separated by mutual consent after the birth of two children. We are told, by way of apology for Shelley's conduct in this mutually voluntary separation, and something more, in the letter of license accompanying it, that Mrs. Shelley was a person of inferior rank, and that Shelley's family disapproved of the match. Whatever her rank was, the unfortunate lady believed herself to have been ill used by her husband; and while Mr. Shelley was residing in Bath, paying court to another lady, news came to him that his wife had destroyed herself. "It was a heavy blow to him," we are told, " and he never forgot it." The first Mrs. Shelley is represented by Mr. Hunt in a very unfavorable light, especially in an intellectual point of view. I have had evidence before me which would go very far to contradict that opinion. In the year 1812, and early part of 1813, Mr. Shelley was reduced by pecuniary distress to the necessity of frequently supplicating a friend for the loan of small sums of money to meet his current expenses, he and Mrs. Shelley living at that period in the most straitened circumstances. In March, 1813, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley were residing in Dublin, at No. 35 Great Cuffe Street, Stephen's Green, a locality sufficient to show the nature of the pecuniary circumstances in which Shelley was then placed. He and Mrs. Shelley were then, to use his own words, "overwhelmed by their own distresses, but still not indifferent to those of others, suffering or struggling in the cause of liberty and virtue," and therefore he sent instructions from Ireland to apply £20 to the benefit of the Hunts. Shelley was then slowly recovering from an alarming illness, accompanied by great nervous excitement and depression of spirits, brought on by dread of assassination, and night-watchings, and terrors, occasioned by an imagined attempt made on his life, the 26th of February, 1813, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, while residing in Wales. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, and a sister of Mrs. Shelley, had retired to rest about half an hour, when Shelley, imagining he heard a noise in the lower part of the house, rushed out of bed, and, armed with two pistols which he had loaded that night, expecting to have occasion for them, ran down stairs and entered a room from whence it seemed to him the noise had proceeded. Mrs. Shelley, in narrating the occurrence, stated that Shelley saw a man in the act of making his escape through a window that opened into a shrubbery. The man, according to that account, fired at Shelley without effect. Shelley then attempted to fire at his assailant, but the pistol did not go off. The man then rushed on Shelley, knocked him down, and while on the ground a struggle took place between Shelley and his assailant. Shelley managed during this struggle to fire his second pistol, which he imagined had wounded the man in the shoulder, for he screamed aloud, rose up, and uttered terrible imprecations and threats in the grossest language, calling God to witness that he would be revenged—that he would murder his wife; that he would bring disgrace on his sister; and ending with these words: "By G-, I will be revenged." The villain had fled, as they (Mr. and Mrs. Shelley) hoped, for the night. The servants had not gone to bed when this occurrence took place, yet Mrs. Shelley makes no mention of their having made their appearance at all on the scene of this rencounter during the struggle, notwithstanding the firing of the shots, nor did she mention being present herself till about eleven o'clock, when" they all assembled in the parlor, where they remained for two hours." Mrs. Shelley stated that her husband then desired them to retire, as there was no farther attack likely to be apprehended. She went to bed, and left Shelley and a man-servant, who had only become an inmate of the house that day, sitting up. Mrs. Shelley had been in bed about three hours when she heard a pistol go off, and immediately ran down stairs, where she found her husband greatly excited. She saw that his dressing-gown and the windowcurtains had been perforated by a ball. The servant-man who had been left sitting up with Shelley, by her account was not present when the shot was fired. He had been sent out to see what o'clock it was, and after having done so, on hearing some noise at the window, Shelley, as she states, went forward in that direction, when a man thrust his arm through the glass and fired at him. The ball passed through the curtain and his dressing-gown, Shelley fortunately standing sideways at the moment the assassin fired. Shelley immediately attempted to fire his pistol at the man, but it would not go off. He then made a lunge at him with an old sword which he found in the house; the assassin tried to wrest the sword out of his hand, and while in the act of so wresting it, the servant-man Daniel rushed into the room, and the man then took to flight and disappeared. When Mrs. Shelley saw her husband after this second attempt, it was four o'clock in the morning. The night had been most tempestuous-a most dreadful night-the wind was so loud, it seemed to her like thunder, and the rain came rattling down in torrents. The next day the occurrence was the subject of general conversation in the locality. A Mr. L spread a malicious report that the whole was a fabrication of Shelley, and the object of it was to furnish an excuse for leaving the place without paying his bills, this Mr. L having an enmity to Shelley, on account of being slighted by the latter, and once having obtained a pamphlet which Shelley had published in Dublin, of a political nature, and having sent the same to the government, denouncing its principles and its possessors. On the Saturday following the Shelleys took their departure for Tarr y calt, and determined shortly after to proceed to Dublin for a change of scene, that might lead to some new train of thought most urgently required at that time for the restoration of his health and spirits. Shelley, in his account of the attempted assassination, said he had been fired at twice by the assassin, and one of the balls had penetrated his nightgown and pierced his waistcoat. He was of opinion it was no common robber they had reason to dread, but a person seeking vengeance, who had threatened his life and his sister's also. Within a week of the date of the occurrence above mentioned, Shelley's state of mind was not only one of depression, but of desperation; he spoke of his escape from an attempted atrocious assassination, and the probability of being then heard of no more, in a very incoherent manner. The whole alleged attempt at assassination, there can hardly be a doubt, was an imaginary occurrence-the creation of an overworked mind, greatly excited, controlled by no religious sentiments-of a state of mental hallucination remotely occasioned by excessive metaphysical abstraction, immediately aggravated by impaired bodily health and extreme physical debility. Those who contributed perseveringly and industriously to undermine the religious sentiments of this noble-minded being, for such he was with all his faults, one originally good and excellently gifted, naturally endowed, too, with sentiments of a reverential kind for the Creator, and with feelings of grateful admiration of the glorious and beautiful works of creation-those persons, some of whom are still living, might well lament for the success of their efforts to unchristianize Shelley, if they had the grace to be conscious of their own grievous errors in matters of fact. Moore says of Shelley, "With a mind by nature fervidly pious, he yet refused to acknowledge a supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction of universal love' in its place."* We are told by Legh Hunt that "Shelley was subject to violent spasmodic pains, which would sometimes force him to lie on the ground till they were over, but he had always a kind word to give to those about him when his pangs allowed him to speak." One of the earliest and most intimate friends of Shelley, in whose house in London, at the period of his first married life, and subsequent to the separation, Shelley was in the habit of staying when in town, informed me that he was subject to violent paroxysms of pain in the head, so violent and overpowering, that, while they lasted, he would lie down on a sofa, and writhe in agony of suffering, that seemed almost to drive him to distraction. Polidori, the Italian physician of Lord Byron in Genoa and Milan, in his Preface to the "Vampire," gives a curious account of one of Shelley's occasional hallucinations, for the truth of which Byron vouches. "It appears that, one evening, Lord Byron, Mr. P. B. Shelley, two ladies, and the gentleman before alluded to, after having perused a German work called Phantasmagoria,' began relating ghost stories, when, his lordship having recited the beginning of Christabel, then unpublished, the whole took so strong a hold of Mr. Shelley's mind that he suddenly started up and ran out of the room. The physician and Lord Byron followed, and found him leaning against a mantel-piece, with cold drops of perspiration trickling down his face. After having given him something to refresh him, upon inquiring into the cause of his alarm, they found that, his wild imagination having pictured to him the bosom of one of the ladies with eyes (which was reported of a lady Moore's "Life of Byron," p. 316, Svo ed., 1838. in the neighborhood where he lived), he was obliged to leave the room in order to destroy the impression."* The belief to which he clung with most tenacity, we are told by his friend Hunt, was in the existence of some great pervading "spirit of intellectual beauty." The sweet cadences of melodious music, the lustre of the stars, the loveliness of flowers, the beauties of nature, the excellencies of art-these, we are told, were the spiritual influences which went to the formation of his religious opinions. The works of Bernard de St. Pierre contributed, perhaps, to make him a natural religionist; and one work of Mr. Godwin, on "Political Justice," made him a philosophical Radical and a metaphysical Republican. Shelley's figure was tall and most unnaturally attenuated, so as to bend to the earth like a plant that had been deprived of its vital air; his features had an unnatural sharpness, and an unhealthy paleness, like a flower that has been kept from the light of day; his eyes had an almost superhuman brightness, and his voice a preternatural elevation of pitch and a shrillness of tone, all which peculiarities probably arose from some accidental circumstances connected with his early nurture and bringing up. But all these Hazlitt tortured into external types and symbols of that unnatural and unwholesome craving after injurious excitement, that morbid tendency toward interdicted topics and questions of moral good and evil, and that forbidden search into the secrets of our nature and ultimate destiny, into which he strangely and inconsequentially resolved the whole of Shelley's productions."t Shelley's lines" Written in dejection, near Naples"-contain some passages exquisitely beautiful and pathetic; some, too, of a mournful interest, and calculated to recall his own sad fate: "I see the deep's untrampled floor, With green and purple sea-weeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers thrown. I sit upon the sands alone: The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did my heart share in my emotion. Alas! I have nor hope, nor health, And walked around with inward glory crown'd; * Moore's Life of Byron, p. 394, 8vo edit., 1838. "My Friends and Acquaintances," by P. G. Patmore, vol. iii., p. 134. Others I see whom these surround; Smiling they live, and call life pleasure: To me, that cup has been dealt in another measure. Yet now despair itself is mild, E'en as the winds and waters are; I could lie like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and still must bear, My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." The second Mrs. Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin, by his union with Mary Woolstonecraft, the author of the "Rights of Women." This gifted lady became the wife of P. B. Shelley in 1818. Soon after their marriage, they left their residence at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, for Italy, where they resided till the fatal accident by which Shelley perished, in his thirtieth year, in the Gulf of Terici, with his friend, Edward Elleker Williams, on the 8th of July, 1822. Her first work, written during her residence in Italy, was "Frankenstein," one of the most remarkable works of fiction of the time. After Shelley's death she had to devote herself to literature to enable her to provide for herself and two young children. She produced, at intervals, “ Valperga," "The Last Man," "Iodore," one or two other works of fiction, biographies of foreign artists and men of letters for the "Cabinet Cyclopædia." She edited, moreover, the poems and various fragments of Shelley, and, lastly, published, in 1843, in 2 vols. 8vo, her "Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843." Mrs. Shelley's elder son, William, died in childhood; the survivor is the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, Bart., who succeeded his grandfather, Sir Timothy Shelley, in that title in 1844. Mrs. Shelley died at her residence, 24 Chester Square, London, aged fifty-three, on the 1st of February, 1851. "The remains of Shelley are deposited near those of his friend Keats, in the cemetery at the base of the pyramidal tomb of Caius Cestius in Rome. In his preface to his lament over Keats, Shelley says, 'He was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.' The inscription on the monument of Keats, who died in Rome in 1821, briefly tells the sad story of the short career of the young English poet, the friend of Shelley This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his : |