was still away, though it was near midnight. What want of consideration for her feelings! ‘Unless,’ wrote the angry woman, ‘you suppose me to be a stick or stone, you must have forgot to think as well as to feel, since you have been on the wing.’

This ‘little outburst’ did not, we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul, affect the cordial affection of the husband and wife. One would like to hear Godwin on that point. What a letter for him to receive from the woman he had so recently married! What a selfish, exacting, unendurable virago! Yet the Shelleyan zealots commend her for her womanly goodness and sweetness; insisting that she appeared on earth to ‘gild humanity with a ray,’ &c., and that Godwin’s life was darkened and lowered to its last hour by her death.

Before we pass on to pay our respects to the second Mrs. Godwin, it is well to notice what is said of the marriage of the first Mrs. Godwin by her daughter (Mrs. Shelley), whose statements respecting her mother and husband are too generally accepted as authoritative in the Shelleyan coteries. In Mrs. Shelley’s fanciful account of her mother’s virtues, which are declared ‘to gild humanity with a ray, &c.,’ it is thus written:—

‘Godwin met her at a moment when she was deeply depressed by the ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence; who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and thoughtless generosity, and lofty independence of character, to plunge her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly difficulties, indeed, she set at nought.... It was at this time that Godwin again met her at the house of her friend Miss Hayes, having done so occasionally before she went to Norway.’

Further, in a note on the marriage of her parents, Mrs. Shelley says—

‘At the beginning of this year (1797) Mr. Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft. The precise date is not known; he does not mention it in his journal, and the ceremony had taken place some time before the marriage was declared. This secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories.... They both however looked on this sort of struggle, in which they had been born, and had always lived, as a very secondary matter, and after a short period of deliberation they, in the month of April, declared the marriage which had before been solemnized.’

(1.) By difficulties, worldly difficulties, Mrs. Shelley obviously means ‘pecuniary difficulties.’ However ill people may think of Imlay’s treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft, it must be admitted that Imlay did not leave her without wishing and seeking to free her from immediate pecuniary difficulties and to put her in easy circumstances for the moment. She showed proper spirit in refusing to take money of him under the circumstances; but as he offered it, he cannot be fairly charged with selfish indifference to the difficulties.

(2.) Mrs. Shelley does not say how long it was before her mother’s departure for Norway, when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had occasional meetings at Miss Hayes’s house. Nor does she actually say that Godwin saw Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time at one of those meetings. But her words are calculated to give, and have given, the impression that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time shortly before her departure from London for Norway, in the summer of 1795. But this impression is erroneous. Thomas Paine escaped from England to France in September, 1792, and never revisited his native country. He was present on the occasion when Godwin, in London, met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, and was displeased with her loquaciousness and apparent desire to engross Paine’s attention. This meeting, therefore, must have taken place before September, 1792. There is also other evidence that Mary Wollstonecraft knew William Godwin before she went to France.

(3.) As he was not ‘acting in contradiction to his theories,’ whilst living in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft, it is obvious that Mrs. Shelley’s words, touching the marriage of her parents, refer to their lawful marriage. Mrs. Shelley says this marriage was solemnized at the beginning of 1797. She is wrong; for the marriage was solemnized at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(4.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the precise date is not known.’ She is wrong. The precise date may not have been known to Mrs. Shelley, but it was known to other people,—to all people who had taken sufficient trouble to inquire about the matter. There never could have been any uncertainty respecting the place of the wedding; for both Godwin and Mary were well known to be inhabitants of St. Pancras parish at the time of the event. To ascertain the precise date it was, therefore, only needful to search the parish register.

(5.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the ceremony had taken place some time before the marriage was declared’ in April; leaving the reader to infer that three months elapsed between the performance and the publication of the ceremony. She is wrong. The marriage was announced to Godwin’s most intimate friends within a few days of the performance of the ceremony. Holcroft acknowledged on 6th April, 1797, the announcement made to him by Godwin of what had taken place at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(6.) Speaking of the secrecy of the marriage, Mrs. Shelley says, ‘This secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories;’ readers being thereby led to infer that Godwin kept the marriage a secret from the beginning of the year till April, from reluctance to avow an act so inconsistent with his theories. Mrs. Shelley is wrong. Instead of postponing the announcement for three months from such a cause, her father announced the marriage within a few days of its solemnization.

(7.) Still writing as though what occurred on 29th March had taken place at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Shelley says,—

‘Another cause for the secrecy at first maintained was the stern law of poverty and necessity. My father narrowly circumscribed both his receipts and disbursements. The maintenance of a family had never been contemplated, and could not at once be provided for. My mother, accustomed to a life of struggle and poverty, was so beloved by her friends, that several, and Mr. Johnson in particular, had stood between her and any of the annoyances and mortifications of debt. But this must cease when she married.’

In other words, according to Mrs. Shelley, her father kept his marriage a secret from the beginning of the year till April, in order that he might derive advantage from money, given to Mary Wollstonecraft by Mr. Johnson and other friends, under the impression that she was a single woman with no husband to maintain her; which money they would not have given her, had they known of her marriage. This is what Mrs. Shelley says of William Godwin. What baseness for a daughter to attribute to her own father, and put on record against him! I wish I could say that nothing in Godwin’s life, till his powers languished under increasing embarrassments, countenances the opinion that he was capable of such baseness. Unfortunately, however, there is evidence that, whilst Mary Wollstonecraft was living in secret Free Love with him in The Polygon, he prevailed on Mr. T. Wedgewood to lend him a considerable sum of money, saying, when he asked for the loan, that he did not want it for himself, but for the use of another person. As this other person was Mary Wollstonecraft, and as a contract of Free Love was marriage in Godwin’s opinion, the money he wanted for her use was money borrowed for his own use. Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood outright that he wanted it for Mary Wollstonecraft? Because he thought it possible that some rumour of his arrangement with Mary had come to Mr. Wedgewood, in which case the benevolent manufacturer, instead of lending the money, would say, ‘No, you must support your own “bosom-friend.”’ Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood that he was living in Free Love with Mary? For much the same reason; from a fear that, instead of lending the money, Mr. Wedgewood would say, ‘No; for I see why you want the money, and I think you ought to keep your own wife.’ Wedgewood lent the money in ignorance of the purpose for which it was needed.

After the declaration of his marriage Godwin confessed that he had wanted the money for Mary Wollstonecraft, and at the same time begged for a further loan of 50l.; saying, as he made this confession and prayer for further help, ‘I trust you will not accuse me of duplicity in having told you that it was not for myself that I wanted your assistance.’ Though he complied with the petition for another 50l., Mr. Wedgewood cannot have acquitted his friend of duplicity in the former application. Hence it is certain that Godwin kept the Free Love contract a secret to one particular friend, lest by revealing it he should lessen his power to draw money from his own friend. It is, therefore, only too probable that he was guilty of the meanness attributed to him by his daughter, and also refrained from publishing the Free Love contract, lest the publication should lessen the readiness of Mary’s friends to give her money. But though he was influenced by pecuniary considerations in keeping his relations with Mary Wollstonecraft a secret, it none the less remains that Mrs. Shelley was wrong in representing that he was moved by such considerations to keep his lawful marriage secret from the beginning of the year till April. As we have said more than once the marriage of 29th March, 1797, was declared in the first week of April.

How are these inaccuracies to be regarded?—as mistakes arising wholly or chiefly from misconception? or as deliberate untruths? Let us fix our attention on the two first misstatements; the assertion that the marriage was solemnized at the beginning of the year and the assertion that the date of the marriage was unknown. Did Mrs. Shelley make these misstatements innocently? in ignorance of the truth, or with a knowledge of the truth? It is not easy to believe that Mrs. Shelley, a woman of letters, curious about her mother’s history, and in her later time engaged in biographical inquiries for the illustration of her husband’s life, her own career, her father’s life, and her mother’s story, omitted to ascertain a fact so easily discovered, as the date of her father’s marriage. If she knew the date, she had obvious motives for putting the ugly fact out of sight, under specious and delusive verbiage. In her later time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? She could not tamper with the evidences of the date of her own birth. They were too numerous and too well known. But by pushing the date of her mother’s marriage some two or three months back, she would cause the world to think her the child of a premature birth, who had entered the world none too soon for her mother’s credit. By doing so, she may well have conceived herself discharging a filial duty, as well as a duty to herself and her husband’s respectable family. She must have wished to think of herself as differing, in this respect, altogether from her base-born sister Fanny, who committed suicide whilst still young. She must have shrunk from the thought that, had it not been for so late a marriage as the one which preceded her own birth by only five months, she would have resembled her sister Fanny in being a bastard. Hence, whilst it is not easy to think her ignorant of the real date of her mother’s marriage, her motive for wilfully misstating the case is obvious. Thus much on the assumption that the main inaccuracy was a deliberate untruth.

It is, however, just conceivable that she did not know the date of her mother’s marriage, and had a sincere belief that it occurred somewhere about the beginning of 1797. This belief may have been due to words spoken to her by Mrs. Gisborne, who, her friend in Italy, had been her mother’s friend in the previous century. She may even have gone to the St. Pancras registry, and paid fees to the registrar for searching for evidence of the marriage amongst the records of marriages, solemnized in the parish in the later months of 1796 and the first month of 1797. She may have taken some, though insufficient, pains to arrive at the evidence of the marriage, and imagined herself to have taken all possible pains, and come to the conclusion that she might honestly write of her mother’s marriage, ‘the precise date is unknown.’

Even so, though she would be innocent of wilful falsehood, she would remain guilty of writing positively on a mere assumption (a serious fault in an historian), and offering her readers as sure facts a series of inferences from a mere assumption, or a belief unsustained by positive testimony. Her narrative of her parents’ marriage, if not a tissue of untruths, would remain a thing made up of inaccuracies. It is important for readers to bear this in mind, whilst and after reading this book. Mrs. Shelley did not die without leaving much biographical material behind her in the shape of printed notes to her husband’s works, and also in the shape of MS. notes and memoranda for the use of future historians;—stuff that would have appeared in her justificatory Memoir of her husband, had not Sir Timothy checked her biographical zeal by the stern order, ‘Silence, or no allowance!’ But on being brought under critical scrutiny, all the passages, and bits, and scraps of her biographical sketches, at present before the world, are found so curiously inaccurate, that every one of her biographical statements should be read with nervous caution, lively suspicion, and watchful distrust, by those who would avoid error on matters of Shelleyan story.

I do not say she was an untruthful woman, though on some occasions she unquestionably rouses serious suspicion of her veracity. Like Lady Byron she enjoyed in her girlhood a reputation for sincerity of speech. But people often say things that are untrue without intending to be untruthful. It was often so with Mrs. Shelley, in some degree before her husband’s death, and in a greater degree after that event. An imaginative and highly emotional woman, she sometimes saw things in a wrong light. Not seldom, her mental vision was affected by the delusive media of sentimentality or anger, through which it regarded matters that stirred her feelings. In speaking of herself she was sometimes strongly influenced by romantic egotism. Affection and combativeness combined to render her an unreliable witness about matters touching her husband’s honour. Resembling Lady Byron in being a vehement and steady hater, she from her girlhood cordially disliked her step-mother and after loving her sister Claire with the romantic fervour described in the Real Lord Byron, came to detest her almost as cordially as Lady Byron, long after Byron’s death, detested her sister-in-law. All that she said or wrote to the discredit of her step-mother and sister-by-affinity should be received with extreme caution, and large allowance for her animosity against them.

CHAPTER III.

THE SECOND MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN.

The Blighted Being—Miss Jones’s Disappointment—The Blighted Being goes to Bath—He proposes to Miss Harriet Lee—Is rejected by Mrs. Reveley—Is accepted by Mary Jane Clairmont—Who was she?—Her Children by her first Marriage—Their Ages in 1801—Points of Resemblance in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont—The Blighted Being marries Mary Jane Clairmont—Mr. Kegan Paul’s serious Misrepresentations of Claire’s Age—The Use made of this Misrepresentation—Mr. Kegan Paul convicted by his own Evidences—Charles Clairmont’s Boyhood—Godwin’s Regard for his second Wife—Misrepresentations touching the second Mrs. Godwin—Childhood of Mary and Claire—Education of Godwin’s Children and Step-children—Charles Clairmont’s Introduction to Free Thought—Godwin’s Care to withhold Mary from Free Thought—She is reared in Ignorance of her Mother’s Story—The Book-shop in Hanway Street—The Godwins of The Polygon—Their Migration to the City—The Godwins of Skinner Street.

By Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin was left with two motherless infants on his hands,—Fanny Imlay, three years and from four to five months old, and Mary, just ten days old. According to Mr. Kegan Paul, he was also left with a blighted existence. Let us see what Godwin did with his blighted existence in the years immediately following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. For some time the infants in The Polygon, Somers Town, were cared for by Miss Louisa Jones, who would fain have become the step-mother of Mary Wollstonecraft’s legitimate child, and the tender guardian of Fanny.

Miss Jones, however, was not allowed to settle herself for life in this manner; for though he saw the necessity of finding a mother for the children, the widower with a blighted existence did not think highly of Miss Louisa.

Mary Wollstonecraft had been just six months in her grave; when the blighted being determined to woo one of the two Misses Lee, of Bath,—Sophia and Harriet Lee, daughters of John Lee, the Covent Garden actor, and authors of The Canterbury Tales; who, as writers with many readers, and school-mistresses with a flourishing seminary for young ladies, were notable personages in the City of Health and Invalids. Going to Bath in March, 1798, Godwin saw enough of Miss Harriet Lee, on four different occasions, to resolve on laying siege (by letters from London) to her mature affections. In April 1798 Miss Harriet Lee received the first of the letters from London, that were intended to induce her to dissolve partnership with her sister, and enter into a different kind of partnership with the author of Political Justice. Barely seven months had passed since Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, when her former and inconsolable husband is making love to another woman. This seems quick work for a blighted being. Is it usual for a blighted being to think of re-marriage so soon after bereavement? If so, blighted beings do not deserve more compassion than other widowers. But the suit was unsuccessful. There were several things to make Miss Harriet Lee think thrice before accepting William Godwin. There was his strong writing against the honourable estate into which he desired to lure Miss Harriet Lee; there was the unpleasant rumour that he had lived for months in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft; there were Mary Wollstonecraft’s two infants in The Polygon, Somers Town. Moreover, as a gentlewoman of elegant letters and a respectable schoolmistress, Mrs. Harriet Lee may have been prejudiced against the man who had admired the author of the Rights of Woman. Miss Harriet Lee thought thrice; and in August, 1798, the author of Political Justice knew he must look elsewhere for a step-mother to his little daughter.

What next with the blighted being? One of the most unpleasant of the several ladies, with whom Shelley associated in Italy, was a certain Mrs. Gisborne, whilom Mrs. Reveley, of whom he wrote to Peacock in August, 1819 (giving her a character not more applicable to her in her advanced middle age than in 1799):—‘Mrs. Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable and very accomplished woman; she is δημοκρατικη and αθεη—how far she may φιλανθρωπη I don’t know, for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm.’ On 6th July, 1799, this gentlewoman lost her first husband, who died no long while after showing much uneasiness at her intimacy with the blighted being. Within a month of Mr. Reveley’s death, Godwin pressed the widow to give him personal interviews, in order that he might show reason why she should hasten to become his wife;—a request that was declined by the widow, who, though an atheist, a democrat, and a cold-blooded creature, had some faint notions of decency, and of what was due to the memory even of the husband with whom she had lived unhappily. Is it usual for a blighted being to behave in this way? In something more than a year from his wife’s death to offer a married lady attention that stirs her husband to indignation, and in less than two years from the blighting bereavement to make an offer of marriage to this same lady, within a month of her husband’s death? In the name of all the domestic affections, what is it to be a blighted being? What is blight of heart and life? It must surely be something that impels an inconsolable widower to make an offer of marriage to nearly every other woman who crosses his path.

Instead of marrying the man of blighted life, Mrs. Reveley in May, 1800, gave herself in marriage to Mr. Gisborne, whose Slawkenbergian nose is curiously associated with Shelley’s own ‘little turn-up nose;’ her action in this matter being (Mr. Kegan Paul assures us) ‘a severe blow to Godwin, who had never abandoned the hope he might overcome the lady’s objections to a marriage with him!’ Twelve months later (May 1801), the blighted being was in love with Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, alias Clermont, whom he married in the following December,—just four years and three months from the day of Mary Wollstonecraft’s funeral.

My information respecting the second Mrs. William Godwin’s first husband is slight and shadowy, though I have done my best to make it more substantial. There is reason to believe he was a bookseller; but my evidence on this point is not conclusive. If he was in ‘the trade,’ the fact would account for the second Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge of printing and publishing matters, and of the confidence with which she urged Godwin to become a publisher of books for children. For the main purpose of this paragraph it is enough to say, that his surname is (as I remarked in the Real Lord Byron) variously spelt in Byronic and Shelleyan biography, and that one comes upon it in the fashion of Clermont, Claremont, Clairemont, and Charlemont, as well as Clairmont. For sufficient and obvious reasons, in the Real Lord Byron I spelt the name Clermont,—the spelling used in the British Museum Catalogue, for the reference to Claire’s well-known letter to Byron, preserved in the Egerton MSS. For no less sufficient and obvious reasons I spell the name in this chapter ‘Clairmont,’—Godwin’s way of spelling the name. Readers, therefore, must bear in mind that ‘Jane Clairmont’ and ‘Jane Clermont’ signify the same Claire (Mrs. Shelley’s sister-by-affinity), who was Byron’s mistress and the mother of Allegra.

By the Shelleyan apologists, who draw their inspiration from Field Place, the first Mrs. William Godwin and the second Mrs. William Godwin have been dealt with differently. It appearing to those apologists that to place Mary Wollstonecraft amongst the angels is to raise a presumption that the daughter of so pure and bright a spirit was also of angelical nature,—a presumption favourable to the poet and his family,—they have tortured the English language to make her into an angel. On the other hand, it appearing to the same apologists that to exhibit the second Mrs. Godwin as a harsh and odious step-mother is to justify Mary Godwin’s desire to get away from so hateful a ruler, and even to palliate the young lady’s conduct in running away to Switzerland with another woman’s husband, they have tortured and strained the English language even more cruelly, to prove that the second Mrs. Godwin was a superlatively disagreeable woman. Being no partisan, the present writer declines either to think the first Mrs. Godwin an angel of grace, or to think the second Mrs. Godwin a very hateful person. Seeing that Mary Wollstonecraft had various faults, he sees that Mary Jane Clairmont had several imperfections. Whilst declining to join with the Shelleyan enthusiasts in glorifying Mary Wollstonecraft because her daughter Mary lived to be Shelley’s second wife, and in decrying the second Mrs. Godwin for the advantage of her step-daughter’s reputation, he is none the less disposed to think favourably of Mrs. Mary Jane (Clairmont) Godwin, because she cordially disapproved of the views about marriage, which Godwin had successively promulgated and abandoned.

In several important particulars the second Mrs. William Godwin resembled the first Mrs. William Godwin. A woman of considerable cleverness and some education, she was an industrious woman of letters. Cleverer with her pen at translation than in original writing, she was enthusiastic and decidedly well looking. Even by her arch-enemy, Mr. Kegan Paul, she is said to have been ‘clever, enthusiastic, and handsome.’ Having somewhat the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft in temper she resembled her in disposition. Both women were quick-tempered, captious, quarrelsome, given to imagine themselves slighted and to sulk. But the second Mrs. Godwin was by no means so violent and outrageous in wrath as Mary Wollstonecraft. In other respects Mary Jane had the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft. In social reputation she was far superior to Mary Godwin’s mother. Having never produced so scandalous a book as the Rights of Women, she had not lived in Free Love with two men or any man; she had never given birth to an illegitimate child; her name had never been discreditably associated with another woman’s husband; nor had she ever thrown herself in a fit of white rage off Putney Bridge. On another point the advantage is with the second Mrs. Godwin. On mating with her Godwin matched evenly; whilst the unevenness of his match with Mary Wollstonecraft had been to his disadvantage. On coming to her childless husband Mary Wollstonecraft brought an illegitimate child in her arms. Godwin had two children to maintain, when Mary Jane Clairmont entered his house with a child on either hand.

In the spring of 1801 Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont took possession of the tenement adjoining Godwin’s house in The Polygon, Somers Town, bringing with her to the new home her little girl Jane (afterwards ‘Claire’), at that time in her fourth or fifth year (older, perhaps, by a few months than little Mary Godwin), and her elder brother, who may be regarded as having been born on or about 4th June, 1795,—possibly on or about 4th June, 1796. My knowledge of the month in which the little boy (Charles Clairmont) was born came to me from a letter, dated 5th June, 1806, written to Mrs. Godwin (at Southend) by William Godwin, who says therein, ‘Yesterday (was that right or wrong?) we kept Charles’s birthday, though his mother was absent.’ My information about the year of the boy’s birth is less precise, but I put it in 1795. It is certain that he was older than his sister. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul has no doubt; if he had any I could remove it. Hence, at the time of Mrs. Clairmont’s entry into the house adjoining Godwin’s home in The Polygon, Somers Town, the ages of the four children of the two households stood thus:—(1) Fanny Imlay, b. April, 1794, ætat. just seven years; (2) Charles Clairmont, b. 4th June, 1795, ætat. five years and ten months; (3) Jane Clairmont, in her fourth (or possibly even in her fifth) year; (4) Mary Godwin, b. 30th August, 1797, ætat. three years and some seven or eight months.

A great deal turns on the ages of these children. In their desire to whitewash Mary Godwin, and exhibit her as a worthy mate for so faultless a person as Shelley, the Shelleyan enthusiasts have discovered that she was much younger than Claire; the discovery being used as a reason why Mary’s grand misdemeanour should be entered in the tale of Claire’s offences, and why, instead of censuring Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter for running off with her friend’s husband, we should be indignant with the mature Claire for not taking better care of her younger sister. It is well to inquire, whether the discovery, of which so much is made, is aught else than a misrepresentation.

Byron thought Mary and Claire were, within a few months, of the same age. Writing of them in 1820, in the famous Observations, he put the case thus ungrammatically, ‘Neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years old,’—i.e. in the months of 1816, which they passed chiefly in his society at Geneva. It may be observed that Byron, often an inaccurate, was sometimes an untruthful writer. But spite against Claire, with whom he was quarrelling bitterly in 1820, would have disposed him to exaggerate her age. Whilst habitually truthful people sometimes tell fibs, persons never too nice about the truth sometimes tell it. On this occasion Byron seems to have told the truth. He was right as to the age of Mary Godwin, who did not complete her nineteenth year till 30th August, 1816. He certainly was not far wrong about Claire’s age.

What is said about Claire’s age by Mr. Kegan Paul, who tells two different stories about it? ‘This,’ he says of Mrs. Clairmont and her coming to The Polygon (vide pp. 57, 58, vol. ii. of William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries), ‘was a Mrs. Clairmont, a widow, with a son then at school, and one little daughter somewhat older than Fanny, who came to occupy the next house to Godwin in the Polygon.’ The italics of two words of this quotation are mine. Farther on, in his book, when he comes to work on the discovery, so as to make it appear that Claire was much older than Mary, Mr. Kegan Paul (vol. ii., p. 213) says, ‘Jane Clairmont was only at home for two nights during the six weeks Shelley spent in London. She was several years older than Fanny, and even then led a somewhat independent life apart from her mother and step-father, presumably as a governess, since that was the occupation she afterwards followed in Italy, during the intervals of her residence with the Shelleys.’ This extract (seven words of which I print in italics) refers to Shelley’s stay in London in the October and November, 1812. It is made up of inaccuracies. (1) Claire, like Mary, was only fifteen years old. (2) She may have been a pupil-teacher in some school where she was being educated; but she was not living in independence of her stepfather and her mother. (3) She was not several years older than Fanny.

Several years older! First, Mr. Kegan Paul says somewhat older, and then several years older; the difference between the two expressions making the two passages tell two different stories. The purpose of the larger expression is obvious. Mr. Paul wishes us to think Claire several years older than Fanny Imlay, in order that we may think her very much Mary’s superior, by the authority of age. Several years may mean anything from three or four years to ten or twelve. Let us put the expression at four years. Then, as Fanny (born in April, 1794) was already eighteen years old, Claire must, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, have been twenty-two years old in 1812, and must have been born at least as early as April, 1790. It follows, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, that Claire’s brother, older than she, must have been born, at the latest, on 4th June, 1789,—might, indeed, be fairly taken as having been born a year earlier.

Charles Clairmont was therefore, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, rising twelve years old, when his mother came to her new house in the Polygon. Was he?

(1) In 1802, when Charles (according to Mr. Kegan Paul’s statement) was thirteen years old, William Godwin is admitted by Mr. Kegan Paul to have taken much pains to put the boy into Christ’s Hospital. Had Godwin succeeded in getting the admission, the boy would have been fourteen before he went into the school, where boys, eighty years since, used to be admitted, no less than now-a-days, in quite tender years. Is it probable Godwin would have sought for the admission when the boy was so old?

(2) As an admission in the Bluecoat School could not be got for the boy, we know from a letter, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s own book, that Charles Clairmont was sent to Charterhouse in the summer of 1805, and kept at his studies there for six years. ‘I observed,’ Godwin wrote to Mr. Fairley on 5th October, 1811, about the boy, ‘that I had kept him for six years at the Charterhouse, one of our most celebrated schools, not without proportionable profit, and that he has since been several months under one of our most celebrated arithmeticians.’ If Charles was born on 4th June, 1789, he was sixteen years old when he first entered the Charterhouse school, and twenty-two when he left it. Does Mr. Kegan Paul think this probable or possible?

(3) Let us take some more evidence from one of the letters, which Mr. Kegan Paul seems to have pitchforked into his book without reading them. On 5th June, 1806, William Godwin wrote about the boy (who had been naughty just before his birthday) to his wife at Southend, in these words:—

‘Do not imagine that I took Charles into my good graces the moment your back was turned.... So that I had only just time to forgive him for his birthday. I wish to impress you with the persuasion that he is infinitely more of a child, and to be treated as a child, than you imagine. Monday I sent him for a frank, and set all the children to write letters, though by his awkwardness the occasion was lost. The letter he then wrote, though I took some pains previously to work on his feelings, was the poorest and most soulless thing ever you saw. I then set him to learn the poem of “My Mother,” in Darton’s Original Poetry.... I went upstairs to his bedside the night before you left us, that I might impress upon him the importance of not suffering you to depart in anger; but instead of understanding me at first, he, like a child, thought I was come to whip him, and with great fervour and agitation, begged I would forgive him.’

(4) Had he been born on 4th June, 1789, as we are asked to believe by Mr. Kegan Paul, Charles (a decidedly clever boy, who made a good position for himself in early manhood by his mental force) was just upon seventeen years old, when he was scolded and punished for being naughty,—was set to learn by heart ‘My Mother’ in Darton’s Original Poetry, and was thrown into lively agitation by fear that his stepfather had come upstairs to whip him. Can Mr. Kegan Paul seriously believe that a clever boy of seventeen years would have cried out for forgiveness, and in childish alarm have begged his step-father not to smack him?

(5) At the close of October, 1811, when, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, he was twenty-two years, Charles (the clever boy, who was still a mere lad when he became a tutor in the Imperial family of Austria) was sent to Mr. Thomas Constable’s publishing house for two years to learn business; it being arranged that the lad should receive a yearly salary of 15l., to which his stepfather should add 30l. for his sufficient maintenance. Can Mr. Kegan Paul believe that this arrangement was made for so promising a young man when he was twenty-two years old?

(6) Now let us see how Charles’s probable birthday of 4th June, 1795, fits in with the known dates of his story. Born on that day he would be seven years old in June, 1802; an age at which persons, wishing to get him into Christ’s Hospital, would be on the look-out for a nomination. Born on that day he was ten years old in 1805, when he went for the first time to the Charterhouse,—a fit age (as matters went seventy years since) at which to send him into the school. Born on that day, he would be still ten years old, when he was scolded, set to learn ‘My Mother,’ and thrown into noisy agitation by fear of being whipt. Godwin’s letter gives a picture of a rather childish boy of ten years, not of a young man seventeen years old. Born on that day, he would be sixteen, when he left school in 1811, and went as a clerk into the Edinburgh publishing-house. Let it be added (though more than enough has been said about the youngster’s age) that the boy’s letters, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders, are enough to show him to have been six or seven years younger than the book-maker requires us to think him.

(7) Another piece of evidence touching Claire’s age, taken from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book. If she was born, as Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe, no later than April, 1790, she was twenty-one years old in May, 1811. In that month of May, Mrs. Godwin went to Ramsgate for change of air, taking her stepdaughter, Mary, with her for the trip, whilst her own daughter Jane (Claire) remained in London with her father and Fanny Imlay. Writing from London to Mrs. Godwin at Ramsgate, on 18th May, 1811, William Godwin says:—

‘I have just been into the next room to ask the children if they have any messages. They are both anxious to hear from you. Jane says she hopes you stuck on the Goodwin Sands, and that the sailors frightened you a little.’

This message from thirteen-years-old Jane was a piquant piece of sauciness from the child to her mamma. From a young woman of twenty-one years it would have been a piece of silliness, that Godwin certainly would not have passed on to his wife, in order to heighten the enjoyment of her holiday. Enough surely has been said to satisfy readers that Byron was right in regarding Claire and Mary as girls of about the same age, i.e. as being both of them only eighteen years old when they were at Geneva in 1816; and that Mr. Kegan Paul is guilty of a serious error in making it seem that Claire was older than Mary by at least seven years and four months. Claire may have been older than Mary by some months; but she certainly was not older than Fanny by several years.

Repeating a piece of malicious domestic tattle, in order to make the lady ridiculous and contemptible, Mr. Kegan Paul says, that soon after entering her new home in The Polygon, Mrs. Clairmont, from the balcony outside her drawing-room window, addressed Godwin (sitting in the balcony outside his drawing-room window) in these words, ‘Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?’—words that, tickling the philosopher’s inordinate vanity, are represented as going far to enslave him. Let it be assumed that the widow made the first advances to acquaintanceship with her neighbour in this absurd fashion; that she set her cap at the widower, angled for him, caught him. Why should so much be made of this to the second Mrs. Godwin’s discredit, by writers who have nothing but eulogy for Mary Wollstonecraft, though she ran wildly after Fuseli, and certainly did not leave it to Godwin to make the first advances to her? We have Godwin’s published word that he made no such advances to her; and we have his serious declaration, in the private note intended only for Mary Wollstonecraft’s eye, that his ambition to heal her wounded heart resulted from her action in throwing herself on his compassionate sympathy.

It is urged by Mr. Kegan Paul, that Godwin’s second marriage was not a remarkably happy one; that Godwin would have lived on the whole more serenely, from middle to old age, had he not wedded the widow Clairmont; that they had two or three lively quarrels, and divers keen disputes; that some of his old friends disliked her so much that they visited her husband less frequently; that she was a ‘managing,’ domineering woman, with a far from happy temper. All this must be admitted, though every count of the indictment is pressed against the lady with extravagant exaggeration. When all has been urged that can be fairly urged to the discredit of her temper, the second Mrs. Godwin was a less irascible and overbearing woman than Mary Wollstonecraft. There are grounds for a strong opinion that had Godwin been Mary Wollstonecraft’s domestic mate for thirty years, instead of some ten or eleven months, he would have suffered far more from her temper, than he suffered from his second wife’s temper during more than thirty years. If in one of their squabbles arising from paltry questions, Godwin and his second wife talked about separating from one another when they had been married only a year and ten months, let it be remembered in what terms he was moved to write to Mary Wollstonecraft, when he had been (legally) married to her only three weeks. If the man of letters and his second wife had another lively difference in August, 1811, when they had been married nine years and seven months, the quarrel ended under circumstances, affording evidence of much good feeling on Mrs. Godwin’s part, and also of the strong mutual affection of the husband and wife. The documents of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book (documents he cannot be supposed to have read) yield conclusive testimony that, whilst falling out with her, and scolding her roundly once in a while, Godwin had a high regard for his second wife’s energy, a corresponding respect for her good sense and discretion in affairs of business, a genuine admiration for several of her qualities, a curious pride in the gentility of her birth, and a steady affection for her,—in truth, all the sentimental fondness so cold a man could feel for any woman. There is a homely saying in Wiltshire that ‘married people are made to bicker and breed.’ Godwin and his wife bickered barely up to the standard of Wiltshire morals; and their recorded bickerings are never without indications of a homely (albeit quite unromantic) liking for one another. Of their petty tiffs and short-lived quarrels, biography would never have said a word, had not the Shelleyan enthusiasts thought it needful to hunt up materials for palliating Mary Godwin’s conduct, in running away from her father’s house with another woman’s husband.

‘The old acquaintances,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says in his general account of Godwin’s life in 1802-3, the first year of his married life with his second wife, ‘did not like Mrs. Godwin, and she did not like them; she was a harsh stepmother, whom his children feared.’ There are, of course, two sides to the story of Mrs. Godwin’s dislike of her husband’s old friends. The dislike has in some cases been exaggerated; and her dislike of some of the people was reasonable and even creditable to her. Possibly her children feared her; for the way, in which children were generally governed in English homes eighty years since, caused them often to fear parents who abounded in parental affection. But there is no evidence that she was a ‘harsh stepmother,’ in any fair sense of the term, apart from Mrs. Shelley’s vindictive words against her. Such scanty evidence as Mr. Kegan Paul gives us from the Field Place papers, goes in the other direction. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul makes strong assertions without supporting them with facts, which he certainly would have done, had the facts been to hand. He says (speaking of 1802-3):—

‘She’ (i.e. the second Mrs. Godwin) ‘had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite duties, and with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education, and even accomplishments, which their slender means would admit, and more than they would admit; while household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin.’

This is the case against Mrs. Godwin, as it is put by the gentleman who insists that Claire (in after-life a governess) was six or seven years older than Mary. As they were of the same age, it was incumbent on Mrs. Godwin to treat them alike in respect to educational advantages; but it is droll that Mr. Kegan Paul, who declares Claire to have been so much the older of the two girls, should be so severe on Mrs. Godwin for spending more money on the education of the elder girl (so soon to be a governess), than on the younger who was still a little child. What accomplishments can Mary (from five to six years old in 1802-3) have been denied by her harsh stepmother, that so much should be made of the denial? The truth is that the two girls of about the same age were educated precisely in the same way, by the same governess, and with the same books. In other matters they were treated in the same way; taking their childish ‘treats’ together or by turns, and taking their punishments in proportion to their naughtiness. It has already been seen, how Mary went with her stepmother in May, 1811 (a rare ‘outing’ for the Skinner-Street people in those days!), Claire being left at home. Had Mrs. Godwin taken Claire and left Mary in Skinner Street, what a fuss the Shelleyan apologists would have made about Mrs. Godwin’s galling neglect of Mary and partiality for her own girl! The alleged difference in the treatment of the two children existed only in the imagination of Mary, who inherited some of the worst defects of her mother’s temper.

These two children, of the same household and about the same age, were fifteen years old, when Godwin received a letter from a stranger, begging for information respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, and asking especially whether they were educated in accordance with their mother’s educational theories,—an inquiry to which Godwin replied with a statement that Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters had not been educated in accordance with their mother’s educational notions. ‘They are,’ he wrote, ‘neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother.’ At the same time, Godwin told his unknown correspondent that he was chiefly moved to marry his second wife by considerations arising from his sense of his own incompetence to educate his daughters. Further, he remarked that he and his wife were too fully occupied by the labour of maintaining their family, to ‘have leisure enough for reducing theories to practice;’—a series of significant admissions.

There is another piece of remarkable evidence, respecting the education Godwin gave his children, to be found amongst the excellent materials of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders. Four days after the boy’s withdrawal from the Charterhouse School, Godwin sent his step-son Charles a book, instead of another work the lad had been advised to read. On sending the book to Ramsgate, where Charles was staying with his mother, Godwin, on 24th May, 1811, wrote to Mrs. Godwin in these words:—

‘I send Charles’s book agreeably to his desire.... The very choice of the book is taken out of my hands; T. T. undertook to procure for him Paine’s Age of Reason; this I objected to. It is written in a vein of banter and impudence, and though I do not wish the young man to be the slave of the religion of his country, there are few things I hate more than a young man, with his little bit of knowledge, setting-up to turn up his nose, and elevate his eyebrows, and make his sorry joke at everything the wisest and best men England ever produced, have treated with veneration. Therefore I preferred a work by Anthony Collins, the friend of Locke, written with sobriety and learning, to the broad grins of Thomas Paine.... Observe, I totally object to Mary’s reading in Charles’s book. I think it much too early for him, but I have been driven, so far as he is concerned, from the standing of my own judgment by the improper conduct of T. T.’

It is instructive to observe how William Godwin fell away from his philosophical theories as soon as he was required to put them in practice. It is one thing for a scholar to theorize in his arm-chair for the guidance of individuals, who are unknown to him; another thing for him to act on his precepts, in the education of persons to whom he is drawn by parental affection. In theory an enemy to marriage, when Mary Wollstonecraft gave him her wounded heart, he had lived with her in Free Love for only a few months, when he discovered that he had better marry her. From the day of his marriage he moved further away from his old hostility to wedlock, till he altogether abandoned his former views against marriage, and became a supporter of the institution he had so long derided. A theorist on education, he no sooner had little girls to care for at his own hearth, than he discovered his ‘incompetence for the education of daughters,’ and bethought himself that he had better find a second wife, who would bring them up in the old-fashioned way. A bold Deist whilst he was a bachelor, he became a timid Deist in private life on becoming a father. When Charles Clairmont came to reasonable years, Godwin shrunk from the thought of giving him the Age of Reason and would fain have postponed his introduction to Free Thought. On putting Anthony Collins’ moderate book in the hands of the sixteen-years-old boy, he was urgent that his daughter (in her fourteenth year) should not be allowed to look into the book.

Godwin’s reluctance to act on his theories, his absolute abandonment in mature middle age of several of his social views (especially his notorious theories respecting marriage), must be borne in mind by readers, who would judge between him and Shelley, in regard to matters that must soon be narrated. Orthodox cynics have laughed over the old man’s chagrin at his daughter’s elopement with another woman’s husband, and have declared him properly punished by the scandalous incident for his denunciations of wedlock. Men of the world, like Trelawny (a true sailor to the last in finding a new love wherever he harboured), have made merry over Godwin’s displeasure and wrath at the elopement. In his old age, Trelawny used to maintain stoutly that, as Shelley acted in this matter in accordance with the philosopher’s published doctrine, the latter had no right to complain of the poet’s action towards Mary. By the majority of the Shelleyan apologists, it is declared or suggested that Godwin, with a marriageable daughter in his house, was bound by the words he uttered against marriage long before he had a daughter; as though he had no right to change his views after coming to mature age. Whilst questions, touching Godwin’s relations with, and conduct to, Shelley are debated in this fashion, it cannot be stated too plainly that his views about marriage in 1814, and in many previous years, had nothing in common with what he thought against marriage, before his union with Mary Wollstonecraft.

In his Leaf from the Real Life of Lord Byron, the rash and deplorable article on matters about which he knew nothing, Mr. Froude asserted that Mary Godwin was, in her childhood, ‘bred up to regard love as the essential part of marriage;’ these words being used in a sense which caused the essayist to assert that, notwithstanding this breeding-up, she was ‘a perfectly pure innocent woman.’ This assertion that in her childhood Mary was indoctrinated in the anti-matrimonial views her father had abandoned, is absolutely the reverse of fact. Godwin’s children and step-children were educated much like other English children of their social degree; just as they would have been educated had he, instead of being a Deist, been a lukewarm member of the Church of England. Sent to a Church of England school, Charles Clairmont was in no way introduced to Free Thought till he had entered his seventeenth year, and had it not been for T. Turner’s busybodyism, the young man’s introduction to Free Thought would have been deferred till he was much older. Instructed by professional governesses and men-teachers, Mary Godwin and Claire were taught chiefly out of the books produced by their parents in the way of their business, for use in Church-of-England and other Denominational Schools. Their minds were not led prematurely to think about marriage. No eccentric notions touching the intercourse of the sexes had been put into Mary’s mind, when Shelley made her acquaintance. It may be assumed confidently, from the way in which she was educated, that she had never known anything of her mother’s painful history and peculiar views, till Shelley spoke to her about them, and used them as arguments for inducing her to become his mistress. It is certain from her own written words that, instead of regarding marriage as an idle form, she regarded it as a sacred and momentous ceremony. As Godwin was so urgent that she should not be allowed to look into ‘Charles’s book,’ and thought sixteen years a ‘much too early’ age for Charles’s introduction to Free Thought, we may be sure he thought the age very much too early for a clever girl’s initiation in the views of Free-thinkers.

Enough has been said to show that, though her temper was defective, the Edinburgh Review (October, 1882) had no sufficient justification for saying, on the authority of Mr. Kegan Paul, that the second Mrs. Godwin ‘was a person who rendered life intolerable to those who shared it with her.’ The evidence is superabundant that she did not render life intolerable, or otherwise than fairly enjoyable, to her husband, her elder son Charles, her younger son William, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny. That Fanny got on pleasantly with Mrs. Godwin, and that Mrs. Godwin proved a good and kind mother to this child of shameful birth, are sufficient testimony that Mary’s stepmother was by no means so bad a woman as certain of the Shelleyan apologists would have us think her. The fault was not wholly on Mrs. Godwin’s side that, on entering the period in which girlhood passes imperceptibly into womanhood,—the period when high-spirited girls are sometimes very difficult persons to control,—Mary and Claire went into rebellion against her. Godwin’s admission to his unknown correspondent, that his favourite child was ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious,’ points to some of the difficulty Mrs. Godwin experienced in managing the girl, who had inherited a liberal share of Mary Wollstonecraft’s quick, fervid, and querulous nature. Beautiful in different styles, clever in different ways, these two wilful, daring, saucy pusses, would have tried the temper and skill of the most judicious governess. Mrs. Godwin being what she was, it is not surprising that they went into rebellion against her government, and constituted themselves ‘the opposition’ in the Skinner-Street Parliament. It was a grievous misfortune of both damsels, that Shelley (ever quick to sympathize with ‘the victims of domestic tyranny’) made their acquaintance, when they were in this dangerous period of girlhood.

That the handsome, clever, managing Mrs. Godwin had great influence over her husband, is shown by the way in which she induced him to become a publisher and retail seller of children’s educational books,—the business being so arranged that she was for some time its nominal and actual manager, whilst he, keeping in the background of the affair, avoided public observation. Knowing much of printing and the book-trade, it occurred to the managing lady that she and her husband would do well to go into this business. There was much to be said in favour of the project in 1805, when in the fourth year of their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin were no richer than they had been on their wedding-day. Still earning an income that would have been wealth to him as a bachelor, Godwin had not ‘done well’ of late years. Since his second marriage things had been going ill with him. His income was waning, his family had increased. Fanny was rising twelve; Charley was ten; Jane (i.e. Claire) and Mary were rising eight; Willie, the babe of the household, was nearing the end of his second year. How were these children to be clothed, fed, taught, and raised creditably into young men and women, on an income that, already barely sufficient for present necessities, seemed likely to dwindle to smaller revenue? With all their industry, Godwin and his wife had barely kept things going; and they were now nearing a time of life (Godwin was in his fiftieth year), when even the most improvident people begin to anticipate the usual incidents of life’s decline.

Under these circumstances, the shop was opened in 1805, in Hanway Street, Oxford Street, under the name of M. J. Godwin and Co.; the M. J. Godwin being Mary Jane, whose Co. at The Polygon, and on the shop-front, went to work bravely in throwing off copy for new Children’s Books, to be published under the nom-de-plume of Baldwin. Mrs. Godwin also worked hard with her pen, whilst she went daily from The Polygon to the little shop near Oxford Street, to look after the person who had been engaged to wait on customers; Godwin keeping in the background, because his reputation might be hurtful to the venture, were the shop known to be his shop, and many of the books sold in it known to be by his pen. Something less than two years later, when the business (which, beginning in this modest way, became a considerable affair) was moved to Skinner Street, it was decided with questionable discretion that Godwin should live over his own shop, and, dropping all concealment, work the business under his own name. The business was thus removed to Skinner Street in May, 1807.

Thus it was that the Godwins of The Polygon, Somers Town, became the Godwins of Skinner Street. There is room for two opinions respecting the policy of the enterprise, that made Godwin for the remainder of his working days a struggling tradesman; whilst with failing powers he persisted in literary toil. But much may be said against the view taken by the partisans who, never finding aught to commend in anything for which Mrs. Godwin was accountable, maintain it was an evil day for the man of letters when he was persuaded by his meddlesome wife to go into ‘the trade.’ Burdened with a wife and five children, Godwin’s only prospect, towards the close of his time at Somers Town, was one of incessant labour and anxiety about money. Had he kept out of business, he would, perhaps, have needed the help of his friends in a greater degree. On the whole, I am disposed to think that, whilst his difficulties were somewhat lighter, his means of supporting his family were somewhat greater, than they would have been had he remained in The Polygon, and kept clear of the commercial side of literature. Sending his boys to good schools, he gave his girls the usual training, together with some of the accomplishments and pleasures, of young gentlewomen. In some respects it might have been cheerier without being in any way costlier or more luxurious; but the house in Skinner Street was a fairly happy home for the five young people who, one and all, called Godwin ‘papa’ and Mrs. Godwin ‘mamma.’

CHAPTER IV.

THE IRISH CAMPAIGN, AND THE STAY AT NANTGWILLT.

Opium and Hallucination at Keswick—Migration to Ireland—Shelley’s Letters to Miss Hitchener—Curran’s Coldness to the Adventurer—Publication of the Address to the Irish People—Measures for putting the Pamphlet in Circulation—Harriett’s Amusement—Shelley’s Seriousness—Shelley’s other Irish Tract—Public Meeting in the Fishamble Street Theatre—Shelley’s Speech to the Sixth Resolution—Various Accounts of the Speech—Mr. MacCarthy’s bad Manners—Honest Jack Lawless—His Project for a History of Ireland—His Way of handling Shelley—William Godwin’s Alarm—Shelley’s Submission—His Intercourse with Curran—His Withdrawal from Ireland—Seizure of his Papers at the Holyhead Custom-House—Harriett’s Letter to Portia—The Shelleys in Wales—Miss Hitchener’s ‘Divine Suggestion’—Harriett and Eliza don’t think it ‘Divine’—Shelley at Nantgwillt—His Scheme for turning Farmer—His comprehensive Invitation to the Godwins—His sudden Departure from Nantgwillt—Cause of the Departure—Mr. MacCarthy again at Fault.

That they may realize the physical condition of the young man who was so easily educated into thinking prodigious evil of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, readers should remember that Shelley was taking laudanum whilst he was at Keswick. The letter which affords evidence of this important fact is believed by Mr. Rossetti to be the earliest of the numerous writings, touching the poet’s use of the tincture of opium; but it may not be inferred that he came to Keswick without having made acquaintance with the drug, of which he was a free consumer in subsequent stages of his life.

Making acquaintance with opium at a somewhat earlier time of life than Byron, though probably in the same year of grace as the older poet, Shelley was so liberal an opium-taker that the drug’s influence on the nervous system must be borne in mind by those, who would account for his successive hallucinations, and other exhibitions of nervous disorder. Even by the medical observer, the effects of laudanum are sometimes mistaken for manifestations of lunacy. Mr. Rossetti certainly had good grounds for suggesting that laudanum was at the bottom of the marvellous tale, with which Shelley thrilled the nerves of Eliza and Harriett in the last week of his stay at Keswick. The story, told with every show of sincerity by the victim of hallucination, or perplexing semi-delusion, if he is not to be regarded as the utterer of a deliberate invention, was that on returning from a walk to his home, he had been assailed by a robber, with consequences that might have been tragic, had not the assault been fortunately made under the very eaves of Mr. Calvert’s roof. By falling over his own door-step, Shelley had been so fortunate as to fall out of the bandit’s grasp. Few readers will hesitate in the opinion that if this wondrous tale was not in some degree an affair of hallucination, it was altogether untruth.

Shelley would have gone to Ireland with firmer confidence in his measures for emancipating the Catholics, and Repealing the Union, had he been attended to the field of philanthropic action by that equally sublime and swarthy young woman, Miss Eliza Hitchener, schoolmistress of Hurstpierpoint. Could this young woman, who seized every occasion for sowing the seeds of Deism and Republicanism in the minds of her infantile pupils, have been induced to throw up her school and start for Dublin at a moment’s notice, Shelley’s Irish expedition might have had a different ending. The need for Miss Hitchener’s presence on the field of moral and political illumination was felt so strongly by Shelley, that he had scarcely taken possession of furnished lodgings at No. 7 Sackville Street, Dublin, when he wrote to her, imploring she would come to him instantly—and for ever. But Miss Hitchener could not be moved so easily. Having charge of certain little Americans, a source of income not to be surrendered recklessly, she wished for time in which to dispose of the goodwill of her school, ere she flitted to Dublin for the sake of the poor Irish. Smuggler’s daughter though she was, Miss Hitchener lacked the spirit to think cheerily of crossing the Irish Channel without any escort. So Shelley was constrained to do his best for Ireland without her personal co-operation. It being clear that his reunion with Miss Hitchener must be deferred till he should have settled the Irish question, saved Ireland, and retired for ever to some delightful cottage in North Wales, Shelley wrote from 7 Sackville Street, Dublin, to the incomparable lady on 14th February, 1812, that he looked forward to the pleasure of meeting her in Wales, in the following summer. Joining hands once more in Wales, they would never again part company.

(1) Dublin: from 12th February, 1812, to 7th April, 1812: just seven weeks and five days!—Leaving Whitehaven for the Isle of Man on 3rd February, 1812, Shelley, with his two travelling companions (Eliza and Harriett), reached Dublin somewhere during the night of the 12th of the same month, after enduring manifold discomforts in the course of a journey that, rough and wretched by land, was yet rougher and more wretched by sea. After recovering from fatigue of travel, the three adventurers bestirred themselves for the good of Ireland, and in doing so, took two or three steps that may at least be declared not wholly and directly at variance with common sense. To avoid the costlier discomforts of a hotel, they lost no time in exposing themselves to the cheaper discomforts of a Sackville Street lodging-house. Having thus planted himself in the capital of the country he had visited from philanthropic motives, Shelley called (with Godwin’s letter of introduction in his hand) on the Master of the Rolls (Curran),—an attention the Master of the Rolls was in no hurry to repay; though Shelley came to Dublin with a not altogether groundless hope of being welcomed cordially by the great orator who, having done fairly well for himself by patriotism, had for several years held the official place that, whilst lowering his zeal for patriotic agitation, required him to exercise a certain amount of circumspection in admitting patriots to his domestic circle. Fortunately for Curran, he was ‘not at home’ on the occasion of Shelley’s first call; and it is conceivable that, having been so fortunate in all honesty, the Master of the Rolls decided to be equally fortunate on subsequent occasions of a visit from the adventurer, until more satisfactory information respecting William Godwin’s young friend should come to hand.

After leaving his card on the Master of the Rolls, Shelley took measures for offering his views on Irish affairs to the people whom he had come to serve and save. It is said that he tried in vain to find a regular publisher for his Address to the Irish People. For this statement, though there is other, I know of no better, authority than certain scarcely reliable words of the letter, written from Lynton by Shelley to Mr. Hookham, in 1812, just before Daniel Hill’s arrest. Certainly, the work was not a production with which a prudent bookseller, desirous of standing well in official circles, would care to connect himself. Nor was the youthful author (who, whilst numbering no more than nineteen, had the aspect of only fifteen years) a person to win the confidence of wary booksellers, who could learn nothing about him besides what he was moved to say of himself. If Shelley went about Dublin in search of a publisher, he certainly wasted no long time in the search, for the pamphlet was printed (in execrably bad type, and on paper of corresponding badness) before he had been fully twelve days in the Irish capital.

Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, Miss Westbrook bestirred herself for Ireland’s regeneration, by collecting ‘useful passages’ out of Tom Paine’s works, with a view to their publication. At the same time, the lady constituted herself keeper of the purse, and made a red cloak.

Fifteen hundred copies of the Address having been printed and delivered to the author, he lost no time in offering them to the people he wished to illuminate. A copy of the work was left at each of the sixty principal public-houses. An Irishman, named Daniel Hill, was sent about Dublin with a supply of the pamphlets, and ordered to sell them at five-pence a-piece to all who would buy, and to use his discretion in giving them to persons who could not afford to buy them. At the same time, Shelley and Harriett dropt the pamphlet from the balcony of their windows to passers in Sackville Street, and never went abroad without copies for distribution. To Harriett, ‘ready to die with laughter’ at their measures for scattering the seeds of wholesome principles amongst the Irish people, the whole affair was a frolic. But what she regarded as comical pastime was the most serious business to Shelley, whose countenance wore its gravest expression, when he dropt his little books into the hands of wayfarers from his Sackville Street balcony, or in his walks about the town furtively slipt a copy of the Address into the hood of an old woman’s cloak. Having made away with four hundred copies in this manner, Shelley congratulated himself on having caused a prodigious sensation, and being far on the way to a peaceful revolution.

The Address to the Irish People, perhaps the weakest and most puerile piece of political pamphleteering that ever proceeded from the pen of a youth of Shelley’s years and education, was followed at a brief interval by another pamphlet of his composition, entitled, 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; this second tract being followed after a longer interval by the Declaration of Rights, a broadside manifesto of wholesome revolutionary principles, in thirty-one numbered articles, with a concluding appeal to all mankind to ‘Awake! Arise! or be for ever fallen!’ The first of the thirty-one articles (plagiarized without acknowledgment, as Mr. Rossetti has shown, from two documents of the French Revolution, (a) The Declaration by the Constituent Assembly in August, 1789, and (b) the Declaration proposed by Robespierre in April, 1793), announced to all Irishmen interested in the matter,—‘Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own.’

A copy of the Address was sent to Curran, who, of course, took no notice of the performance. Fretting at Curran’s disdainful indifference to his efforts for the regeneration of Ireland, Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener of his mean opinion of the lawyer who had consented to serve a tyrannical Government as Master of the Rolls. But in leaving the trio to amuse themselves at their pleasure, without checking or discouraging them, Curran gave Shelley only the same cause of offence, as was given him by all Dublin society during the earlier weeks of his stay in the capital. If Expectation (to use the expression of one of Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener) was on the tiptoe respecting the purpose of the three lodgers at 7 Lower Sackville Street, she gave no other sign of interest in their proceedings. There may have been a little tittering in the highways, in Trinity College, and in the Four Courts, at the eccentric demeanour of the young gentleman and two ladies, who went about the town forcing copies of a foolish tract into the hands of wayfarers; but few people offered to pay for the literature thus put under their eyes. No one of social influence sought out the author who, after crossing the Channel for the benefit of Ireland, found the Irish people much less ready to know him, than he was ready to make their acquaintance. The trio had been a fortnight in Lower Sackville Street, when Harriett wrote of the Irish people to Miss Hitchener, ‘We have seen very little of them as yet; but when Percy is more known I suppose we shall know more at the same time.’ The ink with which Harriett wrote these words had been dry for little more than twenty-four hours, when Shelley was brought face to face with the Irish people, on the evening of 28th February, 1812, at the ‘Aggregate Meeting of the Catholics of Ireland,’ held in the Fishamble Street Theatre for the furtherance of Catholic Emancipation,—a meeting at which O’Connell was chief orator, and Shelley spoke as seconder of the sixth resolution, ‘That the grateful thanks of this Meeting are due, and hereby returned to Lord Glentworth, the Right Hon. Maurice Fitzgerald, and the other distinguished Protestants who have this day honoured us with their presence.’

To second the sixth resolution at a public meeting is not to take an important part in its proceedings. Under ordinary circumstances it is to utter a few words, that are heard by few in the stir and hubbub of the breaking up of the assembly, and are rated by the reporters for the press as a mere formality, undeserving commemoration in a separate paragraph. Shelley’s speech certainly attracted some attention at the moment of its delivery, and caused some subsequent talk. But it was only one of the concluding and insignificant incidents of an important demonstration. Chief-constable Michael Farrell disposed of the eloquence, that commended the sixth resolution to the aggregate Catholics, in this brief sentence, ‘Lord Glentworth said a few words; a Mr. Bennett spoke, also a Mr. Shelley, who stated himself to be a native of England.’ In an official report of an inferior constable, Shelley’s name does not appear; nor does the report contain any reference to his speech, unless Mr. Manning made the mistake of attributing to another youthful orator the words that proceeded from Shelley’s lips. Whilst the constables dealt thus lightly with Shelley’s oration, the reporters for the press noticed it in significant paragraphs. The Freeman’s Journal (29th February, 1812) honoured it with eighty words. The Dublin Evening Post gave it 216 words. The Patriot of the 2nd of March thought it worthy of 345 commemorative words. It is, therefore, well upon the record that Shelley spoke a piece of his mind to what Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy calls ‘an immense assembly.’

The speech was certainly made. But there is a curious conflict as to the length and tenor of the speech, the style in which it was delivered, and the way in which it was received. Lady Shelley wishes us to believe that, by an unreasonable display of tolerance for the Irish Protestants, Shelley provoked savage yells from his Catholic auditors. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy produces half-a-dozen scraps of old newspapers in evidence, that the young poet’s maiden essay in political oratory charmed and moved its hearers in a singular degree, causing them to hail him with delight, ‘whilst joy beamed in every countenance and rapture glistened in every eye.’ Whilst the circumstances of the case, including the reports of the newspapers, dispose the discreet reader to think it probable that the speech held the attention of the meeting for five or ten minutes, persons who believe Shelley incapable of anything in the way of misstatement are convinced by a passage in one of his letters to Miss Hitchener that he spoke for upwards of an hour.

Though it is not to be imagined that the seconder of the sixth resolution was allowed to talk for more than an hour, there is sufficient evidence that, after rising on his legs, Shelley took occasion to introduce himself with unusual particularity to his hearers, and to inform them of the considerations and purpose that had brought him to Ireland. It is also certain that his utterances were received with alternate expressions of approval and dissent; that he was applauded for expressing his abhorrence of English misrule, and checked with even more emphatic indications of displeasure, when he spoke of mere differences of religious opinion, as trivialities that should not be allowed to divide the people of the same nation. Shelley himself certainly made none too much of the expressions of dissent when he wrote to Miss Hitchener on 14th March, 1812 (from 17 Grafton Street, to which address he had moved from 7 Lower Sackville Street), that his speech was misunderstood; that, though he won some applause by stating the objects of his expedition to Ireland, he was hissed for his remarks touching religion; and that ‘the newspapers,’ which gave significant prominence to his speech, ‘only noted that which did not excite disapprobation.’

With this confession of oratorical misadventure under their eyes, most readers will think Hogg right in saying:—

‘On one occasion he’ (i.e. Shelley) ‘told me that at a meeting—probably at the meeting of the philanthropists—so much ill-will was shown to the Protestants that, thereupon, he was provoked to remark that the Protestants were fellow Christians, fellow subjects, and as such were entitled to equal rights, to equal charity, toleration, and the rest. He was forthwith interrupted by savage yells; a tremendous uproar arose, and he was compelled to be silent.’

If Shelley showed himself so comically ignorant of Irish politics, as to assure a meeting of Dublin Catholics that religious equality with the majority of the Irish nation should at least be accorded to the Protestant minority, it is not surprising that he was silenced. Hogg may have exaggerated what Shelley told him with exaggeration, and his way of writing about ‘the Catholics’ and ‘the philanthropists,’ as though the terms meant the same thing, is not the only example of reprehensible looseness in his account of Shelley’s Irish campaign. But in the main the biographer’s account of the poet’s campaign is by no means too unfavourable to the youthful adventurer; and Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is guilty of bad temper and worse manners, in stigmatizing the author of the faulty narrative a ‘liar of the first magnitude.’

That Shelley found an opportunity for introducing himself to the Irish people in Fishamble Street was due to the influence of Mr. John Lawless, whose acquaintance he had made shortly before the meeting. A keen politician, who enjoyed in his party the equally flattering and suspicious designation of ‘honest Jack Lawless,’ and a flighty gentleman of letters, who produced two years later an absolutely meritless contribution to The History of Ireland, Mr. Lawless was quick to recognize in Shelley a young gentleman, whom he would do well to befriend. An organizer of the aggregate meeting, Mr. Lawless used his influence to put the young gentleman to the fore. Had it not been for honest Jack, the Dublin papers would have been silent about the points of Shelley’s speech that ‘did not excite disapprobation,’ and more or less communicative about the points that occasioned uproar. After affording Shelley an opportunity for introducing himself to the Dublin public, and nursing him through the reports of the meeting, ‘honest Jack’ took occasion to introduce the youthful adventurer, yet more fully to the Irish people, in the article that appeared in the Dublin Weekly Messenger of ‘March, 1812;’ the article that was at the same time a personal memoir of the adventurer, and a critical review of his Address to the Irish People; the article that, after speaking of Shelley as the son of ‘a member of the Imperial Parliament’ and ‘the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes in England,’ concluded with a handsome reference to the ‘very beautiful poem’ which he had written for the benefit ‘of our distinguished countryman, Mr. Finerty.’

At the same time Mr. Lawless took occasion to introduce Mrs. Honest Jack Lawless to Shelley’s womankind, and to welcome the trio to his hearth, where he entertained them with the best fruit and vegetables of the Dublin market, and would have fed them on richer fare, had they not recently joined the Nineteenth Century Pythagoreans, and as Pythagoreans bound themselves to abstain from flesh and fermented liquors.

It is not to be imagined that honest Jack showered these civilities on the Shelleys without a thought for civilities, to be rendered by the Shelleys in return. One may need money without being an Irishman. It is not to bring a blush to Erin’s cheek, that honest Jack is mentioned on this page as an Irish gentleman whose command of gold was insufficient for his necessities. Though he appeared very much a minor, ‘the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England’ was a person whom honest Jack regarded as a person who might prove a profitable acquaintance. A man of the world, more than thirty years old, Mr. Lawless was not so absolutely undeserving of his peculiar epithet, as to be capable of robbing so young a gentleman without throwing a show of honesty into the predatory business. Moreover, Mr. Lawless saw at a glance that his new acquaintance, who went to Miss Westbrook for sixpences as he wanted them, was no youth to be plucked at a card-table or plundered on a racecourse. The young gentleman who lived on milk and vegetables, and seldom had more than half-a-crown in his pocket, was no young gentleman to be bled and fleeced in the ordinary way. Mr. Lawless conceived the happy thought of drawing Shelley into partnership in a great and beneficent literary enterprise.

Himself a man of letters, Mr. Lawless wished to write a History of Ireland, that would exhibit the grandeur and misfortunes of the Irish people, and educate its readers in the sacred principles of Irish patriotism. Having already written the opening chapters of such a history, Mr. Lawless saw in the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England a fit coadjutor in so glorious an enterprise. Men of letters, they both burned to liberate Ireland. What more beautiful than for two such friends to co-operate for so sublime a purpose? For their needful enlightenment, the Irish people required above all things a good History of Ireland. To give Ireland what she most needed, the Irish politician and the English scholar must work in unison, throwing all their energies into the undertaking, and deeming no sacrifice too great for so grand an object. Mr. Lawless felt this and said it. On hearing honest Jack’s opinion, Shelley concurred in it cordially. To both gentlemen it was obvious that their enterprise would require money. To both it seemed preposterous and unendurable, that the Irish people should remain in ignorance of their country’s story, through the difficulty of raising the insignificant sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, which would suffice to put the presses to work. It might, perhaps, be necessary to spend another hundred pounds or so; but should the first volume have the sale, to be anticipated for the initial tome of an enthralling narrative, the ridiculously small sum of 250l. (a sum that would, of course, be repaid again and again by the profits of the publication) would suffice to break the fetters from Erin’s bruised and wounded limbs, and chase the darkness of ignorance from a liberated country. Was such a work to be deferred for the want of a miserable 250l., whilst John Lawless was known for his honesty in every castle and cabin, south of the Giant’s Causeway, and whilst his young friend was the immediate heir of one of the first fortunes of England? To obtain the equally trivial and necessary sum, Shelley seized a pen and wrote (vide Medwin’s Life of Shelley) to Mr. Medwin, the Horsham lawyer,—saying how he was engaged with a literary friend in producing a voluminous History of Ireland, and needed 250l. for the execution of the enterprise. Of course, the Horsham lawyer was assured by his youthful client, that the sale of the History would yield great profit, and that the 250l. would be repaid in eighteen months. It is more curious and remarkable that, in pressing Mr. Medwin to provide the needful money for the project, Shelley assured the lawyer that two hundred and fifty pages of the work were already printed:—a statement for which the vigour and liveliness of the writer’s imagination may perhaps be held accountable.

It speaks less for Mr. Lawless’s honesty, than for his cleverness, in drawing wind to his sails from every passing breeze, that this letter was written when Shelley had been barely five weeks in Dublin, and possibly had not known him for a month. How Mr. Medwin answered the letter does not appear; but it may be assumed confidently that if he provided the 250l., he required that the transaction should be withheld from the knowledge of Shelley’s father. Nor does it appear whether Mr. Lawless drew money for his literary project out of his young friend’s pocket. But the known circumstances of their intimacy leave little room for doubt that Shelley’s purse was accountable for the Irish gentleman’s persistence in the labours, that resulted in his Compendium of the History of Ireland, from the Earliest Period to the Reign of George I. (1814);—a work on which he was engaged between the dates of Shelley’s two visits to Ireland.

During his stay in Dublin, Shelley continued to correspond with the philosopher of Skinner Street, writing him at least three long letters, dated respectively on 24th February, 8th March, and 18th March; letters to which Godwin replied on 4th March, 14th March, and 30th March. Resembling in their adulatory and reverential extravagances his earlier epistles from Keswick to the same correspondent, Shelley’s letters from Dublin to William Godwin are chiefly remarkable for evidence that he was looking yearningly for the pleasures of personal intimacy with the sage, whom he was pleased to regard and address as his intellectual guide and guardian.

Whilst Shelley addressed him in the most deferential strain, Godwin abounded with almost parental anxiety for the young man, who appeared to the literary veteran to have gone to Ireland on a mission, that could not fail to result in discredit to the adventurer, and might be fruitful of insurrection and bloodshed. Godwin would have been less apprehensive for his correspondent’s safety, had he known him personally, and would have had no fear whatever for the peace of Ireland, had he realized the indifference (qualified by the slightest sense of amusement) with which the Dublin police and populace regarded the proceedings of the boyish agitator.

The substance of Godwin’s admonitions to his youthful correspondent was just this:—Get out of Ireland promptly, or mischief will ensue to yourself and others from your madcap expedition; and after leaving Ireland, get the better of the misconceptions and self-conceit that make you think yourself competent to settle perplexing questions, that have proved too much for the wisest statesmen. It is to Shelley’s credit that he took such advice in good part, and wrote from 17 Grafton Street, on 18th March, 1812, to his Mentor, that, in deference to the expostulations and counsels of the author of Political Justice, he had withdrawn his Irish pamphlets from circulation, and was making ready to quit Dublin. Acknowledging the indiscretion, insufficiency, and unseasonableness of his measures for dealing with the grievances of Ireland, he declared his intention to leave the Irish, at least for a while, to manage their own affairs.

It was thus that, at the close of his fifth week in Dublin, and two days before writing to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, for 250l. to be spent on the production of a new and voluminous History of Ireland, Shelley desisted from his efforts to force his two pamphlets upon public attention, and acknowledged the unsoundness of the measures they recommended. It does not, however, follow that Godwin was so largely accountable for this change of opinion as he had reason to imagine himself. One of the few points on which Mr. Hogg and Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy are of the same mind is, that Godwin’s arguments and expostulations had little or nothing to do with the speedy extinction of Shelley’s confidence in his own remedies for Irish grievances; and though the concession is by no means favourable to Shelley’s reputation for sincerity, it may be conceded that the point, on which the two biographers are thus unanimous, is also one of the points in respect to which both biographers are in the right. The fact is, that Shelley’s enthusiastic concern for the Irish people had played itself out when the second of Godwin’s expostulatory letters gave him a convenient pretext for retiring from a position that no longer afforded him congenial excitement. Hence the letter which moved Godwin to write to Curran, begging him even yet to pay some attention to the young enthusiast, who had shown so commendable and engaging a readiness to shape his course in obedience to the advice of his superiors by age and experience.

Whilst Godwin overflowed with approval of his young friend’s submissiveness to reason, Shelley could congratulate himself on the results of his announcement that, for the present, he should leave the Irish to manage their own affairs. Raising him in the regard of the philosopher, whose favour he was especially desirous of winning, the announcement brought him invitations to Curran’s dinner-table, where he discovered to his mortification, that a famous patriot may, in his declining years, love good cheer almost as much as his country, and be scarcely more distinguished by devotion to liberty than by a taste for obscene stories.

Enough has been said of Shelley’s ‘Irish campaign’ to show that, so far as his reputation is concerned, the kindest way of dealing with the farcical affair is to make fun of its absurdities; and that he suffers less from biographers who, dealing lightly with the expedition, palliate its foolishness with kindly reference to the adventurer’s juvenility, than from the apologists who discover wisdom and political sagacity in the extravagances of a puerile escapade. To laugh at the droll business is to be in good humour with the boy, whose self-sufficiency is only brought into offensive prominence by attempts to justify it. In this particular the poet’s admirers may well prefer Hogg’s pleasantry to Mr. MacCarthy’s seriousness. In other ways the later biographer defeats his own purpose. It is curious, how he produces evidence, supporting the very assertions whose accuracy he impugns. Maintaining that Shelley’s speech in Fishamble Street was favourably received, he prints the poet’s confession that he was checked with angry clamour against utterances, to which the newspapers made no reference. Indignant with Hogg for saying the poet was mortified by the miscarriage of his efforts for Ireland, he publishes the very words in which Shelley acknowledges the failure of his schemes. Maintaining that Shelley left Dublin ‘at the precise time he had originally arranged to leave it,’ he sets forth the testimony that, whereas he withdrew from Ireland on the 7th April, 1812, he had originally designed to stay in Dublin till ‘the end of April.’ It is thus the author of Shelley’s Early Life by turns disproves his own charges against Hogg’s accuracy, or shows himself more inexact than the biographer whom he accuses of falsehood.

Though it was less sudden and hasty than Hogg imagined, Shelley’s withdrawal from Ireland was made three weeks sooner than the time he appointed for the departure, when he was still hopeful for the success of his intervention between the Irish people and their despotic rulers. Whilst writing his last letter from Ireland to William Godwin (the letter in which he says nothing of his project for a new History of Ireland to the philosopher, whom he affects to treat with unqualified confidence), Shelley had determined to leave Dublin in the first week of the ensuing month, and was already making arrangements for migrating to Wales. One of his preliminary measures was to fill a large deal box with the few copies of his Address to the Irish People still remaining on his hand, the much larger number of his second Irish pamphlet yet resting in his possession, and the greater part of the edition of his Declaration of Rights,—the broadsides with which he hoped to rouse the farmers of his native county to a perception of their political grievances. This large deal box was addressed to Miss Hitchener, Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, and sent on board the boat for Holyhead, whence Shelley imagined it would pass without observation to the philosophical schoolmistress. In the absence of any person, duly authorized by its owner to pass it through the custom-house, this heavy box was in due course opened, and searched at Holyhead, by Mr. Pierce Thomas, Surveyor of Customs, who, writing to the Secretary of State for the Home Office an account of the inflammatory literature discovered in the chest, also put himself in communication with the Holyhead agent of the General Post Office. Hence the correspondence (still preserved at the Record Office) between secretaries of high degree and local officers of mean estate respecting the big box and its criminatory contents, nothing of which was more likely to agitate the official mind than the following letter from Harriett Shelley to her husband’s dear and incomparable friend Miss Hitchener, who had recently adopted the name of Portia, in lieu of her rightful Christian name Eliza (a name already appropriated in ‘Percy’s little circle’ to Miss Westbrook):—

‘Dublin, March 18th, 1812.

‘My Dear Portia,—As Percy has sent you such a large box, so full of inflammable matter, I think I may be allowed to send a little, but not of such a nature as his. I sent you two letters in a newspaper, which I hope you received safe from the intrusion of Postmasters. I sent one of the pamphlets to my Father in a newspaper, which was opened and charged; but which was very trifling compared with what you and Godwin paid.

‘I believe I have mentioned a new acquaintance of ours, a Mrs. Nugent, who is sitting in the room now and talking to Percy about Virtue. You see how little I stand on ceremony. I have seen her but twice before, and I find her a very agreeable, sensible woman. She has felt most severely the miseries of her country, in which she has been a very active member. She visited all the prisons in the time of the Rebellion, to exhort the people to have courage and hope. She says it was a most dreadful task; but it was her duty, and she would not shrink from the performance of it. This excellent woman, with all her notions of Philanthropy and justice, is obliged to work for her subsistence—to work in a shop, which is a furrier’s; there she is every day confined to her needle. Is it not a thousand pities that such a woman should be so dependent on others? She has visited us this evening for about three hours, and is now returned home. The evening is the only time she can get out in the week; but Sunday is her own, and then we are to see her. She told Percy that her country was her only love, when he asked her if she was married. She calls herself Mrs., I suppose, on account of her age, as she looks rather old for a Miss. She has never been out of the country and has no wish to leave it.

‘This is St. Patrick’s night, and the Irish always get very tipsy on such a night as this. The Horse Guards are pacing the streets and will be so all the night, so fearful are they of disturbances, the poor people being very much that way inclined, as provisions are very scarce in the southern counties. Poor Irish people, how much I feel for them! Do you know, such is their ignorance, that when there is a drawing-room held, they go from some distance to see the people who keep them starving to get their luxuries; they will crowd round the state carriages in great glee to see those who have stript them of their rights, and who wantonly revel in a profusion of ill-gotten luxury, whilst so many of those harmless people are wanting bread for their wives and children? What a spectacle! People talk of the fiery spirit of these distressed creatures, but that spirit is very much broken and ground down by the oppressors of this poor country. I may with truth say there are more beggars in this city than any other in the world. They are so poor they have hardly a rag to cover their naked limbs, and such is their passion for drink that when you relieve them one day you see them in the same deplorable condition the next. Poor creatures! they live more on whiskey than anything, for meat is so dear they cannot afford to purchase any. If they had the means I do not know that they would, whiskey being so much cheaper, and to their palates so much more desirable. Yet how often do we hear people say that Poverty is no evil. I think if they had experienced it they would soon alter their tone. To my idea it is the worst of all evils, as the miseries that flow from it are certainly very great; the many crimes we hear of daily are the consequences of poverty, and that, to a very great degree. I think the laws are extremely unjust—they condemn a person to death for stealing thirteen shillings and fourpence.

‘Disperse the Declarations. Percy says the farmers are very fond of having something posted upon their walls.

‘Percy has sent you all his Pamphlets with the Declaration of Rights, which you will disperse to advantage. He has not many of his first Address, having taken pains to circulate them through the city.

‘All thoughts of an association are given up as impracticable. We shall leave this noisy town on the 7th of April, unless the Habeas Corpus Act should be suspended, and then we shall be obliged to leave here as soon as possible. Adieu.’

Though he married for love, Shelley did not live many weeks with Harriett before he felt the need of another companion. Had his girlish wife been all the world to him in their honeymoon, and the days immediately following it, he would not have welcomed Hogg so cordially to the Edinburgh lodgings, or left her at York, whilst he made the flying trip to London and Sussex. That he surrendered himself so completely to his sister-in-law’s control, was due chiefly to the insufficiency of the pleasure afforded him by Harriett’s society. Had he delighted in the music of her voice, the charms of her beauty, and the manifestations of her sensibility, as he would have delighted in them had she been his perfect mate, there would have been in his breast no yearning for another companion, whose presence and sympathy would perfect his felicity. At the moment of setting forth for Ireland, and at the moment of arriving at Dublin, he entreated Miss Hitchener to come to him and Harriett and Eliza, so that an imperfectly happy trio might with her co-operation become a happy party of four. Throughout his sojourn in the Irish capital, he needed Portia for his contentment; and after Portia’s refusal to come to him in Ireland, was looking forward to the meeting in Wales or elsewhere, when the Sussex schoolmistress would make it possible for him and Harriett and Eliza to be happy for ever. Had he been fitly mated, he would not so soon after his wedding have desired the society of any woman but his wife. Had Harriett been to him all that a bride usually is to her mate, Miss Hitchener would have been no less out of his mind than she was out of his sight.

As he needed Portia for the completion of his own happiness, the equally vehement and egotistic Shelley imagined she was no less needful for the contentment of his companions. Whilst it says much for his egotism, it speaks no less strongly of his ignorance of feminine nature, that he could think his wife and her sister especially desirous of associating themselves closely with the young woman, of whose wisdom and goodness he was so extravagantly eloquent. It also speaks for his ignorance of womanly nature, that he imagined the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress would be eager to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Shelley and her sister on terms that would render it difficult for her to get away from them, should she find them otherwise than congenial companions. That he erred so egregiously on these points, is the more remarkable, because the ladies displayed no strong desire for the arrangement on which he was set.

Instead of fixing herself on the trio, as soon as Shelley afforded her an occasion for doing so, Miss Hitchener more than once displayed a reasonable reluctance to surrender her independent position at Hurstpierpoint for the questionable advantages of a perilous connexion with the sisters whom she had never seen. On the other hand, though they humoured Shelley in writing cordially to his friend at Hurstpierpoint, it is obvious, from several matters, that Mrs. Shelley and her sister were no less doubtful than Miss Hitchener, whether Shelley’s scheme for a happy domestic circle would be fruitful of felicity to any one of the party.

Entreated, from Keswick, by Shelley to accompany him to Ireland, Miss Hitchener declined the invitation, on account of her engagements at Hurstpierpoint. Entreated by Shelley to come to him and his wife at Dublin, she held to her purpose of remaining in Sussex. To the proposal that she should come to Wales in the spring, and there make the acquaintance of her Percy’s wife and sister-in-law, Miss Hitchener assented; but when spring came, instead of acting on the invitation, she discovered new reasons for remaining at Hurstpierpoint, and wrote to Shelley that, instead of requiring her to break up her school, it would be better for him to bring his wife and sister-in-law to her in Sussex. That Shelley would have relinquished the notion of a meeting in Wales, and acted on this proposal for a meeting in Sussex, had he been master of his own movements, instead of being under the government of two ladies who had no strong desire to make Miss Hitchener’s acquaintance, appears from the letter he wrote to the schoolmistress from 17 Grafton Street, Dublin, on 10th March, 1812. ‘Your new suggestion,’ he exclaims gushingly in this curious epistle, ‘of our joining you at Hurst is divine. It shall be so. I have not shown Harriett or E. your letter yet; they are walking with a Mr. Lawless (a valuable man), whilst I write this.’ The words exhibit the whole position. To Shelley, yearning for reunion with Miss Hitchener, the proposal for a speedy restoration to her society was so delightful, that no word less eloquent of felicity than ‘divine’ could express the gratification he anticipated from the meeting. ‘It shall be so,’ he wrote bravely, before conferring on the matter with the ladies who owned him. But when those ladies returned from their walk with the valuable Jack Lawless, and were invited to join in the assurance that ‘it should be so,’ the enthusiasm of the subject man was checked by their decision that ‘it should not be so.’

Thinking in their hearts that the meeting with Miss Hitchener could not be deferred for too long a time, and having obvious and sufficient reasons for thinking Sussex the particular county in which a close intimacy with Miss Hitchener would be most hurtful to their interests, Harriett and Miss Westbrook discovered nothing delightful in the suggestion which had seemed ‘divine’ to Percy. If they must be brought into familiar intercourse with Percy’s schoolmistress, Mrs. Shelley and her sister would rather live with her in Wales, or Devonshire, or Scotland, than at a village within a drive of Field Place, and a stone’s throw of Cuckfield. Hence the firmness with which they overruled Shelley’s ‘it shall be so.’ They declined to forego the pleasures of the Welsh trip, to which they had been looking forward so long, simply because Miss Hitchener could not join them. Of course, the pleasure of living in Wales would be enhanced to both of the ladies by the presence of so sympathetic and delightful a woman as Miss Hitchener. But to give up Wales, and travel all the way to Sussex for her acquaintance, would be to pay too high a price for the delight of knowing her. They must go to Wales, hoping that Portia would even yet arrange her affairs so as to join them before they should withdraw from the Principality. The divine suggestion was dismissed as an impracticable suggestion. So sagacious a young woman as Miss Hitchener had no need to ask Shelley why he had, on second thoughts, changed his mind with respect to the suggestion which had pleased him so vastly at first view. By those who know aught of human nature, it will not be questioned that the fight between Miss Westbrook and Miss Hitchener began some months before the July day on which they kissed one another for the first time at Lynton, in North Devon.

(2.)—Nantgwillt, Rhayader, Radnorshire, South Wales.

Crossing a rough sea from Dublin to Holyhead, the trio (attended probably by their Dublin bill distributor, who was certainly in their service in the ensuing summer) traversed Anglesey, made the passage of the Menai Straits, and journeying leisurely through North Wales into the southern shires of the Principality, came, somewhere about 21st April, 1812, to Nantgwillt, five miles from Rhayader, Co. Radnor, where they resided for about seven weeks at Nantgwillt House, at that time in the hands of an insolvent farmer. Delighted with the house, in a familiar part of Radnorshire, and the thought of having his cousin, Tom Grove, for a sociable neighbour, Shelley conceived a desire to settle at Nantgwillt for a considerable time, if not for ever. Here was a bankrupt farmer on the point of leaving a delightful place. Here was a delightful place, whose proprietor would, of course, be only too glad to have so eligible a tenant as the heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. What, thought Shelley, could be more agreeable to him than to turn farmer? With a bailiff at his elbow to look after matters of vulgar business, he could farm to a profit. The holding comprised a hundred and thirty acres of land under cultivation, and seventy acres of wood, scrub, briery, and mountain; woods in which he and Harriett and Eliza could saunter with their friends, when the summer’s sun should be oppressive; hills they could climb in the colder seasons for the enjoyment of the invigorating breeze. Whilst the farm would yield them corn and milk, fruit and vegetables, it would also yield them just the additional money that was needful for their requirements. Whilst the farm would afford them prosperity, they would have leisure for their intellectual pursuits, and larger ability to help their poorer neighbours. The rent for this alluring farm was positively under a hundred a-year. It was only 98l. a-year; and the lease and stock, including the furniture of the house, could be had for 700l. at the outside price! Even this small sum need not be paid till he should have come of age; as the assignees under the bankruptcy would give him credit for eighteen months, provided he found a sufficient friend to be security for the payment of the money, a year and half hence. Feeling he should not let such a chance escape him, Shelley had not been three days at Nantgwillt before he hurried to Cwm Elan to talk the matter over to Tom Grove. Poor talkers, the Groves were excellent listeners; and Mr. Thomas Grove listened whilst Shelley declared his wish to turn Welsh farmer and settle at Nantgwillt. After hearing the poet’s statement of the case, Mr. Grove, without offering to supply the needful money, opened his lips to remark that he should have much pleasure in finding his cousin a suitable person to look after his interests at the valuation. Duly sensible of his kinsman’s kindness, Shelley lost no time in writing the characteristic letter (vide Medwin’s Life of Shelley) in which he asked Mr. Medwin, the Horsham lawyer, to become security for the payment of the 600l. or 700l.

Mr. Medwin may well have perused this letter with a sense of amusement. No long time had passed since he was entreated to supply 250l. for the literary venture, that could not fail to bring the littérateur money and fame; and now he was required to become security for the payment of seven hundred pounds, to put the man of letters into a Welsh farm. Mr. Medwin had a good practice and money of his own, as well as the command of money belonging to his clients. He had, moreover, made up his mind to draw his young kinsman into his hands, both for the sake of making money out of him, and in order to annoy the Squire of Field Place and old Sir Bysshe, whom he did not love. But knowing Percy would not be happy at Nantgwillt for twelve months, there were obvious reasons why he should think twice before drawing a cheque or signing a bond, to put the youngster into the farm in the loveliest spot of all Radnorshire.

Writing, on 25th April, 1812, to Sussex for the means of taking the farm, Shelley wrote on the same day to London for the friends whom he should need a few months later, for his full enjoyment of the delightful place. His new home was surrounded by scenes of unutterable beauty. Defended by rocks and mountains, that shut out the world’s tumult, his chosen valley, peopled by guileless peasants, would afford him all he needed of earthly happiness, when he should have the honour and delight of entertaining the revered William Godwin, together with Mrs. Godwin and all the Skinner-Street family. The philosophic bookseller was entreated to escape from the cold hurry of business, and come with his wife and children to Wales.

How Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, answered Shelley’s letter does not appear; but he seems from the event to have dissuaded his youthful client from throwing himself so impulsively into a business of which he knew nothing. Anyhow, Shelley’s scheme for turning farmer fell through, and on June 11, 1812, he wrote to Skinner Street, explaining that he could no longer look forward to the pleasure of receiving the Godwins at Nantgwillt House, as he had already retired from that delightful abode to temporary quarters at Cwm-Rhayader.

‘We are,’ he wrote to the sage of Skinner Street, ‘unexpectedly compelled to quit Nantgwillt. I hope, however, before long time has elapsed, to find a home. These accidents are unavoidable to a minor. I hope wherever we are, you, Mrs. Godwin, and your children will come to us this summer.’

Homeless for the moment, the minor deferred the happiness of seeing his London friends until he had found a home in which to receive them. From this light and airy announcement of his sudden and enforced withdrawal from Nantgwillt House, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is inclined to infer that the farmer told the trio to leave his homestead, because he questioned their ability to pay for their entertainment.

‘Shelley,’ says the author, whose abuse of Hogg determined some of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to declare him a high authority on the poet’s ‘Early Life,’ ‘resided at Nantgwillt for seven weeks. He changed his residence, not through any restlessness of disposition, for it is evident he was reluctant to leave it, but, perhaps, owing to the doubts of the “farmer” as to the security of his rent. Such is the interpretation I put on the following passage in a letter to Godwin, dated “Cwm-Rhayader, June 11th, 1812:—“We are unexpectedly compelled to quit Nantgwillt. I hope, however, before long time has elapsed, to find a home. These accidents are unavoidable to a minor.”’

Shelley’s letter to Mr. Medwin disposes of the suspicion which should not have been entertained by the authoritative writer on Shelleyan evidences, though it may well have occurred to Godwin in June, 1812, as a reasonable way of accounting for the unexpected change of residence. Coming to Nantgwillt House at the very moment when the bankrupt farmer was about to leave the holding, and his assignees were looking out for some one to take the remainder of his lease, Shelley may be assumed to have retired from the house at the request of an incoming tenant, who required all the rooms for his own use. In the failure of his attempt to take the farm, there is enough to account for Shelley’s way of speaking of his change of abode as unexpected and involuntary. The incoming tenant’s conceivable reluctance to entertain lodgers would be another disappointment of the poet’s expectations. There is no direct evidence that Shelley was just then suffering from financial distress in a degree to make the Nantgwillt farmer suspect his solvency. On the contrary, his ability to continue his southward journey within a few days of his retirement from the farmhouse points to the opposite conclusion.

CHAPTER V.

NORTH DEVON.

Mr. Eton’s Cottage near Tintern Abbey—Shelley’s reason for not taking the Cottage—His Letter to Mr. Eton—Godwin’s expostulatory Epistle—His Grounds for thinking Shelley prodigal—Reasonableness of Godwin’s admonitions—Hogg and MacCarthy at fault—Shelley’s Letters from Lynton to Godwin—Miss Hitchener at Lynton—Porcia alias Portia—Letter to Lord Ellenborough—Printed at Barnstaple—Mr. Chanter’s Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple—Fifty copies of the Letter sent to London—Shelley’s Measures for the political Enlightenment of North Devon Peasants—His Irish Servant, Daniel Hill—Commotion at Barnstaple—Daniel Hill’s Arrest and Imprisonment—Mr. Syle’s Alarm—Shelley’s humiliating and perilous Position—His Flight from North Devon to Wales—William Godwin’s Trip from London to Lynton—His Surprise and Disappointment—His ‘Good News’ of the Fugitives.

(3.)—Lynton, near Lynmouth, North Devon.

Hogg having erroneously inferred from certain letters of the Shelley-Godwin correspondence, which he failed to read with lawyer-like care, that Shelley went from the neighbourhood of Rhayader to Lynmouth, in North Devon, in order to settle himself in a cottage belonging to a certain Mr. Eton, at the last-named place, he has been followed in one of the several errors of his book by Mr. MacCarthy, and other biographers, who are scarcely more clever in discovering mistakes in those pages of the lawyer’s narrative, that are altogether accurate, than ready to rely on those of his statements that are seriously inexact. Instead of lying in Lynmouth, Mr. Eton’s cottage lay in the neighbourhood of Tintern Abbey, as Hogg might have discovered from the letter in which William Godwin expressed his surprise and regret to Shelley that, after looking at the little house, he should have declined to take it on account of its smallness.

Mrs. William Godwin had suggested that the Shelleys should settle for a time in Mr. Eton’s cottage near Tintern Abbey, and ‘all the females’ (to use Godwin’s expression) of the Skinner-Street household ‘were on the tiptoe to know,’ whether the Shelleys would act on the suggestion, when the postman laid on William Godwin’s shop-counter a letter, addressed by Shelley’s hand to Mr. Eton. As there could be no secrets from them, between Shelley and their friend, the curious and excited people in Skinner Street opened the epistle and read it, before passing it on to Mr. Eton. To Godwin’s slight surprise, and to his wife’s slight disappointment, the epistle announced that Shelley declined to take the cottage, because it was too small for his purpose. The consequence was that Godwin, whilst stating how the letter’s purport came to his knowledge sooner than to Mr. Eton’s cognizance, wrote to Shelley these words:—

‘I am a little astonished, however, with the expression in your letter, that “the insufficiency of house-room is a vital objection.” This would sound well to Mr. Eton from the eldest son of a gentleman of Sussex, with an ample fortune. But to me, I own, it a little alarms me.... But you, my dear Shelley, have special motives for wariness in this matter, you are at variance with your father, and I think you say in one of your letters that he allows you only 200l. a-year. If by unnecessary and unconscientious expense you heap up embarrassments at present, how much do you think that will embitter your days and shackle your powers hereafter?... Prudence, too, a just and virtuous prudence, in this most essential point, the dispensation of property, will do much to make you and your father friends: and why should you not be friends?’

The letter, from which these passages have been transcribed, is given in Hogg’s book without date or address; but whilst the contents show it to have been written before Godwin had heard either of Shelley’s arrival at Lynton, or of his intention to journey thither, the evidence is conclusive that it was addressed to Shelley at Chepstow;—a fact to be held in remembrance by the critical reader of the absurd passage of Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy’s very absurd book, in which it is suggested that the sharpness of Godwin’s reflections (in the undated letter), on Shelley’s manifest inclination to live beyond his means, was due to the philosopher’s petty pique at the terms in which Shelley wrote to him, from Lynmouth, on 5th July, 1812, about Miss Hitchener’s virtues and services to humanity.

Though he seldom says anything, that is comparable for absurdity with Mr. MacCarthy’s wilder notes on Shelleyan questions, Hogg provokes ridicule by his animadversions on Godwin’s undated letter. Insisting that it was for Shelley to decide whether the cottage was large enough for his purpose, he smiles disdainfully at the impertinent busy-bodyism of Godwin’s admonitory epistle, and insinuates that it would not have been written, had not the philosopher’s temper been curiously ruffled by his young friend’s audacity, in presuming to decline the modest mansion, which Mrs. Godwin had advised him to hire of one of her friends. On perusing the letter and reviewing all the circumstances that resulted in its composition, the discreet and impartial reader fails to discover the writer’s ill-temper, or the grounds for charging him with exceeding the limits of the position, into which he had been drawn by his correspondent’s repeated solicitations for parental counsel and guidance.

Had Godwin no grounds for thinking Shelley was disposed to live beyond his means? Shelley had himself told Godwin, that his allowance from his father was no more than 200l.; and the veteran of letters may at that time have had no reason for supposing that his young friend received any allowance from his father-in-law, or had any means in addition to the money from his father. At the most Shelley’s precarious income was only 400l. a-year; and though Godwin probably thought it so much, he cannot have thought it more, and may have thought it less than that amount by one half. Immediately on coming to Nantgwillt, Shelley had invited the whole Godwin family (six persons, viz., Godwin, Mrs. Godwin, Fanny, Mary, Claire, and the small boy William) to visit him at Nantgwillt House. At the same time, Godwin had been informed by Shelley of his intention to invite another dear friend to stay with him at Nantgwillt during their sojourn with him. Godwin had no reason to suppose that he and his people and the one other dear friend (viz. Miss Hitchener) were all the persons, whom Shelley designed to entertain during the summer. On the contrary, he had reason to assume Shelley was no less hospitably disposed to old Oxford friends, and half-a-hundred other people, than to persons whom he had not yet seen. Some few weeks after receiving the invitation to Nantgwillt, Godwin is informed by Shelley that the smallness of Mr. Eton’s cottage was a sufficient reason why he should not take it, the rooms being too few for the requirements of his family and friends. Godwin may well, under these circumstances, have come to the conclusion that his young friend—a minor, with certainly no more than 400l. a-year, set on taking a large house and filling it with company—was disposed to outrun the constable. At the same time, it is conceivable that Godwin suspected the suddenness of Shelley’s withdrawal from Nantgwillt House was due to financial distress. For (as I remarked in the last chapter) the sage of Skinner Street, with no information respecting the farm and its recent change of occupiers, may well have drawn the inference and entertained the suspicion, which Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy (with better means of information) had no excuse for drawing and entertaining.

With these grounds for conceiving that Shelley was disposed to live beyond his means, it was creditable in Godwin that, at the risk of offending the young gentleman, he warned him to avoid the hurtful inconveniences of financial extravagance. In giving the advice, that was so needful, Godwin used no needlessly irritating language. Doubtless Godwin’s marital sensitiveness would have been gratified, had Shelley decided to act on Mrs. Godwin’s suggestion. Perhaps he was pained by Shelley’s off-hand way of declining to act upon the lady’s advice. But no passage of the epistle countenances the suggestion that the writer would have written otherwise, had he not been piqued by what he thought disrespectful to his wife’s judgment. Neither impertinent in substance nor pettish in tone, the letter was in every respect a suitable epistle for Godwin to write to the young man, who, with every appearance of sincerity, had entreated the philosopher to enlighten his intellect and form his character. It is also to Godwin’s honour that, whilst writing in a quasi-parental capacity to his singular correspondent, he reminded the young man that one of his first objects should be the recovery of his father’s favour and affection.

Leaving the neighbourhood of Rhayader in the middle of June, 1812, the Shelleys journeyed to Tintern and Chepstow, and after looking at Mr. Eton’s cottage between Tintern Abbey and Piercefield, proceeded to Lynmouth, North Devon. During their sojourn of nine weeks and three days in this locality, the trio lodged in a house, that standing in Lynton, on the hill above the fishing-village, was within a few hundred yards of the Valley of Bocks. In a letter, dated from ‘Lynmouth, Valley of Stones, Sept. 19th, 1812,’ Godwin wrote to his wife in London: ‘Since writing the above, I have been to the house where Shelley lodged, and I bring good news. I saw the woman of the house, and I was delighted with her. She is a good creature, and quite loved the Shelleys. They lived here nine weeks and three days;’—words that, giving us the length of the poet’s sojourn in the loveliest part of North Devon, point to the day on which the trio came to the charming spot, either by water from the Mouth of the Severn, or by land along the ridge of the Somerset coast. Speaking possibly from documentary evidence (though her ‘authentic sources’ of information are too often sources of error) Lady Shelley says, that the poet, with his attendant womankind, left Lynmouth on 31st August, 1812. If Lady Shelley is right on this point (and even Lady Shelley is right sometimes), Godwin was wrong by two days in writing on the 19th of September, ‘My Dear Love. The Shelleys are gone! Have been gone these three weeks.’ The philosopher may of course have thrown nineteen days into the round number of weeks; but I am slow to think this of the narrator who, with his customary exactness in small matters, is careful to record the precise number of days, by which Shelley’s stay in the lodgings, exceeded nine weeks.

When the trio had settled down in the lodging-house (situated in Lynton, though Shelley dated his letters from Lynmouth, which he spelt in accordance with local pronunciation), correspondence was renewed between Godwin and his young friend. Dating from North Devon on 5th July, 1812, before the philosopher’s expostulatory letter had come to his hands, Shelley wrote to the sage of Skinner Street:—

‘We were all so much prepossessed in favour of Mr. Eton’s house that nothing but the invincible objection of scarcity of room would have induced us, after seeing it, to resign the predetermination we had formed of taking it.... The expenses incurred by the failure of our attempt, in settling at Nantgwillt, have rendered it necessary for us to settle for a time in some cheap residence, in order to recover our pecuniary independence. I still hope that you and your estimable family will, before much time has elapsed, become inmates of our house.... As soon as we recover our financial liberty, we mean to come to London.’

Two days later (7th July, 1812), when the expostulatory letter (forwarded from Chepstow) had been some twenty-four hours in his hands, Shelley again refers to the considerations which determined him to decline Mr. Eton’s house near Tintern Abbey, and ‘to seek an inexpensive retirement,’ in another part of the country. ‘It is a singular coincidence,’ he remarks, in the second of his letters from Lynmouth, to Godwin, ‘that in my last letter I entered into details respecting my mode of life, and unfolded to you the reasons by which I was induced, on being disappointed in Mr. Eton’s house, to seek an inexpensive retirement;’—words that, even in the absence of other evidence to the point, should have preserved Hogg from putting Mr. Eton’s cottage in Lynmouth. In the same epistle Shelley says, ‘My letter, dated on the 5th,’ (i.e. the day before the day on which he received the expostulatory letter) ‘will prove to you that it is not to live in splendour, which I hate,—not to accumulate indulgences, which I despise, that my present conduct was adopted.’ From this letter of the 7th July, it is obvious that Shelley did not regard Godwin as having overstept the privileges of his position, in expostulating with him on his pecuniary imprudence in the undated letter, which reached him only on the 6th, when his letter of the 5th was well on its way to Skinner Street. ‘I feel my heart,’ Shelley says on the 7th July, in reference to his previous letter of the 5th instant, ‘throb exultingly when, as I read the misgivings in your mind concerning my rectitude, I reflect that I have to a certain degree refuted them by anticipation.’ It never occurred to Shelley to take offence at the freedom of Godwin’s expostulatory letter. It was enough for him, on the 7th of July, to exult in knowing that he had on the 5th answered by anticipation the principal matters of the epistle, before opening it on the 6th. The undated expostulatory letter, which thus travelled from London to Lynmouth, viâ Chepstow, and came to Shelley’s hands at Lynmouth on the 6th July, cannot have left London later than the 2nd instant. It is more probable that Godwin wrote the epistle on one of the concluding days of June, than on the 1st or 2nd of July. Yet Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy and other gentlemen, claiming as Shelleyan specialists a peculiar right to dogmatize on Shelleyan questions, insist that this particular epistle, which cannot have been posted later than the 2nd of July, would never have been written by Godwin, had not his vanity been acutely piqued by the passage of the letter, dated to him by Shelley on the 5th of July, in which he spoke with extravagant eulogy of the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress, as a Deist and Republican, who openly instructed her little pupils in her religious and political views, and seemed to have formed her mind by the precepts of Political Justice, before it was her good fortune to peruse the pages of that immortal work.

Shelley was urgent in the same letter that Fanny Imlay, alias Wollstonecraft, alias Godwin, might be allowed to journey from London to Devonshire in Miss Hitchener’s company, and stay with him and Harriett at Lynton till the autumn, when they would bring her back to Skinner Street. As Godwin had not educated the young lady, or any of the girls of his curiously composed family, in religious Free Thought, it is not surprising that Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter was not allowed to travel from London to Lynmouth in the company of the Deistical schoolmistress, who joined the trio in North Devon some time about the middle of July. Though there is no conclusive evidence to the point, it has been no less reasonably than generally assumed, that this exemplary young schoolmistress brought with her to the Lynton cottage the large box of inflammatory literature, that had been opened at Holyhead, under circumstances and with consequences already set forth. Anyhow, it is certain that soon after her arrival at Lynton, Shelley had in his keeping at Lynton many copies of the printed compositions that were found in the big box by the Holyhead officials.

For some days Shelley may be presumed to have greatly enjoyed the society of the incomparable Portia (in Percy’s little circle the Shakespearian spelling of the name seems to have been preferred to Porcia) who had at length broken away from Hurstpierpoint, and joined the little circle in which he could now be hopeful of finding happiness for ever. Readers may be left to imagine how the elated Percy escorted his dear Portia to the Valley of Rocks, and other especially picturesque scenes of the delightful region; how he discoursed with her on human perfectibility and other lofty themes in language very much beyond Harriett’s comprehension; and how Portia hung on his words with philosophic acquiescence, that was something too adorative and manifestly acceptable to her husband for Mrs. Shelley to be altogether pleased by it, though she did her very best to think it all right and reasonable, and to regard Percy’s incomparable female worshiper as a superlatively clever and good and charming woman. Readers may also be left to imagine how Miss Westbrook scrutinized her dearest Portia, studied her voice and manner, watched her movements, and took note of her philosophic utterances, whilst, even from the first day of their personal intercourse, she laid her plans for ejecting the dark-eyed and foreign-looking intruder from the little circle, which she entered for the gratification of only one of the three persons, who had joined in begging her to come to them. In those days of his unutterable felicity, far was Shelley from imagining how cordially he would, in a few months, hate the young woman, who had come all the way from Sussex to make him happy for ever. Miss Westbrook, however, would have been less cheerful and complaisant to Portia in the earlier weeks of their association, had she not been reasonably hopeful in July, that before the end of November Percy would have seen quite enough of his incomparable Miss Hitchener.

Memorable in the story of Shelley’s life, as the place where he welcomed Portia to his domestic circle, Lynton is also memorable as the place where he busied himself with a literary enterprise, not unworthy of the young gentleman who had failed to regenerate Ireland with two pamphlets and a revolutionary broadside, and to demolish Christianity with a little syllabus. He had not been many days in North Devon before it occurred to the youthful enthusiast, that he could employ his leisure serviceably by sowing the seeds of revolutionary sentiment in Lynmouth and Barnstaple, and the several villages lying between the fishing-village whence he dated his letters, and the tranquil little borough whose inhabitants are pleased to style it ‘the metropolis of North Devon.’

For some weeks he had been contemplating with disgustful abhorrence the circumstances, under which a man named Eaton had been tried and punished by Lord Ellenborough for printing and publishing the Third Part of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason. This daring violator of law, with which as a printer and publisher he was quite familiar, had been indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in the ordinary way to undergo the severe punishment, to which he had rendered himself liable. Lord Ellenborough’s connexion with the affair was, that it devolved on him, as Lord Chief Justice, to try the prisoner in the ordinary way of his official duty, and after the culprit’s conviction to pass sentence upon him. Doubtless the Chief Justice was at pains to secure a conviction, because the evidence was conclusive, and the case a serious case; at least, in the opinion of the Chief Justice and the overwhelming majority of educated Englishmen. Doubtless, also, he passed a severe sentence, as he would none the less have been bound to do, even had he secretly questioned the wisdom of the law he was required to administer. There is, of course, room for difference of opinion on the question whether the law, under which this person, Eaton, suffered a severe punishment, was politic, salutary, and therefore humane. But even in these days of general disapproval of laws for the restraint of religious opinion, there can be no question that Lord Ellenborough was bound to administer the law. To Shelley it appeared otherwise. Had the Chief Justice been at less pains to secure a conviction, and passed a somewhat lighter sentence on the culprit, Shelley would perhaps have been less stormily indignant; but he would have been no less certain that the judge had ‘wantonly and unlawfully infringed the rights of humanity’ in merely discharging a function of his office. It was not in Shelley’s power to see that the main question of the case was not, whether Eaton had been guilty of an offence against natural morality; but whether he had been guilty of an offence against the law of the land. Discovering nothing to condemn, but, on the contrary, much to approve, in the publisher’s action, on the score of natural morality, Shelley spoke and thought of Eaton as a wholly guiltless person. It followed by Shelley’s logic that the judge who passed sentence on this guiltless person was a judge to be denounced as a ruthless persecutor of the innocent.

Taking this view of the matter, Shelley, on the eve of his withdrawal from Radnorshire (vide his letter of 11th June, 1812, to Godwin) was planning an Address to the public on the wickedness of the prosecution, and the iniquity of the judge.

The outline of the essay, begun in Radnorshire, was filled in as the writer made his leisurely progress to North Devon, where he put the last touches to the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, occasioned by the Sentence which he passed on Mr. D. I. Eaton, as Publisher of the Third Part of Paine’s Age of Reason,—an essay which in respect to literary style, is a great advance on the author’s previous prose writings, without containing a single passage to justify the praise lavished by the poet’s idolaters on the perverse performance. The epistle having been touched in to his satisfaction, and most likely read to Portia (I adhere to Harriett’s way of spelling the name), Shelley took the manuscript to Barnstaple and requested Mr. Syle, the principal bookseller and printer of the borough, to put it in type and furnish him with a thousand copies. The matter, which the bookseller was thus commissioned to make into a printed pamphlet, was a strenuous and pungent libel on the Lord Chief Justice. Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, it appears from Mr. Chanter’s Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple, that Shelley came from time to time to Mr. Syle’s place of business, for the purpose of correcting proofs and revises. That Shelley journeyed to and fro between Lynton and Barnstaple for this purpose, there is no doubt in the mind of the present writer, who knows too much of his good friend, Mr. John Roberts Chanter, to be capable of questioning the accuracy of his written statements. The work, that was intended to cover Lord Ellenborough with historical infamy, seems to have been corrected for press to the last point as early as 16th August, 1812. Anyhow, on the 18th of that month the author dispatched from Lynmouth fifty copies of the Letter to his friend Mr. Hookham, of London, the Old-Bond-Street bookseller; saying with his pen, ‘I enclose also two pamphlets which I printed and distributed whilst in Ireland some months ago (no bookseller daring to publish them). They were on that account attended with only partial success, and I request your opinion as to the probable result of publishing them with the annexed suggestions in one pamphlet, with an explanatory preface in London.’ Had Shelley been so much more truth-loving than other men, as his idolaters declare him, he would have told Mr. Hookham that the failure of the two Irish pamphlets had been complete, instead of representing they had achieved a partial success. The statement that the pamphlets had been in some degree successful was a petty untruth, which is more than slightly offensive, from being told to the bookseller who was asked to reprint the two failures. The Shelley, who wrote on this matter of business to Mr. Hookham, was the same Shelley who planted the Victor-and-Cazire piracies on Mr. Stockdale.

Before Mr. Hookham received the fifty copies of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, much had taken place at Barnstaple. There was commotion in the ‘metropolis of North Devon,’ the fishing village beneath Lynton, and the petty townlets of the intervening seventeen miles. On a previous page a doubt was expressed whether Daniel Hill (alias Healey) attended the trio from Dublin to Holyhead. Whether the Irish lout accompanied the trio to Radnorshire, waited upon them at Nantgwillt House, and travelled at their heels to North Devon viâ Chepstow, is questionable; but he certainly was in Shelley’s service at Lynton soon after the three wanderers settled there. Certain also it is that Daniel Hill was employed by Shelley to distribute in North Devon the various literary performances, by which he hoped to revolutionize quietly the down-trodden, and far-too-contented peasants of that charming part of England, viz.:—(1) The comparatively innocuous Proposals for an Association, which had been composed for revolutionary use in England as well as Ireland; (2) The Devil’s Walk, the poetical broadside (printed perhaps in Dublin) designed to bring the Prince Regent and his sycophants into universal contempt; and (3) the Declaration of Rights broadside, demonstrating sententiously that everyone has a plenitude of rights, with the exception of the Government, which is declared in the first four words of the Declaration to have no rights whatever.

Whilst the Letter to Lord Ellenborough was in Mr. Syle’s hands, Daniel Hill found his chief occupation in distributing copies of these three publications. At the same time Daniel Hill, in the faithful execution of Shelley’s orders, posted some of the broadsides on convenient walls and hoardings. It was Shelley’s intention that Daniel Hill should in like manner distribute copies of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough. But it is not for every man to accomplish his intentions. Before he had been entrusted with copies of the libel on Lord Ellenborough, the Barnstaple magistrates laid Daniel Hill by the heels in the borough gaol on the 19th of August, whilst the fifty copies of the Letter were on the way to Mr. Hookham’s shop in Old Bond Street.

It being Shelley’s practice to be abundantly communicative respecting his birth, parentage, education, and quality, to all persons showing any curiosity in his proceedings, he had not been a fortnight in North Devon, before it was generally known in Lynmouth and Barnstaple that he was young Mr. Shelley, son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, and immediate heir (as honest Jack Lawless put the case) to one of the first fortunes of England. The proceedings of a young gentleman of such superior quality were of course fruitful of much gossip in the parishes visited by Daniel Hill, whose pamphlets and broadsides were the more interesting to mechanics, farmers, and justices of the peace, because he was known to be the young gentleman’s servant. Whilst gossips clacked to one another about the young gentleman’s Declaration of Rights and The Devil’s Walk, he was known to be in communication with Mr. Syle, of Barnstaple, and to have commissioned that enterprising bookseller to print something even more racy than those piquant broadsides. Compositors at press, in a small provincial town, who seldom work at ‘copy’ more diverting than auctioneers’ catalogues or tradesmen’s lists of prices, are apt to grow excited and loquacious when they are employed to put in type a smart electioneering squib, or a pamphlet for the discomfiture of a local dignitary. It was not in the nature of Mr. Syle’s provincial journeymen and apprentices to be silent to their neighbours about the stinging letter to the Lord Chief Justice, which they were ‘setting up.’ Before the author had seen a first proof, the Letter was talked about in the parlours of the two contiguous taverns, where the political leaders of the borough met every evening of the week to confer on matters of Imperial or local politics. At the Whig tavern, feeling went in some degree with the youthful author of the daring essay; but at the adjoining house, where Tories held council, it was urged and agreed that measures should be taken promptly for the maintenance of social order, and the timely stay of seditious practices. By the chiefs of both parties it was agreed that young Mr. Shelley, even though he were the son of half-a-dozen Members of Parliament and heir to half-a-hundred baronetcies, should not be allowed to break the law in North Devon with impunity. Hence the arrest of the young gentleman’s Irish servant.

From evidence preserved at The Record Office, it appears that the Barnstaple authorities acted in this business under guidance and instructions from the Solicitor to the Treasury. The publications being seditious, it was of course competent for the Ministry to proceed against Shelley, as the author and actual promulgator of the writings. That he was not proceeded against in his own name and person may have been due, in some degree, to regard for his father’s feelings and respectability. Consideration also for the offender’s youthfulness may have determined the powers to forbear from prosecuting the erratic stripling. But other considerations doubtless operated with the legal advisers of the Crown. It might be difficult to produce legal proof that Shelley was the author of the writings, or even that he was their publisher. If it could not be proved to a jury that he was the actual instigator and director of his servant’s political activity, the proceedings against him would result in miscarriage, discreditable to those who instituted them. Moreover, if his conviction could be secured, to prosecute him would magnify him into a martyr and make far too much of his puerile sauciness. To act as though the reputation of the Lord Chief Justice could be affected by a schoolboy’s pen would not tend to stimulate the general reverence for the majesty of the law. Under these circumstances it was thought best to proceed only against the servant; but, whilst affecting to take no notice of the culprit in the background, to deal with the servant in such a manner that his youthful master should be punished.

Some of the seditious compositions, posted or otherwise dispersed by Daniel Hill, bore no printer’s name; and it was provided by 39 George III. c. 79, section xxvii. that ‘... every person, who shall publish or disperse, or assist in publishing or dispersing, either gratis or for money, any printed Paper or Book, which shall have been printed after the passing of this Act, and on which the name and place of abode of the person printing the same shall not be printed as aforesaid, shall, for every copy of such paper so published or dispersed by him, forfeit and pay the sum of twenty pounds.’ By the same statute it was further provided that every person convicted under it, who should neither pay the penalties nor be possessed of goods on which they could be levied, should forthwith be sent to prison ‘for any time not exceeding six calendar months, nor less than three calendar months.’ Hence it was possible to punish Daniel Hill, and through him to punish his master, without making too much of the dangerous character of the writings. Convicted in the Mayor’s Court at Barnstaple, of publishing and dispersing Printed Papers in violation of 39 George III. c. 79, the Irish servant was sentenced to pay fines amounting to 200l. or go to prison for six months.

‘Daniel Hill,’ the town-clerk of Barnstaple wrote to Lord Sidmouth, when the case had been dealt with in this manner, ‘has been convicted by the Mayor in ten penalties of 20l. each, for publishing and dispersing Printed Papers, 39 George III. c. 79, and is now committed to the common gaol of this Borough for not paying the penalties, and having no goods on which they could be levied.’

When the servant was fined thus heavily, the Mayor and other acting magistrates assumed that the penalties would be paid by Shelley,—at once and on the spot, if he had so much money in hand; or in a few days should it be necessary for him to communicate with his father or lawyer, in order to put his servant at large. At the trial, Daniel Hill’s defence was that he had meant no harm in posting the bills in accordance with the directions of ‘the gentleman,’ who had given him the broadsides for that purpose, and paid him 2s. 6d. for the job. Everyone in court, of course, smiled at the poor fellow’s attempt to make the magistrates believe, that the ‘gentleman’ was a stranger whom he had come upon accidentally between Lynton and Barnstaple, and that the day’s work which had brought him to trouble was a solitary ‘job’ of casual employment; it being known alike to the Justices on the bench and the public in the body of the court, that the gentleman, who had set Daniel Hill to disperse the seditious bills, was Mr. Shelley, the Lynton lodger.

That young Mr. Shelley could not pay so large a fine at a moment’s notice can have caused the borough magistrates no surprise. That Daniel Hill should pass a few days under penal discipline, whilst his master should be getting the money needful for his liberation, was probably desired by the municipal authorities, to whom it may well have appeared no less salutary than reasonable that, instead of going from the dock scot-free, he should endure for a week or so the wholesome rigour of offended justice. But for a few days, neither to the powers of the bench nor to the multitude living under their sway, did it appear probable that the servant would remain in durance for six calendar months, whilst the gentleman who had brought him to trouble escaped with perfect impunity. In bare justice to all that was generous in his faulty nature, it should be taken for certain that could he have paid them, either at once or by drawing money for the purpose from any source at his command, Shelley would have paid the cumulated fines as quickly as possible, even though they had amounted to 2000l. But he was no more able to lift Lynton in his palm and pitch it down upon Lynmouth, than to open the gate of Barnstaple’s common gaol to his Irish varlet. What could he do for such a purpose? Instead of having 200l. at his command he could not just then have laid his hand on as many shillings, even though Harriett and Eliza, and the incomparable Portia, had given him the contents of all their several pockets, to the last sixpence. Next quarter-day, when he hoped to ‘recover his financial liberty’ (his own elegant Micawberism), the young gentleman, of enterprises so disproportionate to his means, would come into possession of 100l. minus what he should have spent in the interim on his necessities. Already in debt to Mr. Syle of Barnstaple for printing the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, he was for the moment in such a stringent state of financial bondage, that he must either withdraw from the Lynton lodging-house at the end of the current week, or run in his landlady’s debt for room-rent, bread, butter, milk, and vegetables. Over and beyond the several sums to be paid to the most urgent of his local creditors, should he linger in North Devon till Michaelmas, enough might remain to him of his next quarterly hundred pounds, to cover the charges of travelling to London and living till Christmas 1812. This was the extent of the ‘financial liberty’ for which he was longing. To whom could he apply for the money wherewith to pay the 200l. and costs? To his father?—his father’s solicitor? He could not write for help to Hogg, whom he suspected, or at least had recently believed guilty, of trying to seduce Harriett. For failing to do what was completely out of his power, he is less to be blamed than commiserated. The poet’s historian wishes he could record that in his inability to protect his servant with his purse, he stood by him manfully, declaring that the ignorant fellow had only obeyed his employer’s order, and avowing himself the actual culprit; but this chivalric course was not taken by Shelley. He cannot be imagined to have found much enjoyment at Lynton, whilst Daniel Hill was undergoing punishment. On the contrary, regard being had to his sensibility and his mode of dealing with certain of its consequences, it may be assumed that he suffered from mental and bodily distress, which had an effect on the petty-cash receipts of the nearest dealer in laudanum.

When it appeared that the young gentleman, who had brought the ignorant Irishman into trouble, would altogether escape punishment, local sentiment passed to warmer indignation against the misdemeanant of superior social condition. Unmindful of his sentimental distress, ‘society’ came to the very wrong conclusion that he suffered nothing at all. Whilst Daniel Hill lived in the popular imagination as a poor fellow undergoing the rigour of prison discipline, the young gentleman was supposed to be enjoying himself at Lynton. It was whispered that the magistrates had not acted rightly in dealing so hardly with the poor and ignorant man, whilst they allowed the rich and educated one to go scot-free. Though they had acted with the best intentions and under the best advice, the magistrates felt there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. To some of them it was consolatory to reflect that measures could still be taken for the punishment of the youthful libeller of the Lord Chief Justice.

That it was in contemplation to proceed against the author and printer of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, or at least that the talk of Barnstaple turned on proceedings for their punishment, may be inferred from Mr. Syle’s alarm and vain endeavours to recover the fifty copies of the Letter, delivered to Shelley a day or two before Daniel Hill’s arrest. Alarmed by the arrest, Mr. Syle was quick to destroy all copies of the pamphlet lying in his office; the Letter to Lord Ellenborough being the third (possibly, the fourth) of Shelley’s juvenile productions to be suppressed by a panic-struck printer.

My good friend, Mr. Chanter, of Barnstaple, is certain that Mr. Syle had several interviews with Shelley, in order to recover the fifty copies of the Letter which had been sent to London. It is needless to say that these ‘several interviews’ were unsatisfactory to Mr. Syle. It may be assumed that to account for his refusal to surrender the printed copies, Shelley declared his inability to restore them, as they had already passed from his keeping. As the printer would have thought it worth his while to be at much pains and cost to follow the fifty copies or any one of them, it may be assumed that he asked Shelley, whither they had gone,—to whom and by whom they had been distributed. Having a strong opinion that they had not been distributed by Daniel Hill, on whose person none of the Letters had been found, Mr. Syle had good reason for thinking that, if they had really passed from Shelley’s hands, they must have been dispersed either by the writer himself or the ladies of his party. We may, therefore, be sure that Shelley was pressed strongly to give or procure precise information respecting the circumstances of their distribution. With equal confidence it may be assumed that Shelley withheld from the printer, that the fifty copies had been sent to Mr. Hookham. Writing from information, that came to him directly or indirectly from persons concerned in printing the libellous writing, Mr. Chanter says, ‘He’ (i.e. Mr. Syle) ‘at once suppressed and destroyed the remaining sheets, and had several interviews with Shelley to endeavour to get back the ones previously delivered, but unsuccessfully, as they had been mostly distributed’:—words implying a gradual distribution in the neighbourhood. Had Shelley told the printer what had been done with the pamphlets, it would scarcely have lived in local tradition, that they had been dispersed in the manner indicated by Mr. Chanter’s words. Moreover, on discovering what trouble might come to him from the affair, Shelley (a capital keeper of a secret he was interested in keeping) had a good reason for withholding from the Barnstaple tradesman a piece of information, which he might under pressure and for his own safety communicate to the magistrates of the borough, with consequences inconvenient to Mr. Hookham and Mr. Hookham’s correspondent.

The evidence that Shelley’s withdrawal from North Devon was connected with the stir and ferment occasioned by the publication of seditious literature, is only circumstantial; but it is such strong evidence of its weak kind that few readers will think it insufficient for the conclusion, to which it has brought the present writer. Settled at Lynton, with the purpose of remaining there till by economical living he should have recovered his ‘financial liberty’—i.e. till next quarter-day—Shelley likes his lodgings and his landlady, and in various ways seems confirmed in his resolve to stay there for several weeks; when within twelve days or a fortnight he moves hurriedly into another county, lying well away from Devon. Making this migration soon after his servant’s arrest, he makes it at a moment when people are saying he ought to be sent to Barnstaple Gaol to keep Daniel Hill company, and the Barnstaple bookseller is fearful of being prosecuted for publishing what his customer has written.

The prosecution of which Mr. Syle was fearful would have been a prosecution in which he, as publisher, would have been associated in the dock with Shelley, as author. Had Mr. Syle’s alarm been justified by the event, he and Shelley would have been tried together. All that Mr. Syle feared for himself, Shelley had reason to fear for himself. Is it to be supposed that, whilst the bookseller was agitated with terror, Shelley,—a youthful, nervous, excitable laudanum-drinker,—was free from fear? At this moment of terror, and real or imaginary peril, Shelley runs along the coast from Lynton to Ilfracombe, and crossing the water with his three female companions gets into Wales. This flight is made at a moment when there are stringent pecuniary reasons why they should remain at Lynton. Surely here is a body of circumstantial evidence strong enough to justify something more than a strong suspicion that in running from North Devon to Wales, Shelley was impelled by apprehension of the same legal proceedings, which poor Mr. Syle was anticipating with terror! In North Devon he was liable to arrest at any moment. In South Wales he would be secure from immediate seizure. Hidden in a secluded corner of Carmarthenshire, he would not be easily tracked and discovered.

The flight had been made something less than three weeks, when William Godwin, relying on his young friend’s frequent and pressing invitations, determined to pay him a visit at Lynton. Mounting coach in London, the philosopher travelled smoothly enough to Bristol, whence he passed over stormy waters to Lynmouth, enduring discomforts (scarcely to be imagined in these luxurious days) during the trip, so humorously touched upon by Hogg, and so graphically described by the voyager himself. After recovering from sea-sickness the disappointed traveller gave his wife some particulars, which he was pleased to call ‘good news,’ respecting the erratic people, whom he had hoped to find near the Valley of Rocks. He had seen the worthy woman, in whose house the Shelleys had lodged for nine weeks and three days. Leaving Lynton precipitately, the Shelleys had gone off in debt to their landlady and two other people: in debt to her for room-rent and necessaries, and for 29s. of borrowed money, besides 3l., which she had induced a neighbour to lend them. Godwin erred in thinking the fugitives had been constrained to borrow this 4l. 9s., because they could not get change at Lynmouth for the two halves of a bank-note; for at the moment of running off, they had not received the second half of the divided note. It delighted Godwin to observe the affectionate warmth with which the landlady spoke of her late lodgers; and he was pleased at learning from her, that they would be in London in a fortnight.

In their desire to get away from Lynton as quickly as possible, the four friends left Lynton in debt, and could not have left it so soon, had they not induced two of the villagers to lend them four pounds and nine shillings. One of the adventurers (probably Shelley) was in possession of the one half of a bank-note, the second half of the divided paper having not yet come to hand. From what source this note came does not appear. It looks as though Shelley had written to some friend for a small loan to enable him to escape quickly from a perilous position, and that the half-note in hand was the first half of a consequent remittance. Anyhow it points to the precipitateness of the departure, that the fugitives did not like to wait till the post should bring the second half of the negotiable paper. Hastening off with the half-note and borrowed money the adventurers went to Ilfracombe, whence they returned the four pounds and nine shillings to the two several lenders,—3l. to Mrs. Hooper’s friend, and 29s. to the landlady herself, to whom they had given ‘a draft upon the Honourable Mr. Lawleys, brother to Lord Cloncurry,’ for the full payment of the amount in which they were indebted to her. There is no doubt that the gentleman so strangely misdescribed was ‘honest Jack,’ who was nothing more than a distant relation to Lord Cloncurry. The draft is not in evidence to show whether honest Jack was so suspiciously misdescribed on the document itself; but it cannot be questioned that the simple lodginghouse-keeper had been talked into believing that the order for payment, instead of being addressed to a penniless littérateur, was drawn upon a personage of social importance.

I wish I could think honest Jack had not been so misdescribed to this simple soul of a North Devon village, in order that she should the more readily be induced to accept the dubious draft in payment of her little account. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy remarks jocosely on this business, ‘We trust that the good Mrs. Hooper of Lynmonth was not kept out of her money until the “enormous profits” which Shelley so sanguinely expected from the publication of The History of Ireland were realized.’ Even at this remoteness from the end of the poor woman’s earthly cares the reader of this page may well repeat seriously what Mr. MacCarthy says jestingly; for many a poor widow has been brought to the workhouse by her simplicity in taking a worthless cheque from a lodger, who ought to have paid what he promised to give her—ready money.

For the present enough has been said of Shelley’s reasons for wishing to leave North Devon, and of the manner of his flight. Enough has been said to show how far Lady Shelley is justified in ascribing the poet’s abrupt withdrawal from Lynton to Tanyrallt, altogether to ‘the restlessness of his disposition.’

CHAPTER VI.

NORTH WALES AND THE SECOND IRISH TRIP.

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

(4.)—Tanyrallt, Carnarvonshire, N.W.

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

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

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

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

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

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