treatment and less heroic remedies might have been more efficacious in effecting a cure. As it was, Shelley went up to London full of the dangerous exhilaration of a successful martyr, and carried about with him the certificate of his expulsion, as St. Lawrence does his gridiron, at once the evidence of his admission to the Church triumphant, and of the manner of it. The immediate consequences of his expulsion were a quarrel with his father, (followed by a hollow reconcilement,) and the breaking off of his love affair with Miss Grove.

Shortly after his arrival in London he read Godwin's "Political Justice," and was thereby confirmed in his theories on the subject of politics. But Shelley's liberalism must be distinguished from the kind professed by Lord Byron. It was with him a matter of nature as well as conviction, and he cheerfully gave up for its sake a seat in Parliament and a large income. Byron's was an affair of whim, cost him nothing, and the contradiction between his principles and his position, enhanced that interest in his personal chacacter, which it was the object of his whole life to increase. To a peer all things are possible in England, and if Byron made a show of sacrificing his social prestige, it was to himself that the altar was built, and his own nostrils that inhaled the incense, while Shelley enthusiastically made a holocaust of self, of position, of prospects, to the principles which he believed to be right.

At this period of his life Shelley had a habit of writing letters to any person that interested him. Among others, he opened a correspondence with Miss Browne, (afterward Mrs. Hemans,) which continued some time, till it was broken off by her mother, who probably did not relish some of the young poet's theories in regard to domestic life. In the same way his intercourse began with Miss Harriet Westbrooke, the beautiful daughter of a retired coffee-house keeper. To letters succeeded stolen interviews, (the young lady was at a boarding-school,) and to interviews, Gretna Green. This was in 1811.

Hitherto, probably, Sir Timothy had looked upon the dogmatic excesses of his son as only another form of sowing those wild oats from which commonly is reaped in due time a crop of tame respectability and decorum. Theories, as long as they were abstract, did not disturb him, for he knew that they might be, and commonly were, turned out of doors, whenever society as it was offered greater inducements. But now that his son had legally indented himself to a theory for life, it was quite another and more serious affair. The chance of being grandfather to a coffee-house keeper's grandson, who, in spite of him, might be the future master of Castle Goring, was probably not a pleasant one. Hitherto, in his treatment of his son, he had neglected to practise on the obvious truth that the opinions of the

young resemble certain animals which need only to be sufficiently urged in one direction to bolt madly in the other, and that their extravagances have this likeness of virtue that they grow all the more for the weight that is laid upon them. The baronet resolved to punish what he could not cure, and accordingly cut his son off from all paternal assistance. The bride's father, however, was likely to view the matter in another light, (it would doubtless be no great cross to him to see his grandson a baronet,) and he allowed the young couple an annuity of two hundred pounds.*

It is a little odd, considering Shelley's opinions about marriage, that he should have been married twice to his first wife. After their return from Gretna Green, the ceremony was performed again at Cuckfield in Sussex. For some time, he seems to have led a rather migratory life. We find him for a time at Keswick, where he became acquainted with Southey, for whose poetry he had at this time an extravagant admiration; then in Dublin, projecting histories of Ireland, which result in a small political pamphlet, now irrecoverable; then in the Isle of Man, as a kind

quotes a letter of The letter proves,

*Captain Medwin doubts this, and Shelley's in confirmation of his doubt. at least, that the father-in-law sent him something, but this would seem to have been enough to support him, for it does not appear that he was able to raise any money on his expectations. Meanwhile he was able to live for two years in some way or other.

of Alsatia, sacred from the foot of bailiff; and last in Wales, whence he appears to have come to London again.

The results of this marriage were two children, a daughter and a son, and a separation. The circumstances of the disagreement between Shelley and his wife, have never been cleared up. Perhaps it would have been quite as noble if Shelley had continued the martyr of a youthful misstep instead of making his wife the victim of notions about marriage in which there is no evidence that she shared. However this may be, he made himself so acceptable to Miss Godwin, daughter of the novelist and Mary Wolstonecraft, that she consented to elope with him to Switzerland in July, 1814. They crossed to Calais in an open boat, not without danger of being lost. A Miss Claremont went with them. She also was a deaconess in the Church of the Elective Affinities, and (Lord Byron having joined the party) became the mother of the Allegra, mentioned in his will. This, however, seems to have been on a second visit to the Continent, the fugitives having in the meanwhile returned for a short time to England. This last continental tour occupied but a few months, during which the northern part of Italy was visited.

Shelley came back to England again, bringing with him a child by his new connection, and went to Bath. But now was to come the terrible recoil

which almost inevitably results from an attempt to bend an entire social system out of the way of the passions of a single man. However the brain may philosophize, the heart remains loyal to its traditions, and though Mrs. Shelley may have been captivated with the doctrine of attractions while it drew her husband to her, she was not prepared for the more liberal application of it which

drew him away. No theorizing can sweeten desertion; and the unhappy woman, disenchanted of the dream, and forsaken by the substance, sought shelter in death.

The lovers of Shelley as a man and a poet have done what they could to palliate his conduct in this matter. But a question of morals, as between man and society, cannot be reduced to any individual standard however exalted. Our partiality for the man only heightens our detestation of the error. The greater Shelley's genius, the nobler his character and impulses, so much the more startling is the warning. If we make our own inclinations the measure of what is right, we must be the sterner in curbing them. A woman's heart is too delicate a thing to serve as a fulcrum for the lever with which a man would overturn any system, however conventional. The misery of the elective-affinity scheme is that men are not chemical substances, and that in nine cases in ten the force of the attraction works more constantly and lastingly upon the woman than the man.