hard-faced schoolmistress with revolutionary opinions, whom he called his "soul's sister," to come and help him to mould his young wife's character. She hesitated for some time, but at length she came and stayed in earnest, for so long indeed that he paid a round sum to get rid of her.

There was seldom a man whose friends were so expensive to him as Shelley's; he was always giving them money, usually borrowed money. But one does not hear that he often received anything in return, except abuse. Sometimes we admire his generosity, but occasionally we are impatient at his wrong-headedness, his quick revulsions of feeling, and that strange want in him which cannot be called by any other name than a want of manliness.

His conduct as regards his friend Hogg, after Hogg's behaviour to Harriet, is an instance of this. Shelley forgave Hogg with angelic readiness, and ardently desired that they should all three remain on the same terms as before, even inviting Hogg to stay with them again at Keswick. This was unpardonable folly; but Shelley could never understand when his conduct was such as to shock men of the most ordinary decency of feeling. He was either above or below all that. He had no reserve; he was unfit for a man's responsibility, and certainly was much too young for a husband.

But his confidence in himself and in the coming reign

of Reason was unabated. Like many young people of his age, he wanted to reform the world, and was in a hurry to begin; but saw no reason why he should try to understand the world first, for that is a long and troublesome matter. He hated the studies of history and of jurisprudence equally, and never looked at a newspaper. But, unlike most young people of his age, the desire to reform the world lasted, and grew stronger throughout his life; it was no passing whim of youth. Cruel as the world proved to him, he kept to the end his amazing belief in the possibilities of human nature.

About this

"My son, get knowledge, and with all thy getting, get understanding." This counsel of Solomon's was given to Shelley by Sir Walter Scott, with a degree of discernment almost uncanny. time he had sent Scott some of his juvenile effusions. Scott wrote a long and charming letter to the unknown youth, from whose raw verses he had apparently been able to gather so much knowledge of his correspondent's failings that to the advice of Solomon he added his own recommendation that Shelley should choose classical models. Scott cannot have been aware that he was giving him the two pieces of advice that he needed most in all the world. Neither can Shelley have been aware that in disregarding them he was doing violence to his nature and his destiny.

"He decided that Reason was the only sure weapon against Intolerance. He soon became the advocate of one of those mechanical schemes of society in which there was no room for either Christianity or classics."

At this time he was not a poet, or aiming at poetry. He believed that he could wield some reforming power politically, and he was as ready to cross the Channel to Ireland and preach Catholic Emancipation in Dublin, as he was to return in a hurry to Wales and help an energetic country gentleman of Carnarvonshire in building an embankment to reclaim his land from the sea. Fighting the sea was an occupation quite congenial to Shelley, and he laboured faithfully at it during long winter months, while the original designer of the embankment desisted and retired from the scene. Finally, Shelley retired too, in consequence of a sudden scare about being assassinated, which caused him to write wildly to his publisher

"Oh, send me £20, if you have it! I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. You will perhaps hear of me no

more.

His publisher sent the £20, and Shelley and Harriet fled from Wales without delay. He was subject to very strange fears, sometimes amounting almost to hallucinations. A good adviser or a kind friend at this juncture in his affairs might have given him invaluable help,

but he had no such friend, and was too much in the hands of feather-headed or designing women. His father had practically abandoned him.

During their stay in Cumberland the young couple received some kindness from the everfriendly Southey. That excellent man and reformed Revolutionary, busily engaged in the support of his own and other people's families, found time to extend his hospitality and sympathy to Shelley, who on his side seemed to waken in the older man a memory of something lost."

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Here is a man at Keswick," wrote Southey, "who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794.

I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good with £6000 a year. . . . God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way."

Sympathetic and persuasive as Southey was, he failed. From the moment that Shelley realised Southey's opposition to the cause of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform, he looked upon him as a backslider, almost a renegade.

"Corrupted by the world, contaminated by custom!" he lamented. "But Wordsworth and Coleridge I have yet to see."

Unfortunately he never saw either of them-a fact which

"Now-the very reverse of what would have been the case in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred," he later wrote to a friend, "I might have been of use to him, and Southey could not; for I should have sympathised with his poetics, metaphysical reveries, and the very word metaphysics is an abomination to Southey, and Shelley would have felt that I understood him. His discussions-leading towards Atheism of a certain sort-would not have scared me; for me it would have been a semi-transparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true image-the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have thought that sort of Atheism the next best religion to Christianity. . . ."

ever

"To take this tolerant view, it was necessary to have that vein of mysticism which both Shelley and Coleridge possessed, but which Shelley for the time had stifled. In later life he could regard Christianity as at least the next best thing to his kind of Atheism. In 1812, as the world he was struggling with cared only for the labels on its institutions, nothing for their true significance, he had fallen into the error of seeing these not as they had been or might be, but as his age had branded them."

It will be easily seen that Mrs Campbell, in writing of

prehensive view of his period, and looks on the young poet himself with a mixture of tenderness and entertainment. Her quotation of "the next best thing," as it lay between Coleridge and Shelley, conveys an inference of humorous wisdom very far beyond the reach of M. Maurois' mocking wit. It conveys, besides, to the reader a persuasion that the mind capable of such insight can be trusted to give a fair impartial account of the sad, confused, and disgraceful period of Shelley's life when, under the influence of a sudden, overpowering passion for Mary Godwin, a beautiful girl of seventeen, he deserted his wife and child, and fled with his new innamorata to France. Mrs Campbell, one may be certain, would thankfully have been spared the investigation not of the facts, but of the cloud of spurious gossip and calumny that has overshadowed and darkened the facts. This cloud she very rightly leaves to disperse itself, and relates nothing but what is clearly known of the sad sequence of events.

Shelley's marriage had not been a happy one. His wife Harriet, a very pretty, wellmeaning, and thoroughly commonplace girl, had become discontented with the insignificance of her lot, and jealous of Shelley's new friends, a family of very agreeable, educated, and appreciative people, who were really kind to Shelley, and did their best to include

Godwin, as beautiful as Harriet, and with twice the intellect and force of character, was determined to take Shelley away from his wife, and she succeeded. Harriet returned home, wept, and implored in vain. Godwin's reproaches were also vain. It was he who had first taught Shelley to despise the sacredness of marriage. Shelley and his own daughter believed his teaching, and acted on it; and thus did the philosopher find his curse coming home to roost. Unfortunately, it could not roost on himself alone.

Comment and dogmatic judgment are needless where our only duty is to note the the consequences, remembering, whether we note them with pity or contempt, that "consequences are God's commentaries."

Nothing could have been farther from the grand manner than Shelley's second elopement, which was encumbered, as usual in his case, with a sister or half-sister-for relaVOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCCII.

tionships in the Godwin family were complicated. Past experience had not warned him sufficiently to prevent his again domesticating an angel of strife in the shape of this half-sister, who never took her departure entirely from his hearth. Instead of a romantic glamour, there is a shade of the sordid and grotesque thrown over all his youthful adventures, which we can hardly read of without a rueful smile and a compunctious feeling that this at least is undeserved; for whatever were Shelley's faults, he was the least sordid of humankind. In his misery at abandoning Harriet - for of his misery there is no doubt whatever-he had left almost all his money at her disposal; and on his speedy return from France with his new "ménage," he found that she had disposed of it so thoroughly that he had hardly anything left to live upon, and he also found that she was indisposed to help him. This surprised him, and he was yet more surprised to learn that people took a very disparaging view of his conduct; even, as he pathetically protested, people who knew him! Godwin was too deeply shocked to see his daughter again, or to dream of forgiving either of them; he could only mark his sense of their atrocious conduct by extorting sums of money, haughtily and continuously, from both of them, to the end of his life.

After a period of much misery and humiliation, after being

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pursued by bailiffs, and hunted from one dreary lodging to another, till he one day asked a friend, "Do you think Wordsworth could have written such poetry if he had ever had dealings with money-lenders?"-the news reached him in January 1815 of his grandfather's death. He immediately made a visit to his home, his last visit there; but was not admitted, and sat reading Comus' on the doorstep, while his grandfather's will was being read by the family within. This will made him heir after his father's death to nearly a quarter of a million pounds, on condition that he should entail the whole estate upon his own eldest son. This he refused for the second time to do, from a purely conscientious conscientious motive. He disbelieved in the law of primogeniture-a most unusual form of scepticism in an eldest son. His father had endeavoured on a former occasion, when Shelley was in urgent need of money, to persuade him into some such agreement, and had requested the help of the Duke of Norfolk to convince his strangely obstinate son. The elder Shelley was just the man to believe in the force of ducal arguments, but his son replied with equal dignity and candour to the well-meant interference

"I sincerely regret that any of your valuable time should have been occupied in the vain and impossible task of reconciling myself and my father.... I was prepared

to make my father every reasonable concession, but I am not so degraded and miserable a slave as publicly to disavow an opinion I believe to be true. Any man of commonsense must plainly see that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be devised."

Nobody admired this despiser of self-interest. For his rejection of their travesty of Christianity they called him bad; but for his rejection of an eldest son's privileges thus offered to his necessity, they called him mad; and from this attitude of mind his family and their intimates never varied during his lifetime. By negotiations, which lasted for some months, an arrangement was made through which Shelley, renouncing his brilliant future prospects, received an income of £1000 a year.

It was not nearly enough to satisfy the demands of Godwin, the really important person, whose rapacity grew stronger with advancing age, till the year came when he succeeded in extracting over £4000 from Shelley, whom he did not hesitate to designate as "this flagrant and disgraceful person" in a letter to his daughter, intended for Shelley's perusal.

All things considered, it is not surprising that Shelley began to think life would be easier out of England with its atmosphere of darkness, damp,