because, for the most part, they had their basis in his firm belief that his father and uncle had designs upon his liberty. On this basis his imagination built a fabric of romance, and when he presented it as substantive fact, and it was found to contain more or less of inconsistency, he felt his selfesteem interested in maintaining it by accumulated circumstances, which severally vanished under the touch of investigation, like Williams's location at the Turk's Head Coffee-house. I must add that in the expression of these differences there was not a shadow of anger. They were discussed with freedom and calmness, with the good temper and good feeling which never forsook him in conversations with his friends. There was an evident anxiety for acquiescence, but a quiet and gentle toleration of dissent. A personal discussion, however interesting to himself, was carried on with the same calmness as if it related to the most abstract question in metaphysics."

In April, 1813, Shelley took lodgings in London. There he had now several intimate friends: Hogg, the Godwins, Peacock the poet and novelist, whose acquaintance he had recently made, Leigh Hunt, and others. Hogg again affords a series of lively pictures of the Shelleys and their method of living. Harriet was bright, blooming, and placid as ever, and still addicted to reading aloud. Owing to the multitude of books, their sitting-room presented a scene of confusion which recalled Shelley's bachelor apartments in Oxford. Meals came at irregular hours. Throughout life the poet was very simple in his diet and neglectful of regular meals. "When he felt hungry," writes Hogg of Shelley in 1813, "he would dash into the first baker's shop, buy a loaf, and rush out again, bearing it under his arm; and he strode onwards in his rapid course, breaking off pieces of bread and rapidly swallowing them." He eschewed spirituous liquors and drank tea or water; both he and Harriet were

vegetarians at this time. But Shelley was not fanatical in this respect; when away from home he ate what came in his way, and did not refuse the weaker sorts of wine. Peacock ascribes Shelley's ill-health largely to vegetarianism and irregularity in eating. In his sleeping he was not less eccentric, inclined to be drowsy in the evenings, and never so wakeful as when the rest of the world is in the habit

of taking repose. As to dress, Hogg says that he never remembers to have seen Shelley in a greatcoat, even in the coldest weather. He wore his waistcoat much, or entirely, open; his throat was bare, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned; he wore a hat reluctantly in town, but in fields or gardens had no other covering for his head than his long, wild locks. "He took strange caprices, unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and panic terrors, and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of times, places, persons, and seasons; and, falling into some poetic vision, some daydream, he quickly and completely forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly promised or ran away after some object of imaginary urgency and importance which suddenly came into his head, setting off in vain pursuit of it, he knew not whither."

In June, 1813, a daughter, Ianthe, was born. This event, which should have bound husband and wife more closely together, marks the beginnings of estrangement. We have seen the quixotic fashion in which Shelley married. The marriage turned out, at first, more happily than could have been expected. Harriet had beauty and amiability; she adopted, though in a somewhat childish fashion no doubt, the views of her husband; she employed his phraseology. Shelley's love for his young wife grew; his letters and poems written while in Devonshire and Wales witness to the happiness of their union. But the poet's eccentricities were such

as to put a strain on the most appreciative affection; and Harriet was not specially adapted, in character and intellect, to comprehend him. On the other side, the time was sure to come when Shelley would feel with exaggerated sensitiveness the difference between the real person and the ideal which he had conceived. Harriet was essentially commonplace, without extraordinary spiritual or mental endowments. As she grew to full maturity, as the pliancy and docility of girlhood passed away, she doubtless developed tastes and opinions little in harmony with her husband's unconventional views. Her patience must have been tried by his unpractical aims and by his neglect of those things which society about her deemed important. In 1813 Shelley made a purchase of plate and set up a carriage — certainly not of his own impulse. To intensify any divergencies of thought and feeling between husband and wife, there were the continued presence and influence of Eliza Westbrook However she may have dissembled in the early days of thei acquaintance, she had no natural interest or sympathy for Shelley's peculiar ways and opinions. She was not at all literary or intellectual in her tastes; her aims were commonplace; her character, mature and strong; her influence over her sister, great. Shelley now cordially detested his sisterin-law, and his dislike was intensified when he saw her in chief charge of the little Ianthe. Peacock says: "I have often thought that if Harriet had nursed her own child [contrary to the father's wishes, a wet-nurse was employed], and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married love would not have been so readily broken.”

The sense of disparity between himself and his wife may have been quickened by the congenial female society which he now enjoyed among some new friends, the Newtons and Boinvilles. The circle into which he was thus introduced was composed of persons of an enthusiastic and

somewhat eccentric type.

Mr. Newton was a strong vege

tarian; to animal food and the drinking of undistilled water he ascribed most of the ills of humanity; he saw, too, profound meanings in the signs of the zodiac. His wife and Mrs. Boinville were sisters. To the latter Shelley was especially drawn. Recalling in 1819 the time of which we are now speaking, he wrote: "I could not help considering Mrs. Boinville, when I knew her, as the most admirable specimen of a human being I had ever seen. Nothing earthly ever appeared to me more perfect than her character and manners." She was an enthusiast for liberty, full of sensibility and intensity, of gracious and refined manners. Under her teaching and that of her married daughter, Cornelia Turner, Shelley began the study of Italian poetry. To the cynical and common-sense Hogg and Peacock, the absurdities of this circle were more apparent than its charms. "The greater part of her [Mrs. Boinville's] associates," says Hogg, "were odious. I generally found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners, or medical students, all of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was, and swore by William Godwin and Political Justice." During the summer of 1813 Shelley was much in the society of these people, having rented a cottage at Bracknell, where the Boinvilles were spending the summer months.

From Bracknell, Shelley, on the invitation of his mother, paid a clandestine visit to Field Place while his father was absent. There he met a young officer, Captain Kennedy, whose impressions of the poet are interesting: "His eyes were most expressive, his complexion beautifully fair, his features exquisitely fine; his hair was dark, and no particular attention to its arrangement was manifest.

In per

son he was slender and gentlemanlike, but inclined to stoop; his gait was decidedly not military. The general appearance indicated great delicacy of constitution. One would pronounce of him that he was different from other men.

There was an earnestness in his manner and such perfect gentleness of breeding and freedom from everything artificial as charmed every one. I never met a man who so immediately won upon me. He reasoned and spoke like a perfect gentleman, and treated my arguments, boy as I was (I had lately completed my sixteenth year), with as much consideration and respect as if I had been his equal in ability and attainment." Shelley told Captain Kennedy that he owed everything to Godwin, "from whose book, Political Justice, he had derived all that was valuable in knowledge and virtue."

In the autumn of the same year, Shelley, in company with Harriet, Eliza, and Peacock, made a tour through the Lake country to Scotland. Under Peacock's influence he plunged deep into classical literature. The chief literary product of the year was a dialogue entitled A Refutation of Deism, which exhibits a great advance both in style and thought upon his earlier prose writings.

The year 1814 brought matters between Shelley and his Harriet to a crisis. The divergence in views and practice between husband and wife had probably been gradually widening. From Peacock's account, we gather that the latter had begun to laugh at Shelley's enthusiasms and at some of his friends. Hogg says that after the birth of her child she relinquished reading aloud. "Neither did she read much to herself; her studies, which had been so constant and exemplary, dwindled away to nothing, and Bysshe had ceased to express any interest in them or to urge her, as of old, to devote herself to the cultivation of her mind. When I called upon her she proposed a walk, if