two suicides. The first was that of Fanny Godwin, who, having gone to Swansea, prior to paying a visit to her two maternal aunts in Ireland, suddenly poisoned herself with laudanum on the night of the 9th of October. No adequate motive could ever be assigned for this act: a hopeless passion for Shelley has sometimes been surmised, but this remains as a conjecture to which credence is advisedly refused by qualified inquirers. The second suicide touched the poet still more nearly. On the 9th of November Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine, the body remaining unrecovered up to the 10th of December. Thus, in gloom, abasement, and despair, closed the young life which had been so bright and charming in the bridal days of 1811. The exact course of Harriet's life since June 1814 has never been accurately disclosed; and there is no lack of reason why, even if one had at command details as yet unpublished, one should hesitate to bring them forward. I shall confine myself to reproducing the most definite statement' as yet made on the subject—that of Mr. Thornton Hunt; omitting only one unpleasant expression which I have grounds (from two independent and unbiassed sources of information) to suppose overcharged. He unreservedly allows, with other biographers, that there was nothing to censure in Harriet's conjugal conduct before the separation; "but subsequently she forfeited her claim to a return, even in the eye of the law. If she left [Shelley], it would appear that she herself was deserted in turn by a man in a very humble grade of life, and it was in consequence of this desertion that she killed herself." The same author says that, before this event, Mr. Westbrook's faculties had begun to fail; he had treated Harriet with harshness, "and she was driven from the paternal roof. This Shelley did not know at the time." Another writer 3 represents that Harriet -poor uncared-for young creature-suffered great privations, and sank to the lowest grade of misery. De Quincey says that she was stung by calumnies incidental to the position of a woman separated from her husband, and was oppressed by the

2

1 The "most definite," save a statement, to the same effect as the omitted passage, made by some base calumniator in the Literary Gazette, in a review of Queen Mab, during Shelley's lifetime-and made in that instance as a charge against Shelley far more than against Harriet.

2 I do not see the force of this expression. It is certain that in one sense Harriet did leave Shelley; and equally certain that (to say the very least) her leaving him was less of a voluntary act on her part than his leaving her was on his.

3 C. R. S., in Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. vol. v. p. 373. His statement may perhaps be of no more authority on the point above cited than when he says that Mr. Westbrook died insolvent before Harriet's suicide, and that this took place "in the great basin of the Green Park."

loneliness of her abode-which seems to be rather a vague version of the facts. Mr. Kegan Paul affirms distinctly, "The immediate cause of her death was that her father's door was shut against her, though he had at first sheltered her and her children. This was done by order of her sister, who would not allow Harriet access to the bedside of her dying father." He can hardly, however, have been "dying" in November, 1816, as he took legal action against Shelley in 1817. In any case we will be very little disposed to cast stones at the forlorn woman who sought and found an early cleansing in the waters of death-a final refuge from all pangs of desertion, of repudiation, or of self-scorn.

I find nothing to suggest otherwise than that Shelley had lost sight of Harriet for several months preceding her suicide; though it might seem natural to suppose that he continued to keep up some sort of knowledge, if not of how she went on, at least of the state of his young children Ianthe and Charles. At all events, be he blameworthy or not in the original matter of the separation, or on the ground of recent obliviousness of Harriet or his children, it is an ascertained fact that her suicide was in no way immediately connected with any act or default of his -but with a train of circumstances for which the responsibility lay with Harriet herself, or had to be divided between her and the antecedent conditions of various kinds. It is moreover a fact clearly attested by Hogg that she had for years had a strange proclivity towards suicide towards starting the topic, and even scheming the act. I know also, from a MS. letter of Shelley's written very soon after his elopement with Harriet, that, in the complaints of ill-treatment which she had made leading up to that event, a resolution of suicide was not pretermitted. "Early in our acquaintance," says Hogg [i.e., in 1811], "the good Harriet asked me, 'What do you think of suicide?' She often discoursed of her purpose of killing herself some day or other, and at great length, in a calm resolute manner. She told me that at school, where she was very unhappy, as she said (but I could never discover why she was so, for she was treated with much kindness, and exceedingly well instructed), she had conceived and contrived sundry attempts and purposes of destroying herself. . . . She got up in the night, she said, sometimes, with a fixed determination of making away with herself. . . . She spoke of self-murder serenely before strangers; and at a dinner-party I have heard her describe her feelings, opinions, and intentions, with respect to

suicide, with prolix earnestness. . . The poor girl's monomania of self-destruction (which we long looked upon as a vain fancy, a baseless delusion, an inconsequent hallucination of the mind) amused us occasionally for some years: eventually it proved a sad reality, and drew forth many bitter tears." Again, about the middle of 1813, we find :-"She had not renounced her eternal purpose of suicide; and she still discoursed of some scheme of self-destruction as coolly as another lady would arrange a visit to an exhibition or a theatre." All this requires to be well pondered, as raising a strong presumption that Harriet was a person likely enough to commit suicide, even without being urged thereto by any great degree of unhappiness, or other forcible motive. At the same time, it is true that there may be a deal of talk about self-destruction, with very little intention of it; and Harriet may have caught the trick of such talk from Shelley himself—who (as Mr. Hogg says) "frequently discoursed poetically, pathetically, and with fervid melancholy fancies, of suicide; but I do not believe that he ever contemplated seriously and practically the perpetration of the crime." This last conclusion of Hogg's, however, will be considerably modified in the minds of my readers who notice that Shelley did really poison himself in the early and agitating days of his passion for Mary Godwin; also of those who recollect how Trelawny records that Shelley wrote on 18th June 1822, asking that devoted friend to procure him, if possible, a small quantity of the strongest prussic acid. "You remember we talked of it the other night, and we both expressed a wish to possess it: my wish was serious, and sprung from the desire of avoiding needless suffering. I need not tell you I have no intention of suicide at present; but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest."

I

Shelley, on receiving the news of his wife's suicide, hurried up to London; and now began his more special intimacy with Leigh Hunt and his family. All authorities agree in testifying to the painful severity with which the poet felt the shock, and the permanence of the impression. Leigh Hunt says that Shelley never forgot it; it tore him to pieces for a time, and he felt re

Mr. Furnivall, son of the surgeon at Egham who attended the second Mrs. Shelley in her confinement in 1817, and in whom (as Mr. Peacock reports) the poet had great confidence, tells me an amusing anecdote bearing on this point. The surgeon after attending a post mortem examination, arrived at Shelley's house, and there found Leigh Hunt. The two friends, especially Hunt, were talking rather big about the expediency and attractions of suicide, when Mr. Furnivall proffered his case of surgical instruments for immediate use--but without result.

and

morse at having brought Harriet, in the first instance, into an atmosphere of thought and life for which her strength of mind had not qualified her. Thornton Hunt speaks in the same strain: "I am well aware that he had suffered severely, and that he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes." Medwin says that the sorrow ever after threw a cloud over Shelley indeed, he goes so far as to speak of its having brought on temporary derangement-which may probably be true in only a limited sense. Peacock says that "Harriet's untimely fate occasioned him deep agony of mind, which he felt the more because for a long time he kept the feeling to himself." Mr. Trelawny tells me that even at the late period when he knew Shelley-1822-the impression of extreme pain which the end of Harriet had caused to the poet was still vividly present and operative. Mr. Garnett adverts to a series of letters, not yet given to the world, written by Shelley about the middle of December, and therefore under the immediate pressure of his misfortune, which "afford the most unequivocal testimony of the grief and horror occasioned by the tragical incident. Yet self-reproach formed no element of his sorrow, in the midst of which he could proudly say 6 (mentioning two dry unbiassed men of business) 'every one does me full justice, bears testimony to the uprightness and liberality of my conduct to her.'" Mr. Garnett, indeed, concludes that, if Shelley, soon after the suicide of Harriet, appeared calm and unmoved to Peacock (as that writer affirms), this was presumably a symptom of his want of full expansive confidence in Peacock, rather than of his actual self-possession. I think, however, that such an argument may be pushed too far. The feelings of a strong but variously impressible character like Shelley's under such a conjuncture of circumstances are of a very mixed description: what is called "sentiment" does not cover the whole area. "Sentimentalism" is of course a very different thing from sentiment: but I may here take occasion to quote the noticeable statement of De Quincey, in allusion to a description he had heard of Shelley's personal appearance :-"This gave to the chance observer an impression that he was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some excess of sickly sentimentalism; from which I believe that in all stages of his life he was remarkably free." For my part, I can imagine that he was not only, in a certain way, calm enough at times immediately after Harriet's death, whether to the eyes of Peacock or of other friends, but

even that he could (as I am assured he did some few months later) apply to her the emphatic term "a frantic idiot.” He must no doubt have regarded her later career as one marked by great want of self-respect, and may have both felt and expressed himself strongly now and again, without derogating from the substantial rectitude and tenderness of his nature-qualities disputable only by creatures of the type of those Quarterly Reviewers who, at the same time that they represented Shelley's life as a compound of "low pride, cold selfishness, and unmanly cruelty," discerned also that "the predominating characteristic of his poetry was its frequent and total want of meaning," and that the Prometheus was "in sober sadness drivelling prose run mad," and "looked upon the question of Mr. Shelley's poetical merits as at an end." 2 And so indeed it was after the spawning of that opprobrium of the British and modern Muse, the Prometheus Unbound. "These be thy gods,

O Israel !"

XV.-MARRIAGE AND MARRIED LIFE WITH MARY.

On the 30th of December 1816 Shelley married his dearlyloved Mary, at St. Mildred's Church in the City of London. Godwin made marriage an express condition of his continuing further intercourse with Shelley. Yet they had not all this while remained wholly estranged-some communication between them (very frigid at first) having recommenced as early at least as January 1815.

The Shelleys soon afterwards entered upon their residence at Marlow, Miss Clairmont and her brother Charles being along with them. Mr. Peacock was close by, and they saw something also of their next neighbour Mr. Maddocks (not the landlord and friend of the Tanyrallt days): of other mere neighbours they knew little or nothing. "I am not wretch enough to tolerate an acquaintance" was Shelley's phrase. The house was a large one situated away

By Mr. Furnivall, who heard it repeatedly from his father.

2 These expressions are accurately quoted from the Quarterly Review of April 1819 and October 1821; critiques of Laon and Cythna, the Revolt of Islam, and Rosalina and Helen, in the former article, and of Prometheus Unbound in the latter. Even these phrases fall short of what we find in the Literary Gazette of 1820, critiques of The Cenci and Prometheus. The Cenci, we are told, is the most abominable work of the time, and seems to be the production of some fiend: the reviewer hopes never again to see a book so stamped with pollution, impiousness, and infamy." Prometheus is "little else but absolute raving: and, were we not assured to the contrary, we should take it for granted that the author was lunatic, as his principles are ludicrously wicked, and his poetry a mélange of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty, and pedantry." Further on we find the critic speak of "the stupid trash of this delirious dreamer," and "this tissue of insufferable buffoonery."