truly impressive in discussion, or in grave and elevated conversation: Medwin says, "In eloquence he surpassed all men I have ever conversed with," and, according to Trelawny, "he left the conviction on the minds of his audience that, however great he was as a poet, he was greater as an orator." Even "his ordinary conversation is akin to poetry," says the loving Lieutenant Williams. But it is probable that in this instance in Dublin he did not greatly shine as a speaker. Chief Baron Woulfe recollected his speaking "at a meeting of the Catholic Board" (no doubt the same occasion), pausing now and anon, and delivering his slow sentences as so many disconnected aphorisms. His speech, however, was very well received by the audience, except one portion of it touching on religious matters, which was greeted with hisses. On the whole, his experiences did not augment his Irish enthusiasm ; neither did personal intercourse with the renowned Mr. Curran, for whom Godwin had sent him a letter of introduction, and whom he found a sufficiently prurient and buffoon-like old gentleman -qualities always and peculiarly distasteful to Shelley. In after years, an obscene story, or ribaldry of set purpose, would suffice to make him rise from his chair, and leave the room. He stayed in Dublin long enough, it would seem, to find that his absence would be a convenience to the governing powers; long enough also to begin, with Mr. John Lawless, a voluminous History of Ireland, of which 250 pages had been printed by the 20th of March. He had likewise had a project of taking a share in a newspaper. Lawless's Compendium of the History of Ireland, published in 1814, embodies, no doubt, some of Shelley's work.

On the 7th of April the Shelleys and Eliza left Dublin.' They ranged about North and South Wales in search of a residence; paused at and again left a 'haunted" house at NantGwillt, near Rhayader; flitted through Cwm Elan; and at last, from about the end of June, settled down for a short while at Lymouth in North Devonshire. They had a small unpretending cottage in a beautiful locality.

Shelley brought with him from Dublin a paper of his composition termed Declaration of Rights; various copies of which

I Medwin (Life, vol. i. p. 177, and Shelley Papers) gives an account, self-contradictory in more respects than one, of a storm on this return-journey, and of the exertions of Shelley, who did much to save the vessel, and its crew of three. In my edition of 1870 I pointed out some grounds for disbelieving the story; and Mr. MacCarthy has since detailed others which cast so much discredit on it that I think it can no longer be tolerated in Shelleyan biography.

had been seized at Holyhead, while on postal transit, in March of this year, and had become at that time the subject of some correspondence between the Post Office and the Home Office. The Declaration consists of thirty-one axioms, in favour of absolute control by the commissioning body, the nation at large, over its delegates, the government; advocating also unlimited freedom of opinion and of expression, the abolition of war, and so on. The opening proposition is "Government has no rights." The document is not wanting either in generous largeness of purpose, or in pointed expression. Its author made a practice of enclosing this broadsheet, and another on which was printed his poem of The Devil's Walk, in carefully secured boxes or bottles, which he dropped into the sea, hoping that somebody would pick them up, and that his ideas would thus peacefully germinate in congenial or impressible minds, and prepare the millennium in. a regenerated country. Shelley, no doubt, considered this an ingenious device; but possibly even he was struck with a sense of its being in some degree unpractical. He next took a bolder step. On the 19th of August an Irish servant whom he had brought from Dublin, Daniel Hill (or more properly Healey), was found in the neighbouring town of Barnstaple, distributing and posting up, by his master's order, copies of the Declaration of Rights, and carrying about him The Devil's Walk. He was arrested, brought before the mayor on a charge of publishing and dispersing printed papers not bearing the printer's name, convicted in penalties amounting to £200, and, in default of payment, committed to the borough jail for six months. Town-clerk of Barnstaple consulted the Home Office, then under the direction of Lord Sidmouth, on this matter; the postmaster of the same town also communicated regarding it with the Postmaster-general, Lord Chichester; and instructions were given for watching Shelley's proceedings. The result was that the latter found it apposite to disappear from Lymouth with his household. At the end of August they left. Godwin, after much urging, came down on the 18th of September to pay them a visit, only to find they had vanished. His sympathies and intellectual curiosity had been greatly excited by the letters Shelley had addressed to him.

The

At Lymouth Bysshe had two boyish hobbies, not heretofore recorded by his biographers. He would blow soap-bubbles from the hill-slope before Mrs. Hooper's lodging-house, where he resided. He would also cut out paper, and stick it on pasteboard, thus manufacturing a kind of balloon, to which he then fastened

a stick or straw this appendage he fired, and watched his balloon intently as it floated away, rising higher and higher, and gradually fanned by the wind into a full blaze. Mrs. Hooper dreaded a descent of the fire-balloon upon her own or some neighbouring thatch; but this never actually occurred, the wind wafting the frail structure along cliffs on the opposite shore.1

The next and rather less brief sojourn was at Tanyrallt, near Tremadoc in Carnarvonshire, where Shelley hired a commodious cottage or country-house belonging to a gentleman named Madocks, who was engaged on extensive works for reclaiming land from the sea-several thousand acres. Here, and at Lymouth previously, Shelley, with his usual unreflecting enthusiasm of good-will, received an additional inmate-Miss Elizabeth Hitchener. This lady was a deist and republican, who kept a school in Sussex, at Hurstpierpoint, and whom Shelley invited away from the sphere of her operations to aid him in emancipating the human race. He was possessed with an enormous admiration of Miss Hitchener's independence of mind—an admiration which, indeed, for some months before and after his elopement with Harriet, exceeded all bounds of proportion and sound judgment. It is to be presumed that he supported her at Tanyrallt, and he certainly subsidized her afterwards: for, as "the Brown Demon" (such is the sole title which this estimable person used to obtain in printed Shelleyan records) proved sovereignly distasteful to Eliza, and hence to Harriet and Shelley himself, the connection was severed in November of this same year, and Shelley felt bound to indemnify her to some extent for her damaged prospects. This was not now from love; for he disposes of the Brown Demon in one monumental sentence-"What would hell be, were such a woman in heaven?" A much more signal instance of his splendid generosity and public large-heartedness occurred about the same time. An uncommonly high tide broke through the embankment of Mr. Madocks's earthworks, to the great dismay and peril of the cottagers. Shelley went about personally soliciting subscriptions (a task which was likely to be especially unpleasant to him, as his letters speak of his neighbours as being in a high degree bigoted and prejudiced), and himself headed the

Miss Mathilde Blind learned these and other entertaining particulars, in the summer of 1871, from Mrs. Blackmore, a worthy old woman then aged eighty-two, who had been servant at the lodging-house when Shelley was there, and who remembers him and his ways with much predilection. In justice to Daniel Hill, it may be added that she believes in his thorough faithfulness and devotion to Shelley. Mrs. Blackmore died at a recent date.

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list with £500—much more than a year's precarious income. He also hurried up to London, which he reached on the 4th of October, to push the subscription there, and had the satisfaction of saving the work. Here, after a long interval, he again saw Hogg, who was now studying in the Temple, and he treated him apparently with absolute adherence to the gracious maxim forgive and forget" here also he made Godwin's personal acquaintance, and stayed awhile in his house. A letter of the 19th of February 1813, written to Mr. Hookham the publisher, after the poet's return to Tanyrallt, marks another act of genuine liberality, though only on a small scale. He was "boiling with indignation" at the tyrannical sentence of fine and imprisonment (£1000 and two years) passed upon Leigh Hunt and his brother John for an alleged libel' on the Prince Regent printed in the Examiner; and he proposed a public subscription to pay-off the fine, and sent for the purpose £20, which appears to have been about all the ready money he had at the time even for his own requirements. The Hunts honourably declined to avail themselves of the proposal, and of a subsequent offer of 100 from Shelley during their imprisonment. This was not the first time that Shelley had had something to do with Leigh Hunt; for, on the occasion of the failure of a previous Government prosecution against the Examiner, he had written from Oxford (2nd March 1811), without any personal acquaintance, "to submit to his consideration a scheme of mutual safety and mutual indemnification for men of public spirit and principle." By the date of the sentence for libel he had met Hunt, but not on an intimate footing.

The residence at Tanyrallt came to an end in a startling and mysterious manner. On the 26th of February the Irish servant Daniel Hill reached the dwelling of the family, his six months' term of imprisonment having just expired. During the night of the same day an attempt to assassinate Shelley in his own house was made, or was supposed or alleged to have been made. For some unexplained reason, Shelley, on retiring to

There is nothing like understanding and attending to the facts of a case, whichever direction they may bear in. It has often been said that the attack made by Leigh Hunt upon the Prince Regent was some slight affair of ridicule or depreciation; calling him "a fat Adonis of sixty," according to Hogg. This is quite untrue: the assault was as virulent as it was well-deserved. One phrase no doubt is "that... this 'Adonis in loveliness, was a corpulent gentleman of fifty"; but (besides other severities) the very next sentence has anything but a bantering tone:-"In short, that this 'delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and iininortal Prince' was a violator of his words, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity."

bed that night, had expected to have occasion for pistols, and had loaded a brace: possibly the arrival of Daniel had revived in his mind the idea of Government surveillance and persecution. Hearing a noise in one of the parlours, he got out of bed with his pistols, and saw a man who fired upon him. A struggle ensued, in which Shelley twice returned the fire, with dubious result: the ruffian, vowing outrage and murder on Eliza and Harriet, ran away. But he returned about three hours afterwards, and shot through Shelley's night-gown and the window-curtain: another struggle ensued, with sword and pistols Daniel arrived, and the assassin again made off. Such is the account given by Harriet in a letter to Mr. Hookham, who had been implored to send funds to enable the Shelleys to quit their Cambrian Castle Dangerous, and retreat to Dublin.'

The Shelleys went to "the solicitor-general of the county," and had an investigation set on foot. No trace could ever be found of the assassin. The Shelleyan theory was that a certain Mr. Leeson, a man whom they avoided as "malignant and cruel to the greatest degree," was at the bottom of the affair. The Leesonian and irreverent theory was at least as tenable primâ facie-viz., " that it was a tale of Mr. Shelley's to impose upon the neighbouring shopkeepers, that he might leave the country without paying his bills." People in general, along with Messrs. Hogg, Madocks, and Peacock, and Mr. Browning among later analysts, have disbelieved the story, and attributed it to an excited imagination, or nerves unstrung by laudanum: Hogg suggests that Daniel may possibly have had something to do with it. This presumption had hitherto been a mere conjecture; but the facts recently ascertained regarding Daniel's imprisonment3 seem to lend it no inconsiderable degree of plausibility. It is fairly surmisable that Daniel might have entertained revengeful feelings against Shelley, and might have concocted a plan either for simply frightening him, or for maltreating him and robbing the house as well. If he really was at the bottom of the affair, he must, according to the details narrated by Harriet, have had a confederate; and some one of

A preliminary brief and agitated letter from Shelley to Hookham is dated 3rd March in Hogg's Life-in the Shelley Memorials it is given without any date. I think "3rd March must be incorrect; for it seems clear the missive was despatched immediately after the event, and, if so, on 27th February.

"

2 This is the correct name : in Hogg's Life it is Luson.

3 These facts have been traced out through certain documents preserved in the Record Office, and published, with some remarks of my own, in the Fortnightly Review for January 1871.