Like so many of the poet's stories about himself, it was a curious mixture

of fact and fiction. As the story, so thoroughly believed and steadily

repeated by its teller, points to the period when Shelley began to regard

his father with morbid fear and aversion, and also to the circumstances

that gave birth to so unnatural a state of feeling, it is well to inquire

how much of this marvellous story was true, and how much of it was

illusion. No discreet and judicial hearer of the story ever gave the

slightest credit to the chief and most painful statements of the

narrative,--viz., that Mr. Timothy Shelley intended to send his

fever-stricken boy to a madhouse, and had been heard to express this

intention. The evidence being conclusive that he was an affectionate

father and kindly gentleman, the notion that he was capable of any such

atrocity can have been nothing more than one of the sick boy's delirious

fancies. Had Mr. Timothy Shelley been a less amiable person, his abundant

sensitiveness for the honour of Field Place (the honour of the

newly-created Castle Goring family), and his nervous care for the world's

opinion, would have saved him from the blunder of sending the sick boy to

a lunatic asylum; the blunder, moreover, of consigning to a madhouse the

son who, as a lunatic, could not have concurred in the resettlement of

family estates, for which his concurrence was requisite, and the Squire

was greatly desirous. Old Sir Bysshe was not more desirous than his son

Timothy for the resettlement of the estates A and B. A man of affairs, Mr.

Timothy Shelley, would have known that, whilst imprisoned as a lunatic,

his son could not resettle the estates; knew also that, by barbarously

throwing him into a madhouse, he would create in his son's mind a state of

feeling that would be fatal to the scheme for getting him to join in the

resettlement, on his liberation or escape from the madhouse. Had he been

morally capable of so atrocious an offence, self-interest would have

preserved the Squire of Field Place from the iniquitous purpose, about

which Shelley's wild story made him gossip lightly and loudly. Hogg gave

not a moment's credence to the ghastly and revolting particulars of the

story. The other hearers of the story, to whom Hogg makes reference,

concurred with him in ascribing these particulars to hallucination, which

continued to prey on the patient's light and flighty brain, long years

after his recovery from the fever that gave birth to the morbid fancy.

Even Lady Shelley seems to take the only sensible view of this part of

the affair, though she does not go the length of saying her father-in-law

was the victim of hallucination--

'From the indiscreet gossip,' she says, 'of a servant, who had

overheard some conversation between his father and the village doctor,

Bysshe had come to the conviction that it was intended to remove him

from the house to some distant asylum:--'

language certainly implying that the sick boy's fancy was erroneous. Hogg

says:--

'It appeared to myself and to others also, that his, _i.e._ Shelley's

recollections, were those of a person not quite recovered from a

fever, which had attacked his brain, and still disturbed by the

horrors of the disease. Truth and justice demand that no event of his

life should be kept back, but that all materials for the formation of

a correct judgment should be freely given.'

Other particulars of the story may have been no less baseless. That a

servant told him of his father's purpose, that he gave this servant orders

and means to despatch a messenger to Dr. Lind, may have been mere fancies

of the delirious brain. On the other hand, Lady Shelley may have had

better authority than the poet's words for attributing the painful

conviction to a servant's gossip. It can also be readily imagined that the

sufferer from the distressing fancy gave his pocket-money to a servant,

and bade him be off to Windsor for the doctor. These are points on which

the reader may be left to form his own opinion, but he must altogether

acquit Mr. Timothy Shelley of intending to send his boy to a madhouse.

The indisputable facts of the story are these:--The boy had a febrile

illness attended with delirium; whilst ill he suffered from a fancy that

his father meant to send him to a lunatic asylum; after this notion had

fastened on the disordered brain, Dr. Lind was sent for; in compliance

with the summons Dr. Lind came from Windsor to Field Place, and attended

the boy till he was better. A reasonable view of these facts is that

during his delirious sickness the patient expressed a strong desire to see

Dr. Lind, and that, in their natural desire to do the best for their

child's comfort and recovery, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley invited the doctor to

come to Field Place. Even Dr. Lind with all his eccentricity would not

have presumed to visit Field Place without an invitation from the master

of the house. Still less would he have ventured to force his way into the

sick chamber against Mr. Timothy Shelley's wish. The statement that he

dared Mr. Shelley 'to execute his purpose,' and brought him to a sense of

decency by 'menaces,' is simply ridiculous. Ever reluctant though she is

to discredit any of the poet's statements, Lady Shelley shows her opinion

of the wildest extravagances of his marvellous story by being silent about

them.

Something should be said about the probable time of this illness.

Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr.

Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in

regarding the illness as an incident of one of his 'holidays;' but there

are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course

during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet's

death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen

was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed

through an illness.

'I went to school before Margaret,' Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1856,

'so that she recollects how Bysshe came home in the midst of the

half-year to be nursed; and when he was allowed to leave the house, he

came to the dining-room window, and kissed her through the pane of

glass.'

Hellen's age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness

cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she

would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness

mentioned in the poet's strange story, Dr. Lind's visit to Field Place is

a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness,

the patient had been under Dr. Lind's medical treatment before he was sent

home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe

one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy

grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for 'a second opinion,' than

for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the

patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr.

Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so

indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the

question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was

summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else

is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had

already been, or would soon be, the boy's instructor in hard swearing, Mr.

Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet

left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story

occurred during the height of Dr. Lind's influence over the boy; as that

influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe's stay at

Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be

nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799)

was already at school and in 'the middle of her half-year,' most readers

will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in

the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same

illness,--and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of

1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, _i.e._ when Shelley was sixteen

years old. If this manner of dealing with sure facts is acceptable to

readers, they may congratulate themselves on having discovered the six

months, at the beginning or end of which, the poet was first possessed by

the fancy that his father was looking out for a pretext for locking him up

in a madhouse:--the hideous fancy that (to use Love Peacock's words)

'haunted him throughout life.'

How came this ghastly and absolutely groundless fancy to take this early

and enduring hold of his mind? The answer must be sought in the poet's

ancestral story, the characteristics of the romantic literature of which

he had been a greedy devourer from his early childhood, and the conditions

of his life at Eton. The answer to be extorted from these three sources of

information is doubtless an answer, resting on inference and conjecture

from facts, almost as much as upon facts themselves. Still it is an answer

worth having, though veined with uncertainties. The Shelleys, who

eventually blossomed into the Castle Goring house, resembled the

eighteenth and nineteenth century Byrons in having a distinct strain of

madness. Mention has already been made of the Newark apothecary's elder

brother, whose story is told in the following words of the Castle Goring

pedigree:--

'John Shelley, of Fen Place, aforesaid, esq., 2nd son, _a lunatic_.

Bapt. at Worth 1st September, 1696; died unmarried at Uckfield, 7th

October, 1772, buried at Worth 18th same month.'

This long-lived lunatic, who did not escape from his dismal doom in this

world, till he had entered his seventy-seventh year, is a significant

feature of the poet's ancestral story. Brother of the Newark apothecary,

this madman, whose affliction caused him to be set aside in the

arrangements of the family (to his younger brother's advantage), was the

first baronet's uncle, the poet's great-great-uncle. The obscurity of the

families, with whom this lunatic's ancestors intermarried before his

period, precludes the discovery of the number of the various channels

through which insanity may have come to his brain. But it is not to the

physiological credit of the Castle Goring Shelleys, that their ancestors

married so many heiresses. Families, whose men have married for money in

successive generations, are usually seen to suffer in bodily stamina and

mental health from what has come together with money to the family story.

There is, of course, no reason why an heiress should not be as healthy as

a poor parson's daughter. But there is nothing in money to exempt its

possessor from struma in its various forms; and so long as he can win in

his bride the first object of his desire, money, the male fortune-hunter

is apt to shut his eyes to the indications that the advantages of the

money must be taken with serious attendant drawbacks. Families, famous for

marrying heiresses, whether they intermarry with noble stocks, or, like

our poet's ancestors, with mere gentle yeomanry (_i.e._ squireens entitled

to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals

gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such

families often do so by suffering for centuries.

To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for

the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his

tender infancy,--the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he

had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that

literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being

unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least

probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the

press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded

theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of _The Captive_, may

have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment

in a mad-house.

Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of

the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power

was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote

collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic.

The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by

a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, 'Mad Shelley,

Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!' had good reason to suspect that something in

his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of

insanity.

'I have seen him,' says one of the spectators of these frequent scenes

of cruelty and suffering, 'surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened

bull; and, at this distance of time (forty years after), I seem to

hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his

paroxysms of revengeful anger.'

The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who

only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object

of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to

brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate

resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him

with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they

really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled

him to their compassion.

In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy

and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course

informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his

word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice

expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father's entreaty) re-admitted to

the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time.

It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons

for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to

remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him,

suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the

Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the

Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and

contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the

holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received

personal chastisement at his father's hands. But it is conceivable he was

so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of

unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the

birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized

as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially

amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his

heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction

and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire

with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the

Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free

speech of that lunatic's nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and

natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might

resemble his great-great-uncle's fate,--that he might be set aside as a

lunatic to his little brother's advantage in the arrangements of his

family,--that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an

occasion for sending him to a mad-house?

But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of

the poet, that 'the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for

a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?' Was the delusion so

absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy

passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this

matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he

forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy,

similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and

curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said

that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that

Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid

fancy, which certainly held the poet's mind in his later time, 'haunted

him through life.'

To the present writer, indeed, it is conceivable that there were times

when the poet's mind got the better of the most hideous of the several

delusions that troubled it from time to time. The present writer can also

conceive there were times when the poet, by the exercise of his will,

sustained his belief in the delusion, even as the dreamer can for a few

seconds by pure volition persist in believing a dream, which may be

described as overlying his consciousness of its unreality. One of the

prime dogmas of the school of metaphysicians, whose tenets Shelley

embraced with cordial conviction of their truth, is that belief is

independent of volition. The dogma is true in respect to perfectly

logical and altogether sound minds. But there are unsound minds that are

capable of shaping their opinions and determining their belief by

processes of volition. Minds subject to manifest and distressing illusions

are not to be rated as perfectly logical and altogether sound. Shelley's

mind certainly was liable to such delusions. It is conceivable he would

not have insisted on the separateness of belief and volition with so much

needless emphasis and passion, had he not been uneasily

conscious,--troubled and irritated by a criminatory

sub-consciousness--that in some matters (such for instance as his delusion

respecting his father) he believed what he ought not to believe, and could

by strenuous volition save himself from believing. Some such thought as

this was perhaps in Peacock's mind, when he spoke of the 'semi-delusions'

of the man whom he loved so heartily.

Returning to Eton after recovering from the fever, of which so much has

been said in foregoing pages of this chapter, Shelley, to the end of his

time at the public school, continued to be in most respects the same boy

he was on rising to the office of Lord High Atheist. Persisting in

contumacy and unruliness he left the school in disgrace, though not under

any ignominy to preclude him from the advantages of further education at

one of the universities. In one particular, however, he seems to have

changed his course towards the close of his Etonian career. The passion

for scientific amusements (let them not be called 'studies') having in

some degree spent itself, he devoted the greater part of his leisure to

literary exercise, in the hope of winning premature distinction as a man

of letters,--an ambition he certainly would not have entertained, had he

been so seriously set on scientific inquiry, and occupied with scientific

interests, as successive biographers have represented.

On 7th May of 1809, whilst still a boarder in Mr. Bethell's house, Shelley

wrote Messrs. Longman & Co., the eminent publishers of Paternoster Row,

London, a boyish letter, informing them that he was writing a romance, and

expressing his wish for them to publish it. The publishers were informed

that, as he was 'the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of

Sussex,' their correspondent was not writing for money, though he would

gladly take a share of any pecuniary profits, resulting from the

production of his work. As the publishers endorsed this puerile letter

with a memorandum of their readiness to look at the story on its

completion, it may be assumed that the manuscript of perhaps the most

ludicrous tale of all English literature was submitted to the publishers'

reader. As the absurd performance was not published till the end of May,

or an early day of June, 1810, and was then published by Messrs. G. Wilkie

and J. Robinson, of 57 Paternoster Row, it may be assumed that after

considering their reader's opinion of the story, Messrs. Longman & Co.

declined to publish it,--or at least to publish it on terms the author

could consent to accept.

Though it is certain Shelley left Eton prematurely and on account of

misbehaviour, the particular misconduct which resulted in his dismissal

from the school is unknown. To Peacock (who at the time smiled secretly at

the 'semi-delusion,' even as in later time he smiled at it openly in the

pages of _Fraser's Magazine_), Shelley averred that he was sent away from

Eton for striking a penknife through the hand of one of his

school-fellows, and pinning it to a desk. Of course, Shelley said the

ferocious act was the result of extravagant provocation.

To satisfy impartial readers that Shelley did not pin his schoolfellow's

hand to a desk with the blade of a pen-knife, it is enough to say that his

comrades at Eton had no recollection of any such incident in his career at

the school. How Shelley came to account in so remarkable a manner for his

premature withdrawal from the public school, is not left altogether to

conjecture. Though he makes no reference to the affair in his _Fraser_

article, Peacock, on hearing Shelley's astounding story, was doubtless

mindful of the case of the military gamester, whose hand (in an early year

of the present century) was pinned with a steel fork to the table of a

famous gambling-club, as a convenient preliminary to the exposure of what

was concealed between his wrist and cuff.

Whilst it is certain that Shelley was _not_ dismissed from Eton for the

cause he stated, it is by no means improbable that he was sent home on

account of his amiable habit of cursing his own father,--a practice that

cannot have favoured the moral tone of school, and on coming to the

knowledge of the masters would necessarily move them to a strong

expression of disapproval.

It accords with this conjecture, that the Etonians, who called on Shelley

at Oxford in Hogg's presence, obviously regarded his singular way of

proclaiming his hatred of his father as the grandest and most memorable of

his offences at school. The young man, whose reluctance to repeat the form

of cursing for the amusement of his old schoolfellows may be fairly

attributed to regretful shame, would naturally in later time shrink from

confessing he had been sent away from Eton for so heinous a misdemeanour.

But though he left Eton in disgrace with the masters, the Atheist of the

school does not seem to have fallen out of favour with the boys, whose

regard he had won by extravagances of unruliness. Hogg speaks of the books

(Greek or Latin classics, each inscribed with the donor's name) given to

Shelley by his comrades on his withdrawal from the college, and reasonably

urges that the 'unusual number' of these parting gifts is sufficient

evidence of his eventual popularity with his schoolfellows.

CHAPTER VI.

ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.

Literary Ambition--Biographical Value of _Zastrozzi_--The Etonian

Shelley's Disesteem of Marriage--Review of the Romance--Julia and

Matilda--Conceits of the Romance reproduced in _Laon and

Cythna_--Egotisms of the Prose Tale and the Poem--The Original of

Count Verezzi and Laon.

The literary diversions, that occupied a considerable part of his leisure

at Eton, are note-worthy indications of Shelley's intellectual tastes and

aims at a time, when delusive biography represents him as possessed by a

passion for scientific studies. Having in his earlier terms at the school

found congenial pastime in the composition of childish dramas, he amused

himself, after coming under Dr. Lind's hurtful influence, with translating

some of the earlier chapters of Pliny's _Natural History_. Medwin assures

us it was the boy's intention to produce a complete English version of

that curious medley of fact and fable, but relinquished the enterprise

almost at the threshold, on account of his inability to comprehend the

philosopher's chapters on the stars. In his perplexity the youthful

translator is said to have sought the aid of Dr. Lind, who avoided the

difficulties submitted to his consideration, and at the same time

preserved his credit for masterly erudition, by telling his disciple that

he had better not waste his time on passages which the best scholars could

not understand. In accordance with this prudent counsel, the aspirant to

literary eminence bade adieu to Pliny the Elder, and looked about him for

an easier way of winning the distinction for which he hungered.

In the spring of 1809, he bethought himself that he would compete with the

artists of prose-fiction, and write a novel that should make him as famous

as Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and Mr. Matthew Lewis. If the son of a West Indian

planter could in his nonage write a novel so famous, that he was

universally styled after its title 'Monk' Lewis, surely 'the heir of a

gentleman of large fortune' (as the Etonian described himself in his

letter to Messrs. Longman and Co.) might in his nonage produce a romance

that should cause him to be talked about as Zastrozzi Shelley. To

accomplish this ambition, Shelley went to work on the novel which,

certainly begun in Mr. Bethell's house, and talked about before he left

the school, was perhaps written to the last line at Eton; though, in

consequence of the delays and postponements which usually attend a

literary aspirant's first steps to celebrity, it was not published by

Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of Paternoster Row, till the summer of

1810, when the author had been for some seven or eight weeks a member of

the University of Oxford.

Though the idolaters of Shelley's genius have small reason to thank his

most voluminous editor for recovering so absurd a performance from the

oblivion that covers most of his puerile follies, the poet's biographers,

and all who are interested in his story, have cause for gratitude to Mr.

Buxton Forman, for reprinting in clear type the ludicrous tale, which

enables them to examine the mental stuff and texture of the seventeen

years' old boy (sixteen years and nine months old when he began the story,

seventeen years and ten months old when he published it) who, fairly

forward in Greek, could throw off Latin prose and verse, of more than

average goodness, with singular facility.

Were it not for _Zastrozzi; a Romance_, by P. B. S. (1810), one would be

without evidence that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet of Free Love, did not

leave Eton without conceiving the disregard for the religious sanctions of

marriage, which developed into a strong repugnance to the institution, and

a cordial disapproval of all the restraints imposed on wedlock by law and

custom. Readers seriously bent on knowing the Real Shelley, who has been

so artfully and dangerously replaced in these later years by the

Fictitious Shelley, will do well to give their best attention to the

following summary of the story which reveals so much of the poet's

character and disposition, at the moment when he crossed the line that

divides boyhood from manhood.

ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.

The action and successive tragedies of this curious performance result

from the craft, energy, and diabolical vindictiveness of Pietro Zastrozzi,

the illegitimate son of Olivia Zastrozzi, who in her fifteenth year was

seduced, under promise of marriage, by the Count Verezzi, an Italian

nobleman. More heartless than a majority of the seducers, who impart

piquancy to the novels in which our grand-parents delighted, this

nobleman of a southern clime, instead of allowing her the means of

subsistence usually accorded in romantic literature to cast-off

mistresses, refused to give his victim a crust, when, deserting her and

her child (the villain of the book!), he threw himself into the arms of

the heiress who became his wife,--and in due course the mother of another

Count Verezzi, the virtuous count of the narrative.

Possessing every virtue but womanly discretion and the power to forgive

her enemies, the wretched and exemplary Olivia Zastrozzi died in her

thirtieth year, after enjoining her son, Pietrino, to avenge his mother s

wrongs. Having, in language appropriate to a pious son, mitigated his

mother's mortal agonies with a vow to do her bidding, Pietrino passed from

her grave to the cruel world, with a virtuous resolve to compass the

destruction of his own father (the elder Count Verezzi), his own

half-brother (the younger Count Verezzi), and any persons in whom the same

virtuous young Count should be strongly interested. On coming to full

manhood, Olivia Zastrozzi's son, seizing the happy moment and making the

most of it, plunged a dagger into his father's heart, sending him without

shrift to the pit that is reserved in the nether regions for the seducers

of trustful womankind.

Having disposed of his father in this summary fashion, Pietro Zastrozzi

determines to wreak his vengeance on his half-brother by means more

secret, ingenious, and horrible. Biding his time till the young Count

Verezzi has won the love of Julia Marchesa di Strobazzo, whose affection

he worthily reciprocates, and has also gained unintentionally the love of

Matilda Contessa di Laurentini, whose passion he is most desirous of

avoiding, Pietro Zastrozzi is quick to see his advantage in the mutual

jealousy and aversion of the two ladies, and in the embarrassments certain

to arise from their idolatry of the same man. To afford his exemplary

mother's soul the vindictive satisfaction for which so pure a spirit is

naturally pining, Pietro Zastrozzi approaches these ladies, and, by a

series of subtle stratagems and diabolical contrivances, brings them and

their Count to extremities of passion and despair; and to deaths, that

under the more skilful manipulation of Mrs. Radcliffe or _Monk_ Lewis,

would have rendered _Zastrozzi_ a superlatively thrilling and sensational

romance.

Resembling one another in the nobility of their lineage, and the enormity

of their wealth, and the reputation that had come to them, these two

heroines are alike admirable for their different styles of beauty. Whilst

Julia is a gentle blonde, Matilda is a Cleopatra, with dark rolling eyes,

and breasts made to heave with voluptuous desire. Each of these ladies is

in love with the Count at the beginning of the story, which opens with

particulars of his seizure at an inn near Munich, as he is journeying

southwards to the damsel of his preference.

Captured at this tavern, whilst he breathes heavily and lies helpless

under a stupor of Zastrozzi's contrivance, the Count Verezzi is thrust

into a chariot, and conveyed to his place of imprisonment with all the

celerity attainable on rough roads, in days long prior to the invention

of the steam-locomotive. Drawn by relays of horses, that are put to their

fullest speed by Bernardo (the postillion) the chariot moves rapidly

throughout the day, till on the approach of nightfall it quits the

post-road, and makes slower progress through the rugged underwood of a

forest, to the jaws of a cavern yawning in a darksome dell. In this cavern

the Count--fastened by a chain to the rock of the cavern's inmost recess,

and fed upon bread and water--is confined for several days and nights,

till the rock of his dismal dungeon is broken up during a thunderstorm by

a scintillating flash of lightning!

On the morrow of this remarkable storm, the youthful Count is discovered

in a plight, which causes his persecutors to liberate him from his

manacles, and to call in a physician, who, after carrying the youth out of

brain-fever (quite as skilfully as the Hermit, _alias_ Dr. Lind, in _Laon

and Cythna_ carries Laon out of brain-fever under similar circumstances),

recommends that he should be conveyed, without loss of a single moment, to

a scene of tranquillity. In compliance with this advice, the captive is

lifted again into the chariot, and conveyed by Zastrozzi and his

subordinate villains (Ugo and Bernardo) to a cottage, standing in the

middle of a wide and desolate heath, to which they come after four hours'

rapid posting. In that cottage, tended by an old woman (one of Zastrozzi's

creatures), and watched by Ugo and Bernardo, the Count remains till, on

his convalescence, he knocks Bernardo down-stairs (in the temporary

absence of Zastrozzi, Ugo, and the old woman), and clearing out of the

humble tenement, reaches the vicinity of Passau, where he is sheltered and

hospitably entertained by the peasant Claudine,--an amiable old woman, who

gets her living by raising flowers for the Passau market.

The scene now changes to one of the rural palaces of Matilda La Contessa

di Laurentini--a palace of Gothic architecture, whose battlemented walls

rise high above the lofty trees of the surrounding forest; the palace in

which the Marchesa Julia's faithful servant, Paulo, dies from the fatal

potion, administered to him by Zastrozzi and Matilda. As Paulo's only

offence against La Contessa Matilda is his loyalty to his own mistress,

one is constrained to pity the poor fellow, though he makes matters

needlessly unpleasant by groaning in his death-torments with excessive

loudness, and rolling his eyes in a revolting manner.

Despatching Zastrozzi to Naples to watch the movements of Julia La

Marchesa di Strabozzi, and seize the first opportunity for murdering her,

Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini migrates from her battlemented palace to

her hotel in Passau, on the banks of the Danube, where she passes her time

in meditating schemes for her rival's extinction, and taking measures to

get possession of her beloved Verezzi. On the failure of these measures,

the Countess grows desperate, and in the violence of her despair is on the

point of drowning herself in the Danube, when, instead of dropping in the

water, she falls into the arms of a casual wayfarer. Of course, this

casual wayfarer is Verezzi, who, after saving her from the guilt of

self-murder, carries La Contessa off for the night to Claudine's cottage.

On the morrow, the Countess returns to Passau, attended by Verezzi, who

henceforth lives with the lady till he expires in her presence.

Not that he yields at once to her overtures for his consent to their

union. For a time, La Contessa Matilda gets nothing more agreeable from

her domiciliation with her beloved Verezzi, than the pleasure of

ministering to the brain-sickness and despondency of the invalid Count,

who, regarding her by turns with frigid pity, distrustful tenderness, and

vehement detestation, persists in vexing her ears with rapturous praises

of his adorable Marchesa Julia. Acting on Zastrozzi's advice, Matilda di

Laurentini assures her guest that Julia is dead, and even causes him to

think her dead. But vain the assurance, bootless its success! Instead of

seeking consolation in the arms of La Contessa di Laurentini, the Count

Verezzi persists in idolizing his Marchesa, protesting that he is bound to

her for ever--as much bound to her now that she is dead, as he was bound

to her when she was alive.

But though she cannot draw him to her embrace, Matilda La Contessa gains a

gradually growing influence over the Count by 'her siren illusions and

well-timed blandishments.' Soothing him in his wilder moods, cheering him

in his dejection, Matilda di Laurentini diverts him with piquant speech,

fascinates him with the music of her harp and voice, and animates him with

the society she attracts to her salon. Playing the part of his ministering

angel, she conceals from Verezzi the real nature of the passion, whose

fierceness and animality would revolt him. 'Her breast,' the reader is

told, 'heaved violently, her dark eyes, in expressive glances, told the

fierce passions of her soul; yet, sensible of the necessity of controlling

her emotions, she leaned her head upon her hand, and when she answered

Verezzi, a calmness, a melting expression overspread her features. She

conjured him, in the most tender, the most soothing terms, to compose

himself; and, though Julia was gone for ever, to remember that there was

yet one in the world, one tender friend, who could render the burden of

life less unsupportable.'

At length joy comes to this tender friend, whose demeanour is so mild and

conciliatory to the Count Verezzi, though, in his absence, her bosom often

heaves violently, whilst her dark and lustrous eyes emit glances, eloquent

of the soul's fiercest passion. Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini, and her

idolized Count, have journeyed from Passau to yet another of her stately

homes,--the Castella di Laurentini, standing in a gloomy and remote spot

of the Venetian territory; a palace surrounded by a darksome forest, and

lofty mountains that 'lift their aspiring and craggy summits to the

skies,'--when the lady achieves her purpose by a melodramatic stratagem.

To win the Count, she is admonished by Zastrozzi to 'dare the dagger's

point,' and is, at the same time, instructed by her counsellor _how_ to

dare it. In accordance with the instructions, Matilda La Contessa leads

Verezzi to a convenient spot of her picturesque demesne--a spot where, on

the right hand, the thick umbrage of forest trees would render

indistinguishable any person lurking about; whilst on the left, there

yawns a frightful precipice, at whose base a deafening cataract dashes

with tumultuous violence around misshapen and enormous masses of rock,

lying at the foot of the gigantic and blackened mountain, which rears its

craggy summit to the skies.

Matilda and Verezzi are looking down the precipice, when a man, who has

been instructed to play the part of an assassin, rushes with upraised

dagger on the Count, who deems himself the mark of the bravo's weapon. A

second later, and the Contessa di Laurentini, hurling herself between the

two men, receives the descending poniard in her right arm. Disappearing in

the forest, the sham-bravo leaves the uninjured Verezzi with the wounded

Contessa,--the one overflowing with gratitude to his preserver, whilst the

other exults in the success of her artifice.

Soon after this theatrical scene, the Count, yielding to Matilda di

Laurentini's 'siren illusions and well-timed blandishments,' addresses her

as his wife, adding '_And though love like ours wants not the vain ties of

human laws, yet, that our love may want not any sanction which could

possibly be given to it, let immediate orders be given for the celebration

of our union_.'

Their marriage having received the vain sanction of human laws, Matilda

and Verezzi enjoy a brief term of tempestuous bliss. On her wedding-day,

'Matilda's joy, her soul-felt triumph, is too great for utterance,--too

great for concealment. The exultation of her inmost soul flashes in

expressive glances from her scintillating eyes, expressive of joy

intense--unutterable. Animated with excessive delight, she starts from the

table, and seizing Verezzi's hand, in a transport of inconceivable bliss,

drags him in wild transport and varied movements to the sound of swelling

and soul-stirring melody.' By this time, the virtuous Verezzi has so

completely succumbed to 'siren illusions' that instead of showing any

disapproval of the Contessa's forwardness, or any annoyance at being

dragged about thus sportively, he exclaims with delight, 'Come, my

Matilda, come, I am weary of transport,--sick with excess of unutterable

pleasure.'

In the earlier days of the honeymoon, one circumstance alone moderates

Matilda's happiness. Though the Count thinks Julia la Marchesa is dead,

the Contessa has received no intelligence of a successful issue to her

arrangements for her rival's murder. This source of uneasiness passes

away, however, for a time, when Zastrozzi assures the Countess he has

removed Julia di Strabozzi with poison. But malignant fate soon puts a

period to the feverish felicity of the husband and wife. Ere they have

been married a month, Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini is summoned before

the Inquisition. In their alarm at the letter of citation, the Count

Verezzi and Matilda (albeit the latter has been warned by Zastrozzi to

keep away from the capital) fly to a secluded dwelling in the eastern

suburb of Venice, in the hope of living there in concealment from the

agents of the dread Tribunal.

At Venice Matilda soon discovers that Zastrozzi's warning was not given

without reason. They have not been there many days, when one evening she

and the Count behold the pensive and melancholy Marchesa di Strabozzi,

gliding over the Laguna in her magnificent gondola, surrounded by 'the

innumerable flambeaux which blazing about rival the meridian sun.' Whilst

the Count discovers that the Marchesa, the real possessor of his heart, is

still alive, the Contessa Matilda discovers that Zastrozzi has deceived

her with a false announcement of her rival's death. At the same time, the

pensive and melancholy Julia di Strabozzi discovers that her Count Verezzi

is living on terms of suspicious familiarity with Matilda di Laurentini.

These discoveries are followed by dramatic incidents and tragic scenes.

Sitting with Matilda in the villa of the eastern suburb, the Count Verezzi

is in the act of drinking to her, with protestations of eternal fidelity,

when the pensive and melancholy Julia appears at the supper-table. 'My

adored Matilda!' the Count is saying, 'this is to thy happiness,--this is

to thy every wish; and if I cherish a single thought which centres not in

thee, may the most horrible tortures which ever poisoned the peace of man

drive me instantly to distraction! God of Heaven! witness thou my oath,

and write it in letters never to be erased! Ministering spirits, who watch

over the happiness of mortals, attend! for here I swear eternal fidelity,

indissoluble, unutterable affection, to Matilda!'

No sooner has the Count Verezzi delivered himself of this oration than

Julia comes into the room. The Count has been taken at his word! The

ministering spirits are in attendance! If she has not appeared as a

witness against him, Julia has come to inquire why her affianced suitor is

living so intimately with Matilda. No wonder that Verezzi dashes the

goblet to the ground! that his frame is agitated with convulsions! that,

'seized with sudden madness, he draws the dagger from his girdle, and with

fellest intent raises it high!'

'Raised with fellest intent,' the gleaming poniard is in a trice buried in

the Count's breast. Whilst 'his soul flies without a groan, his body falls

upon the floor bathed in purple blood.' Furious at the spectacle, Matilda

plucks the weapon from her husband's corse, and rushes upon the pensive

and melancholy intruder, who, seeing mischief in the Contessa's flashing

eyes, and danger in the ensanguined weapon, turns and flies towards the

door. 'Nerved anew by this futile attempt to escape her vengeance, the

ferocious Matilda seizes Julia's floating hair, and holding her back with

fiend-like strength, stabs her in a thousand places, and with exulting

pleasure again and again buries the dagger to the hilt in her body, even

after all remains of life are annihilated.' On throwing the dagger from

her, Matilda di Laurentini regards a terrific scene with sullen gaze.

As it takes at least two seconds to plunge a dagger up to the hilt into

the tenderest flesh and to withdraw the weapon for another blow, the

Countess must have spent considerably more than half-an-hour in stabbing

the Marchesa's body. Bearing in mind the amount of muscular effort

requisite for driving a dagger up to the hilt into a human body, one is

not surprised to learn that the murderess exhausted herself. Bearing in

mind also the number of square inches on the surface of a woman's body, no

reader will question that Julia's body was frightfully disfigured by the

thousand stabs in a thousand different places.

Julia's murder is of course followed by the punishment of the murderess,

and of the supreme villain who may be said to have educated her to

perpetrate the monstrous crime. Zastrozzi is racked to death. No

particulars are given of Matilda di Laurentini's last agonies, but the

reader is left under the impression that she has died or will die by the

executioner.

Published in a single duodecimo volume, this tale of horror contains about

as many words as a single volume of an ordinary three-volume novel.

Perhaps more horrors have never been crowded into so short a romance. The

tortures endured by Verezzi during his successive imprisonments afflict

the memory. Verezzi's father is poniarded to death by his bastard son.

Julia's faithful servant, Paulo, dies in the presence of his poisoners,

groaning horribly and writhing in hideous convulsions. Matilda makes a

futile attempt to throw herself into the Danube. The dagger-scene in the

vicinity of the Castella di Laurentini would not have been more terrific

had the mock-assailant been a veritable bravo. The Count Verezzi commits

suicide. Julia is stabbed in a thousand different spots of her body.

Zastrozzi is racked to death. The Contessa di Laurentini is left for

execution.

Affording not a single indication of literary taste or wholesome

sentiment, the story is badly written, morbid, unnatural, and

superlatively foolish, from its first to its last page. To Shelley's

reasonable and honest biographers, the performance is of great value and

interest on account of the view it gives of the future poet's culture,

attainments, and mental condition towards the close of his career at Eton.

Allowance should of course be made for the author's youth, his

inexperience of human nature and society, and the difficulties besetting

every puerile essayist in an arduous department of literature. But when

all allowances have been made, the book remains a thing of evidence to the

utter discredit of all the fine things that have been written by certain

of the poet's adulators about his intellectual precocity. He would not

have laboured at this crude tale in his seventeenth year, corrected it for

the press, and published it in his eighteenth year, hoping to win fame by

it, had he, in his boyhood, acquired the knowledge of English literature,

for which several historians of his earlier career have given him credit,

or had he been the sincere and strenuous student of natural science the

same writers have declared him. Had he perused the works of the higher

English writers with critical discernment as well as delight, the Etonian

would have written his mother tongue with less inelegance and feebleness.

Had his care for natural science exceeded the commonplace curiosity of a

youth, given to play tricks with an air-pump, an electrical machine, and a

chest of chemical materials, his mind would have been too fully occupied

to have a hankering for the miserable distinction that comes to the

writers of bad novels.

Though it is not regarded as a faultless performance in the coteries of

the Shelleyan enthusiasts, passages of considerable merit and indications

of fine feeling have been discovered in this superlatively foolish story,

by some of the gentlemen who have in these later years constituted

themselves the peculiar guardians of Shelley's honour, and the especial

interpreters of his philosophical utterances.

In the superabundance of his veneration for every line written, and every

scrap of paper known to have been touched by the poet, Mr. Buxton Forman,

is educating the English people to regard _Zastrozzi_ as a performance

that, instead of being perused lightly and laughed over merrily, should be

studied with due regard to the various readings of its two different

editions,--the original edition of 1810, and the reprint of 1839, in _The

Romancist and Novelist's Library_. Wherever those editions differ by an

inverted comma, a mark of punctuation, a dropt letter, or a letter too

many, Mr. Buxton Forman calls attention to the difference, as though each

trivial diversity of the two texts were a matter of high importance.

Believing that delicate meanings may be found in the poet's occasional

slips of spelling, Mr. Forman calls attention to the remarkable fact, that

the word 'ceiling' in the reprint is spelt 'cieling' in the original

edition; the no less curious and significant circumstance that the word

'escritoire' of the later edition is spelt _escrutoire_ in the edition

that passed straight to the world from the author's own hand and eye. In

like manner we are invited to notice the difference of a perfectly formed

's' between the 'mishapen' of Shelley's own text, and the 'misshapen' of

the reprint. Mr. Forman calls attention to an even bolder departure from

the original text in the reprint, which may well be regarded with

suspicion and mistrust by the Shelleyan specialists. Whilst the original

edition contains the sentence, 'The most horrible scheme of vengeance at

at this instant glances across Zastrozzi's mind,' the editor of the 1839

edition has the daring (not altogether innocent of irreverence) to omit

the second 'at.' From the standpoint and principles of an editor, who

regards Shelley as a being who might have been the Saviour of the World,

Mr. Buxton Forman is of course right in attaching great importance to

these differences of the two editions, of an almost sacred performance.

But to the profane mind of the present writer, who, instead of thinking

Shelley in any respect comparable with the Saviour of the World, and

conceives him to have been a rather foolish schoolboy in the earlier

months of 1809, a very foolish Oxford undergraduate in the later months of

1810, and a still more foolish undergraduate in the earlier months of

1811, it appears that these differences of the two editions of _Zastrozzi_

are of no more importance than the proverbial difference between

'tweedledum' and 'tweedledee.'

It is, however, interesting to observe how the hero of the puerile novel

corresponds with the hero of _Laon and Cythna_,--to observe also how

Shelley (holding to crudities and fantastic fancies, which any other man

of similar strength would have hurled to his soul's rubbish-bin),

reproduces in the great poem some of the subordinate details of the

immature romance.

The victim of secret enemies and relentless persecutors (even as Laon is

the victim of similar enemies and persecutors, and even as Shelley himself

suffered from a conspiracy headed by his unnatural father, ever watching

for a pretext for locking him up), the Count is torn from Julia di

Strabozzi, and carried to a cavern in a darksome forest, even as Laon,

after being torn from Cythna, is conveyed in a state of unconsciousness to

the cavern of the column-surmounted rock. On entering the cavern in the

wood, Verezzi recovers consciousness, even as Laon recovers his powers of

observation on approaching the 'cavern in the hill.' The darkness of the

tortuous way, by which the Count's enemies lead him to the inmost cell of

the cavern, is qualified by no ray of light, but for awhile the cell is

illumined by Bernardo's solitary torch, even as the cavern under the hill,

which serves as a passage to Laon's grated prison, is lit by the solitary

torch, carried by one of his captors.

In _Zastrozzi_, it is said, 'after winding down the rugged descent for

some time, they arrived at an iron door, which at first sight appeared to

be part of the rock itself. Everything had till now been obscured by total

darkness, and Verezzi, for the first time, saw the faces of his

persecutors, which a torch borne by Bernardo rendered visible.'

In _Laon and Cythna_ it is written,

'They bore me to a cavern in the hill

Beneath the column, and unbound me there;

And one did strip me stark; and one did fill

A vessel from the putrid pool; one bare

A lighted torch, and four with friendless care

Guided my steps the cavern-paths along,

Then up a steep and dark and narrow stair

We wound, until the torch's fiery tongue

Amid the gushing day beamless and pallid hung.'

After bringing him into his prison, the Count Verezzi's persecutors put an

iron chain about his waist, and leave him fast bound to the cruel rock

that cuts his tender flesh, even as Laon is bound with chains in his cage

upon the mountain's top.

In _Zastrozzi_ it is written, 'His triumphant persecutor bore him into the

damp cell, and chained him to the wall. An iron chain encircled his waist;

his limbs, which not even a little straw kept from the rock, were fixed by

immense staples to the flinty floor; and but one of his hands was at

liberty to take the scanty pittance of bread and water which was daily

allowed him.'

In _Laon and Cythna_ it is read,

'They raised me to the platform of the pile,

That column's dizzy height:--the grate of brass

Thro' which they thrust me, open stood the while,

As to its ponderous and suspended mass,

With chains which eat into the flesh, alas!

With brazen links, my naked limbs they bound:

* * * * *

I gnawed my brazen chain, and sought to sever

Its adamantine links, that I might die.'

From the fever which results from the barbarities inflicted upon him in

the forest cavern, and from the terror consequent on the thunderstorm that

shatters the walls of his prison, the Count Verezzi is recovered by the

ministrations of a physician, who, after carrying him through the crisis

of the malady, prescribes conditions of existence more favourable to

mental tranquillity. Very much the same happens to Laon, who is restored

to sanity from the sheer madness, that seizes him and preys upon him in

the brazen cage, by the wise physician who visits him under the guise of a

hermit, and conveys him to the tranquil retreat, where he eventually

regains his faculties.

In _Zastrozzi_ it is written,--'A physician was sent for, who declared

that, the crisis of the fever which had attacked him being past, proper

care might reinstate him; but, that the disorder having attacked his

brain, a tranquillity of mind was absolutely necessary for his recovery.

Zastrozzi, to whom the life, though not the happiness, of Verezzi was

requisite, saw that his too eager desire for revenge had carried him

beyond his point. He saw that some deception was requisite; he accordingly

instructed the old woman to inform him, when he recovered, that he was

placed in this situation, because the physicians had asserted that the air

of this country was necessary for a recovery from the brain-fever, which

had attacked him. It was long before Verezzi recovered--long did he

languish in torpid sensibility, during which his soul seemed to have

winged its way to happier regions. At last, however, he recovered, and the

first use he made of his senses was to inquire where he was.'

In _Laon and Cythna_ the hero of the poem describes his release from

prison and his recovery from fever in the following terms:--

'... in the deep

The shape of an old man did then appear,

Stately and beautiful, that dreadful sleep

His heavenly smiles dispersed, and I could wake and weep.

And when the blinding tears had fallen, I saw

That column, and those corpses, and the moon,

And felt the poisonous tooth of hunger gnaw

My vitals, I rejoiced, as if the boon

Of senseless death would be accorded soon;--

When from that stony gloom a voice arose,

Solemn and sweet as when low winds attune

The midnight pines; the grate did then unclose,

And on that reverend form the moonlight did repose.

He struck my chains, and gently spake and smiled;

As they were loosened by that Hermit old,

Mine eyes were of their madness half beguiled,

To answer those kind looks--he did infold

His giant arms about me, to uphold

My wretched frame, my scorchèd limbs he wound

In linen moist and balmy, and cold

As dew to drooping leaves;--the chain, with sound

Like earthquake, thro' the chasm of the steep stair did bound.

* * * * *

... We came at last

To a small chamber, which with mosses rare

Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed

Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced.

* * * * *

Thus slowly from my brain the darkness rolled,

My thoughts their due array did re-assume

Thro' the inchantments of that Hermit old;

Then I bethought me of the glorious doom

Of those who sternly struggle to relume

The lamp of Hope o'er man's bewildered lot;

And, sitting by the waters, in the gloom

Of eve, to that friend's heart I told my thought--

That heart which had grown old, but had corrupted not.'

From these passages of the puerile romance and the mature poem, readers

may see how Shelley nursed and nourished every fancy that entered his

brain; how, growing gradually in form and beauty under his fostering

egotism, the conceits of his puerile inventiveness developed into the

conceptions of his poetical genius; and how he weaved the story of his own

life out of imaginations as baseless, and in the earlier stages of their

development as grotesque, as the phantasies of departing slumber. The

imprisonment of Laon was the outgrowth of Verezzi's imprisonment. The hero

of the poem resembles the hero of the romance in being the victim of

secret and unscrupulous enemies; and in that respect they resembled the

poet who created them,--the poet who only escaped captivity such as theirs

by repeatedly flying from foes, bent on throwing him into a dungeon. The

fever that seized Laon in the grated cage, and the fever that nearly

killed Verezzi in the gloomy forest were romantic reproductions of the

fever Percy Bysshe Shelley endured at Field Place. The tyrant who put Laon

between brazen bars, and the villain who chained Verezzi in the darksome

cavern, had their prototype in the unnatural father (of the poet's

'marvellous story' to his second wife), who was set on sending his

wretched heir to a madhouse. The physician who, braving a tyrant's

vengeance, rescued Laon from confinement and ministered to his mental

disease, was the same hard-swearing Windsor doctor who, facing the

malicious despot of Field Place, saved Percy Bysshe Shelley from his

appointed doom, and carried him out of brain-fever. It was thus that

Shelley wrote his wild views of his own story into the Byronic 'egotisms'

of his literary productions:--the 'egotisms' which the Shelleyan

enthusiasts would have the world accept as pieces of substantially

veracious autobiography.

CHAPTER VII.

BETWEEN ETON AND OXFORD.

Literary Interests and Enterprise--A.M. Oxon. Letter--Shelley's Hunger

for Publisher's Money--Winter 1809-10--Nightmare--_The Wandering

Jew_--Medwin in Lincoln's Inn Fields--The Fragment of Ahasuerus--Its

Influence on Byron and Shelley--Matriculation at Oxford--Shelley at

the Bodleian--John Ballantyne and Co.--Shelley in Pall

Mall--Stockdale's Scandalous Budget--_Victor and Cazire_--Their

Original Poetry--Who was Cazire?--Felicia Dorothea

Browne--Illumination of Young Ladies--Harriett Grove--The Groves and

Shelleys in London--Shelley's Interest in Harriett Grove.

Having written a large portion of his first publication (_Zastrozzi; a

Romance_) by 7th May, 1809, Shelley had little leisure for 'scientific

studies' between that date and the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. The

literary aspirant during those twenty months worked successfully (in some

of the cases, simultaneously) on (1) _Zastrozzi_; (2) _The Nightmare_; (3)

_Original Poetry of Victor and Cazire_; (4) _St. Irvyne, or The

Rosicrucian_, his second published romance; (5) _The Wandering Jew_; (6)

The Verses to be regarded as the First Sketches for _Queen Mab_; (7) The

_Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_; (8) The very careful

analysis of Hume's _Essays_ used in the composition of _The Necessity of

Atheism_, that resulted in his expulsion from University College, Oxford;

(9) A novel, described in the letter of 18th December, 1810, to Stockdale,

as 'principally constructed to convey metaphysical and political opinions

by way of conversation,' and (10) a novel (never finished) that was

designed to give the death-blow to intolerance. With so many literary

irons in the fire, he cannot have spent many half-hours in playing with

the scientific instruments and apparatus that figured so conspicuously in

his college rooms. During the same period, he found time for journeys to

and fro between Field Place and Oxford; at least one stay of several weeks

in London; a good deal of miscellaneous reading; much sentimental and

sceptical correspondence, by letter, with Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne;

much correspondence of the same nature with Miss Harriett Grove; long

walks with Medwin in St. Leonard's Forest; long walks with Hogg in the

neighbourhood of Oxford; and some participation in the field-sports,

seldom altogether neglected by country gentlemen.

Whether _Zastrozzi_ (published on or a little before 5th June, 1810) was

written to the last lines at Eton, is uncertain. Bearing in mind every

young author's impatience to see himself in print, and having regard to

the natural consequences of this impatience in the excitable Shelley, I am

disposed to think the book would have appeared sooner, had it been ready

for the printers before the unruly Etonian left the public school. Time,

doubtless, was wasted in the futile negotiation with the Messrs. Longman &

Co. But the delay from this cause would scarcely account for the long

postponement of the publication, if the author finished the MS. under Mr.

Bethell's roof, and on receiving it back from the Longmans, sent it

straight to Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson.

Whilst the external evidence that Shelley wrote the letter is too light

for the scales of criticism, the internal evidence is conclusive that he

was not the contributor of the 'A.M. Oxon's' epistle, in behalf of Lord

Grenville's candidature for the Chancellorship. Medwin's assertion is idle

in respect to the composition, whose style shows it was not, could not

have been, written by the author of the puerile letters to the Messrs.

Longman, Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson, and Stockdale,--the puerile prose of

_Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_,--and the scarcely less puerile prose of the

letters and addresses written by the poet in Ireland. A comparison of the

'A.M. Oxon' letter of November 1809, with the numerous examples of

Shelley's English prose, will satisfy the critical reader that Shelley did

not, because he could not, write the epistle in behalf of Lord Grenville.

The question is one of those questions where the evidence of style is

conclusive. It is conceivable the 'A.M. Oxon' letter was well spoken of at

Field Place, that it was written at Mr. Timothy Shelley's instance, that

Medwin was told Shelley wrote it, that Shelley claimed the authorship of

the letter. Establish all these points, produce a copy of the letter in

Shelley's hand-writing; and the evidence of style would be none the less

conclusive, that Shelley did not write the letter.

Towards the close of 1809, and throughout the earlier months of 1810,

Shelley was 'at home,' writing briskly for fame, and with a keen appetite

for 'publisher's money,' which Byron, at the outset of his literary

career, was of opinion no nobleman or other gentleman of high degree

could accept, without sullying his honour. In his nonage, the author of

_Zastrozzi_ asked publishers for their money with a steadiness, that would

probably have been less unwavering, had it been old Sir Bysshe's practice

to tip his grandson bountifully. Not that the desire for payment was

wholly due to the need of it. In taking wages for the work of his pen, he

would have regarded them as no less honourable than convenient. The

Etonian, whose friends seem to have thought, that he entertained them with

his literary earnings, was no youth to feel shame in taking publisher's

money, or to miss it for want of asking for it. On the contrary, at the

outset of a literary career (that from the commercial point of view, was

worse than absolutely profitless) he liked to be credited with winning

what he never won, and could ask for payment, though he had only the

faintest hope of getting it.

Throughout his time at Eton, Shelley saw much of Tom Medwin during

vacations. During the winter of 1809-10, the cousin, who would soon go to

Oxford, and the cousin, who would soon leave it for the army, were

inseparable companions. During their long walks through the leafless

glades of St. Leonard's Forest--in the clear frosty air and under the

bright skies, that had a most exhilarating effect on their spirits--these

two young men of common blood and kindred tastes discoursed with more

enjoyment than discretion on the principles of poetry and romantic prose,

of ancient science and modern culture. This was the winter, when they set

to work on the production of a wild story (with a hideous witch for its

principal character), that seems to have justified its title of

_Nightmare_, before they ceased writing alternate chapters of the morbid

tale, and threw themselves with greater enthusiasm into the much higher

and more arduous enterprise of a grand 'metrical romance on the subject of

the _Wandering Jew_,'--an enterprise in which the two cousins were

encouraged and influenced (though not actuated from the commencement) by

one of those accidents, which so often influence, and sometimes determine,

the course of human genius.

On his way through Lincoln's Inn Fields, Tom Medwin picked up at a

bookstall the following passage, from a free English rendering and

adaptation (with variations from the original) of Christian D. F.

Schubart's rhapsodical poem _Der Ewige Jude_.

'Ahasuerus the Jew crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel.

Near two thousand years have elapsed since he was first goaded by

never-ending restlessness to rove the globe from pole to pole. When

our Lord was wearied with the burden of his ponderous cross, and

wanted to rest before the door of Ahasuerus, the unfeeling wretch

drove him away with brutality. The Saviour of mankind staggered,

sinking under the heavy load, but uttered no complaint. An angel of

death appeared before Ahasuerus, and exclaimed indignantly,

"Barbarian! thou hast denied rest to the Son of Man; be it denied thee

also, until He comes to judge the world!"

'A black demon, let loose from hell upon Ahasuerus, goads him now from

country to country; he is denied the consolation which death affords,

and precluded from the rest of the peaceful grave.

'Ahasuerus crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel--he shook

the dust from his beard--and taking up one of the sculls heaped there,

hurled it down the eminence; it rebounded from the earth in shivered

atoms. This was my father! roared Ahasuerus. Seven more sculls rolled

down from rock to rock; while the infuriate Jew, following them with

ghastly looks, exclaimed--And these were my wives! He still continued

to hurl down scull after scull, roaring in dreadful accents--And

these, and these, and these were my children! They _could die_; but I!

reprobate wretch, alas! I cannot die! Dreadful beyond conception is

the judgment that hangs over me. Jerusalem fell--I crushed the sucking

babe, and precipitated myself into the destructive flames. I cursed

the Romans--but alas! alas! the restless curse held me by the

hair,--and I could not die!

'Rome, the giantess, fell--I placed myself before the falling

statue--she fell, and did not crush me. Nations sprung up and

disappeared before me;--but I remained and did not die. From

cloud-encircled cliffs did I precipitate myself into the ocean; but

the foaming billows cast me upon the shore, and the burning arrow of

existence pierced my cold heart again. I leaped into Etna's flaming

abyss, and roared with the giants for ten long months, polluting with

my groans the Mount's sulphureous mouth--ah! ten long months. The

volcano fermented, and in a fiery stream of lava cast me up. I lay

torn by the torture-snakes of hell amid the glowing cinders, and yet

continued to exist.--A forest was on fire: I darted on wings of fury

and despair into the crackling wood. Fire dropped upon me from the

trees, but the flames only singed my limbs; alas! it could not consume

them.--I now mixed with the butchers of mankind, and plunged into the

tempest of the raging battle. I roared defiance to the infuriate Gaul,

defiance to the victorious German; but arrows and spears rebounded in

shivers from my body. The Saracen's flaming sword broke upon my scull:

balls in vain hissed upon me; the lightnings of battle glared harmless

around my loins; in vain did the elephant trample on me, in vain the

iron hoof of the wrathful steed! The mine, big with destructive power,

burst upon me, and hurled me high in the air--I fell on heaps of

smoking limbs, but was only singed. The giant's steel club rebounded

from my body; the executioner's hand could not strangle me, the

tiger's tooth could not pierce me, nor would the hungry lion in the

circus devour me. I cohabited with poisonous snakes, and pinched the

red crest of the dragon. The serpent stung, but could not destroy me.

The dragon tormented, but dared not to devour me.--I now provoked the

fury of tyrants: I said to Nero, Thou art a bloodhound! I said to

Christiern, Thou art a bloodhound! I said to Muley Ismail, Thou art a

bloodhound!--The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill

me.--Ha! not to be able to die--not to be able to die--not to be

permitted to rest after the toils of life--to be doomed to be

imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon--to be for ever clogged

with this worthless body, its load of diseases and infirmities--to be

condemned to hold for millenniums that yawning monster Sameness, and

Time, that hungry hyæna, ever bearing children, and ever devouring

again her offspring!--Ha! not to be permitted to die! Awful avenger in

heaven, hast thou in thine armoury of wrath a punishment more

dreadful? then let it thunder upon me, command a hurricane to sweep me

down to the foot of Carmel, that I there may lie extended; may pant,

and writhe, and die!'

What consequences ensued from young Medwin's accidental discovery of this

fragment amongst the litter of the London bookstall! The finder of the

scrap carried it to Shelley, Shelley carried it to Byron; and both poets

were powerfully affected, permanently influenced by it. It gave Byron the

thought of the lines in _Manfred_.

'I have affronted death--but in the war

Of elements the water shrunk from me,

And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand

Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,

Back by a single hair, which would not break.

In fantasy, imagination, all

The affluence of my soul--which one day was

A Croesus in creation--I plunged deep,

But, like an ebbing wave, it dash'd me back

Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.

I plunged amidst mankind--Forgetfulness

I sought in all, save where 'tis to be found,

And that I have to learn--my sciences,

My long pursued and super-human art,

Is mortal here--I dwell in my despair--

And live--and live for ever.'

So strongly held to his last hour was Shelley by the thought which came to

him, through the scrap of dirty paper taken with worthless stuff from a

bookstall, that whilst Ahasuerus appears once and again in his own

character and personality in the poet's works, the reader of those works

comes no less often on cursory references to the undying wanderer, and on

lines that would never have been penned, had it not been for Shelley's

deep and frequent ponderings of the hideous doom of deathlessness,

accorded to the supreme sinner of Christian romance. Ahasuerus the Jew

figures in _Queen Mab_ (1812-13) and _Hellas_ (1821); he was in the poet's

mind when he meditated the lines of _Alastor_ (1815)--

'O, that God,

Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice

Which but one living man has drained, who now,

Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels

No proud exemption in the blighting curse

He bears, over the world wanders for ever,

Lone as incarnate death!'

Shelley's subsequent misconception of the way in which the tragic fragment

came into his possession, may be regarded as one of the trivial

consequences, though by no means the least curious consequence, of the

degree in which the fragment possessed his fancy. As there is no evidence

that the author of _Queen Mab_ was in London shortly before the time when

the fragment first came under his eyes, and much evidence that he was away

from London throughout the certain period, covering the uncertain day on

which the fragment was picked up at the bookstall, there is no reason on

the score of Medwin's peculiar mental infirmity to question the accuracy

of his precise statement that he was the finder of the transcript, which

he describes as 'not a separate publication,' but a thing that 'mixed up

with the works of some German poet' seemed to have been 'copied ... from a

magazine of the day.' The words of Medwin's precise averment touching this

matter are--

'Mrs. Shelley is misinformed as to the history of the fragment from

the German, which I, not Shelley, picked up in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields

(as mentioned in my preface to Ahasuerus), and which was not found

till some of the cantos had been written.'

Mrs. Shelley certainly could produce in support of her statement an

authority she was bound to regard as respectable. For at the foot of the

_Queen Mab_ note (1812-13), from which I have just transcribed the

fragment, Shelley says--

'This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose

title I have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and

torn, some years ago, in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.'

Thus in the course of something less than three years (a period scarcely

to be described by so comprehensive a term as 'some years ago') Shelley,

whilst remembering the scene of the discovery, had come to imagine himself

the discoverer, a misapprehension not to be omitted from the schedule of

facts, to the credit of those of the poet's nearest and dearest friends,

who have spoken of the little reliance to be placed on his statements

respecting himself and his affairs.

The first glimpse of Shelley at Oxford is obtained immediately after his

matriculation on 10th of April, 1810, when the tall, slight, long-necked

youth, with a square cap on his minute head, and a new gown hanging from

his rather round shoulders, entered the Bodleian Library, in the hope of

seeing the book from which the fragment had been taken. Had the German

book been given him, the freshman would have learnt nothing from it, for

he knew nothing of the German tongue at this point of his career. Ignorant

alike of the title of the book he wished to see, and of the name of its

author, the undergraduate asked for _The Wandering Jew_,--a request that

probably caused the librarian no less amusement than surprise. The

librarian had never heard of a book so entitled, but was not wholly

ignorant of a periodical (edited by one of the wits of the Great

Frederick's court) which bore the name of interest. Having come to the

famous library, under an impression that it contained every book of every

language, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of University College, was not a

little disappointed at failing to get a view of the only book he for the

moment had a strong desire to look at. The incident points to the time

when the youngster was full of the marvellous Jew, and wanted the book for

aid in his poetical enterprise.

Enough is known of the poem, that was perused by Campbell and offered to

the Ballantynes of Edinburgh, to warrant a strong opinion that originality

of thought was not one of its characteristics. One of the cousins (Medwin)

lived to think it 'a sort of thing such as boys usually write, a cento

from different favourite authors;' and probably the other author would

have described the puerile performance even more unfavourably, had he

written about it in his later time. The vision in the third canto was

taken from Lewis's _Monk_, one of the bad novels in which Shelley

delighted. The crucifixion scene seems to have been lifted bodily into

the manuscript from a published work; it was (to use Medwin's words)

'altogether a plagiarism from a volume of Cambridge Prize Poems.' Bold

play was doubtless made with 'the fragment' by the joint authors, who

differed on one important particular,--Shelley wishing to leave the Jew at

large, whilst Medwin wished to put a period to the wretch's sufferings by

killing him at the end of the last canto. When seven or eight cantos had

been made up in this fashion, the patchwork of shameless plagiarisms was

copied fair from the first to the last line by Shelley, and sent off to

the Edinburgh publishers who, after keeping the authors a long while in

suspense, declined their proposal (without returning the MS.) in the

following terms:--

'_Edinburgh, September 24th, 1810._

'SIR,

'The delay which occurred in our reply to you respecting the poem you

have obligingly offered us for publication, has arisen from our

literary friends and advisers (at least such as we have confidence in)

being in the country at this season, as is usual, and the time they

have bestowed on its perusal.

'We are extremely sorry, at length, after the most mature

deliberation, to be under the necessity of declining the honour of

being the publishers of the present poem;--not that we doubt its

success, but that it is, perhaps, better suited to the character and

liberal feelings of the English, than the bigoted spirit which yet

pervades many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter Scott is

assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual, and

Evangelical magazines, and instructors, for having promulgated

atheistical doctrines in the _Lady of the Lake_.

'We beg you will have the goodness to advise us how it should be

returned, and we think its being consigned to the care of some person

in London would be more likely to ensure its safety than addressing it

to Horsham.

'We are, Sir, your most obedient humble servants,

'JOHN BALLANTYNE & Co.'

The religious sentiments, which the publishers thought less likely to

offend English than Scotch readers, were probably the same 'opinions on

religion, whose inconsequence' Medwin declares to be a sufficient

indication that the poem was the composition of two different writers.

That the publishers had reason to think these sentiments little adapted to

the feelings of their fellow-countrymen of North Britain will appear

probable to readers who recall the part played by Ahasuerus in _Queen

Mab_,--a poem that resembled the poem of _The Wandering Jew_ in containing

passages that were the direct offspring of the memorable fragment.

Medwin says that on their completion, Shelley sent the seven or eight

cantos 'to Campbell for his opinion on their merits, with a view to

publication,' and that the author of the _Pleasures of Hope_ returned the

MS. with the remark that there were only two good lines in it:--

'It seemed as if an angel's sigh

Had breathed the plaintive symphony,'

lines, by the way (Medwin adds), 'savouring strongly of Walter Scott.' The

peculiarities of Mr. Medwin's habitual inexactness countenance the

suspicion that, though the poem came under Campbell's critical

consideration _through_ Shelley's act, the author of the _Pleasures of

Hope_ would not have seen it had he not been the particular literary

friend and adviser, whose 'opinion' determined John Ballantyne and Co. not

to publish the work. Anyhow, Campbell read and condemned the poem which

the publishers declined,--the poem which Shelley (on receiving the letter

of 24th September, 1810, from the Edinburgh publishers) lost no time in

offering to John Joseph Stockdale, the Pall Mall (London) publisher, whose

dealings with the poet and the poet's father were laid before the public

in _Stockdale's Budget_ (1827).

In one of the several puerile letters, whose style affords conclusive

testimony that he was not the author of the _A.M. Oxon._ letter, Shelley

wrote to Stockdale from Field Place on 28th September, 1810 (just a month

before he went into 'residence' at Oxford):

'I sent, before I had the pleasure of knowing you, the MS. of a poem

to Messieurs Ballantyne and Co., Edinburgh; they have declined

publishing it, with the inclosed letter. I now offer it to you, _and

depend upon your honour as a gentleman for a fair price for the

copyright_. It will be sent to you from Edinburgh. The subject is _The

Wandering Jew_. As to its containing Atheistical principles, I assure

you, I was wholly unaware of the fact hinted at. _Your good sense will

point out to you the impossibility of inculcating pernicious doctrines

in a poem, which as you will see is so totally abstract from any

circumstances which occur under the possible view of mankind._'

The words, which the present writer has caused to be printed in italics,

should hold the reader's attention for a moment. Whilst the desire for

money, indicated by the earlier set of words, is noteworthy, the second

set of words should be examined as an example of the Oxonian's epistolary

style at a time when some of his adulators have declared him capable of

writing vigorous prose.

Not quite seven weeks after the date of these significant sets of words,

Shelley (now an Oxonian 'in residence') is writing on 14th November, 1810,

to the Pall Mall publisher: 'I am surprised that you have not received

_The Wandering Jew_, and in consequence write to Mr. Ballantyne to mention

it; you will doubtlessly, therefore, receive it soon.' Five days later

(19th November, 1810), writing again to his publisher from University

College, the youthful literary aspirant says, 'If you have not yet got

_The Wandering Jew_ from Mr. B., I will send you a MS. copy which I

possess.' Nearly a fortnight later (2nd December, 1810), he writes from

his college to the same correspondent: 'Will you, if you have got two

copies of _The Wandering Jew_ send one of them to me, as I have thought of

some corrections which I wish to make,--your opinion on it will likewise

much oblige me:'--words showing that Shelley had sent his 'reserved copy'

of the poem to Pall Mall, that he assumed it was in Mr. Stockdale's hands,

and that he thought it possible Mr. Stockdale was also in possession of

the transcript which should have been sent to him from Edinburgh by the

Ballantynes. The words also show that the young author was in some

excitement about the fate of his poem, and eager to hear whether the

publisher would produce the metrical romance, and, 'as a gentleman' pay

him 'a fair price for the copyright.'

Unless Stockdale's memory failed him on the matter in 1827, neither of

these copies came to his hands.--'It is singular,' he says in his

scandalous _Budget_ (1827), 'that, after all, the poem of _The Wandering

Jew_ never reached my hands, nor have I either seen or heard of it from

that time.' From this not altogether reliable statement it seems that

there was a miscarriage of the second and 'reserved' transcript of the

poem, sent by Shelley himself from Field Place to Pall Mall. For the

removal of a scarcely noteworthy misapprehension, it may be observed there

was no similar miscarriage of the other copy; the evidence being abundant

that the MS., sent by Shelley from Field Place to Edinburgh, was _not_

lost through miscarriage on its way from Edinburgh to Pall Mall. This MS.

cannot have miscarried for the simple reason, that it was never

despatched by the Ballantynes to Mr. Stockdale's place of business.

Instead of being sent to London, in accordance with the suggestion made by

the Ballantynes themselves, and in accordance with the instructions sent

to them by Shelley, mainly in consequence of their suggestion, the MS.

rested at Edinburgh till 1831, when, some nine years after the poet's

death, it came to light;--a discovery that was speedily followed by a

publication of some portions of the metrical folly (Medwin says 'four of

the cantos') in _Fraser's Magazine_.

After throwing off _The Wandering Jew_, which even Mr. Buxton Forman, with

all his reverence for every scrap of paper blotted by the poet, has

excluded (with the exception of a few verses) from his authorized edition

of the poet's writings, Shelley, with the assistance of a friend, produced

in the spring or summer of 1810, the volume of poetry entitled _Original

Poetry, by Victor and Cazire_,--the edition of miserable rhymes, noticed

in the _British Critic_ of 1811 (_vide_ Professor Dowden's very noteworthy

article in _The Contemporary Review_ of September, 1884, on 'Some Early

Writings of Shelley'), that was suppressed soon after its untimely birth,

because at least one of the poems was discovered to be scandalously

wanting in originality; to be, in fact, a gross and disgraceful plagiarism

of one of Monk Lewis's pieces of sensational verse.

Ignorant of the name of Shelley's coadjutor in this discreditable

business, Mr. Garnett is at much pains to show, who could not have been

the coadjutor, who may not be supposed to have been the coadjutor, and who

might have been the coadjutor. Hogg could not have been the coadjutor,

because he had not yet made the poet's acquaintance. Tom Medwin was not

the coadjutor. But Mr. Garnett is of opinion that Miss Harriett Grove may

have been the coadjutor. 'A more likely coadjutor,' he says, 'would be

Harriet Grove, Shelley's cousin, and the object of his first attachment,

who is said to have aided him in the composition of his first romance,

_Zastrozzi_.' It is strange that so exemplary a Shelleyan expert as Mr.

Garnett dealt thus respectfully with what Shelley told Medwin, or Medwin

imagined himself to have been told by Shelley, about Harriett Grove's part

in the composition of _Zastrozzi_. There is no more truth in the fable

that Harriett Grove wrote some of the chapters of _Zastrozzi_, than there

is in the fable that she was the Harriett of the Dedicatory Prelude to

_Queen Mab_. Possibly Shelley saw his pretty cousin in her Wiltshire home,

when he went from Brentford to Fern for the Easter holidays, in the

company of her Harrovian brothers. Probably the cousins saw one another on

other occasions, when they were small children; but when they met at Field

Place in the summer of 1810, they came together as new acquaintances.

There is decent, though not conclusive, evidence that they had never

looked on each other before that summer. It is certain that their brief

intimacy, attended with innocent flirtation and cousinly correspondence,

was an affair of the later six months of 1810:--that _Zastrozzi_ had been

written to the last line, sent to Messrs. Longman and Co., declined by

those publishers, sent to Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson, printed by them,

and almost, if not actually published, before the dawn of that brief

intimacy. So much for what has been written about Harriett Grove's

participation in the authorship of the earlier of Shelley's inexpressibly

ludicrous novels.

The poet's coadjutor in the unfortunate business of the _Original Poetry_

was his sister Elizabeth, and it is easy to see how Shelley manufactured

the fanciful name 'Cazire' out of so dissimilar a name as Elizabeth. He

may be presumed to have made it out of the letters of his sister's name

and a single epithet of affection, on principles familiar to students who

are versed in the romantic curiosities and fanciful contrivances of

eighteenth-century English literature. Isabel and Elizabeth are the same

name with differences of garniture. In each case Iza is the veritable

name. To call a woman Izabel, or Izabella, is to call her 'the beautiful

Iza.' To call her Elizabeth (El Iza beata) is to style her 'the blessed

Iza.' In being christened Elizabeth, the eldest of Shelley's sisters was

named Iza. The letters out of which Shelley made the fancy-name 'Cazire,'

were the letters of Cara Iza == dear Iza. Of course he used no letter

twice. Rule of art forbade him to use the same letter twice. First he took

the letters of the name, and by reversing their order made them spell

'azi.' By prefixing to 'azi' the 'C' of Cara, and putting the 'r' of the

same epithet after the 'i' of 'Cazi,' he made the name 'Cazir,'--a name to

which he gave a more feminine appearance by adding to it the initial

letter of his sister's familiar name, Elizabeth. Hence 'Cazire.'

Even as the Byron of Southwell Green employed Ridge, the Newark

bookseller, to print and publish his three first volumes of verse, the

Shelley of Field Place appointed a Horsham printer to make a printed book

of the _Original Poetry_, which he and his sister had put together. The

edition, thus printed at Horsham in the late summer or early autumn of

1810, though it can scarcely be said to have been published there, seems

to have been an edition of fifteen hundred copies. If the youthful authors

looked for a brisk sale in Sussex, that would enable them to pay their

printer as soon as he should ask for his money, they were disappointed. If

the Horsham printer worked off the edition, under the notion that he would

have no difficulty in getting payment of his little bill from the young

gentleman of Field Place, or from the Member of Parliament for New

Shoreham, or from old Sir Bysshe Shelley, he, too, was disappointed. For

in the autumn (towards the end of August or on one of the earliest days of

September), 1810, the Oxford undergraduate entered for the first time the

place of business of Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, and with a countenance

eloquent of anxiety besought the publisher to satisfy the demand of the

importunate Horsham printer, and taking over the stock of printed copies

to offer them for sale in his usual way of business. Had he been a youth

of no social quality, instead of being the eldest son of a well-known

Member of Parliament, who was reputed to be the heir of the wealthiest

commoner of Sussex, the petitioner for relief from an embarrassing

position would probably have been bowed out of the publisher's office with

more promptitude than courtesy. But the heir-apparent of the heir-apparent

of the inordinately rich Sir Bysshe Shelley, Baronet, was no person for

Mr. John Joseph Stockdale to repel. In a few years the beardless

undergraduate might himself be one of the richest of England's dignified

commoners.

An arrangement was made between the man of business and the youth of

quality; and on 17th September, 1810, the Pall-Mall publisher received

from the Horsham printer fourteen hundred and eighty copies of the

_Original Poetry: By Victor and Cazire_, a work forthwith announced in the

principal London papers as on sale 'by Stockdale, Jun., 41, Pall-Mall,' at

the price of 4_s._ per copy, in 'boards.' The book's career, under these

circumstances, was brief. It had not been re-published many days, at the

longest not more than two or three weeks, and the copies sold or put into

circulation cannot, at the boldest computation, have exceeded a hundred,

when, on examining the book closely (examining it, probably, in

consequence of something he had heard to the volume's discredit) the

publisher came to the conclusion that the work must be withdrawn and

suppressed. A fraud on the public, an infringement of at least one

author's copyright, a thing published with a deceptive title-page, the

_Original Poetry_ was found to contain poetry by Monk Lewis. It may be

conceived how surprised Shelley was to find he had induced a London

publisher to accept for the original poetry of himself and his friend,

poetry that, instead of being what he declared it to be, was stolen

poetry. No fine words, no specious phrases, can put out of sight the fact

that this business was an ugly business. Shelley was not a child when he

thus put wares under a false name on a London tradesman. He had entered

his nineteenth year when he did this distinctly discreditable thing.

To separate Shelley as far as possible from what he necessarily regards as

an awkward and humiliating affair, Mr. Garnett has recourse to a

representation which, instead of according with the probabilities of the

case, is discountenanced by several facts. 'It was but too clear,' says

the author of _Shelley in Pall Mall_, 'that Shelley's colleague, doubtless

under the compulsion of the poet's impetuous solicitations for more

verses, had appropriated whatever came first to hand, with slight respect

for pedantic considerations of _meum_ and _tuum_.' What evidence could Mr.

Garnett produce that the pilfered matter was put into the book, not by

Shelley but by his coadjutor? that the poet had pressed his coadjutor

impetuously for more verses? that, in consequence of his impetuous

solicitations for more verses, Shelley's coadjutor took verses out of a

printed book, and palmed them off on him as verses of her own composition?

What evidence could Mr. Garnett produce that Shelley was unaware that the

volume of so-styled original verse contained poetry which had been

'appropriated ... with slight respect for pedantic considerations of

_meum_ and _tuum_?' No evidence of any kind, over and beyond these words

by the mendacious and rascally Stockdale:--

'I fully anticipated the probable vexation of the juvenile

maiden-author, when I communicated my discovery to Mr. P. B. Shelley.

With all the ardour, incidental to his character, which embraces

youthful honour in all its brilliancy, he expressed the warmest

resentment at the imposition, practised upon him, by his coadjutor,

and intreated me to destroy all the copies.'

Of Stockdale's motives of self-interest and vindictiveness, in writing of

Shelley in a laudatory style, something will be said by-and-by. For the

present it is enough to remind the reader that the concoctor of the

scandalous _Budget_ (1827) was writing from memory, more than sixteen

years after the incidents to which he refers. That Shelley's coadjutor was

spurred into wrongful action by 'the poet's impetuous solicitations for

more verses,' is a touch of fiction for which we are indebted to Mr.

Garnett's imagination.

As no copy of the suppressed edition is known to be in existence, and all

our certain knowledge of the contents of the volume comes from Stockdale's

meagre and mendacious narrative, it is useless to inquire what will

probably never be known--what proportion the purloined matter bore to the

original writing of the book, and how far the purloined matter was

manipulated and re-dressed by the pilferer or pilferers? It is scarcely

conceivable that the stolen stuff was lifted from one book to the other

without any verbal alteration. Should a copy of the _Original Poetry_ be

recovered, I should expect to find the least original of its pieces to be

specimens of bold, free, manifest plagiarisms--not verbatim transcripts.

That Shelley was a partner to such plagiarisms in 1810 we know from

Medwin's candid account of the way in which they made up the cantos of

_The Wandering Jew_. That Shelley used to perpetrate such plagiarisms

single-handed, and for his own sole use, in 1810, we know from the

plagiarism from Byron's _Lachin-y-Gair_ (_Hours of Idleness_) to be found

in _St. Irvyne_. Lewis's _Monk_ was boldly pilfered for the benefit of the

third canto of _The Wandering Jew_, a canto altered and added to by

Shelley after Medwin had rough-written it. Monk Lewis's writings were so

much admired by Shelley, and so familiar to him, that whilst he (with a

strong taste for literary imitation) may be assumed, almost as a matter of

course, to have plagiarized some parts of them at some time or other, he

was not likely to have overlooked the quality of any plagiarism from Monk

Lewis in the verses given him by his sister for their joint enterprise.

It follows that, whilst there is no sufficient evidence in support of Mr.

Garnett's account of the affair, several facts point to the probability

that, instead of being perpetrated by Miss Shelley, the plagiarisms,

which made it needful to withdraw and suppress the 'original poetry,' were

done by her brother's own hand. Yet Mr. Garnett declares it not merely

clear, but 'too clear,' that Shelley was nothing more than the simple and

unsuspicious victim of an unworthy coadjutor. At the same time to minimize

the discredit, accruing to Shelley from her misconduct, it is observed

lightly that, instead of stealing, she only 'appropriated whatever first

came to hand, with slight respect for pedantic considerations of _meum_

and _tuum_.' It is thus that disagreeable matters are glossed for the

benefit of the poet, who might have been the Saviour of the World.

Mr. Rossetti, by far the most discreet and able of Shelley's apologists,

would win a favourable verdict for the poet in respect to this _Victor and

Cazire_ business, on the plea that so youthful and unworldly a writer is

not to be supposed to have studied the law of copyright.

'One can but speculate on the question whether Shelley was himself in

fault in this matter, or whether he had been duped by his coadjutor.

There was certainly some tendency to secretiveness in his early

literary attempts; and it may be doubted whether the Etonian

scatterbrain would have seen much harm in appropriating stanzas or

whole compositions from Lewis if they fell in with his notions,--or,

indeed, whether he had ever perceived or pondered the meaning of the

word copyright. Stockdale, at any rate, does not seem to have

considered himself aggrieved by Shelley, as he soon after undertook

the publishing of _St. Irvyne_; in fact, after some serious rows

during their business connexion, he continued enthusiastic as to the

young author's character and honour.'

By all means let Shelley have the benefit of the lenient judgment of a

publisher, who came to ruin through his own dishonourable conduct. The

publisher, who gave English literature _The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson_, is

scarcely the person on whose evidence a proud man would care to rely for

the vindication of his own or his friend's honour. The plea that Shelley

probably knew nothing of the law of copyright, reminds one of the similar

plea, which caused Lord Justice Knight Bruce to declare in his proper

court, that 'to be honest it was not necessary to be an attorney.' In

truth, the question is wholly beside Shelley's knowledge or ignorance of

that law. Every Eton boy knows whether he has done a set of Latin verses

for himself, or copied them from another boy's paper; knows also that he

is telling an untruth when he expressly declares himself the maker of the

verses which another boy has composed for him. If Shelley knew the book

contained poetry, that was written by neither of the individuals indicated

in the title-page,--contained poetry that was _not_ original in the sense

of the title,--he was guilty of an untruth. For reasons already stated, I

cannot question he had this knowledge, and was guilty of an untruth, which

he would not have uttered to the publisher and the world, had he been (as

Lady Shelley declares him to have been) more outspoken and truthful than

other boys; or (as Mr. Walter S. Halliday declares him to have been)

remarkable for 'great moral courage' and dislike of everything that was

'false.' Were it a solitary instance of departure from truth in the poet's

career, his present biographer would be at less pains to call attention to

this matter, as an affair that should not be without effect on our final

estimate of an equally interesting and puzzling character.

After placing the 1480 copies of the _Original Poetry_ in Mr. Stockdale's

hands, Shelley naturally wished the same publisher of light literature to

produce _St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian_,--a novel of which so much will

be said in the next chapter of this volume, that it is enough in the

present page to say the young author was at work upon it in the summer and

autumn of 1810, and probably began to work upon it soon after sending the

copy of _The Wandering Jew_ to John Ballantyne and Co.

Enough has been said of the verses that, written by Shelley in 1809-10

(probably in the earlier half of 1810), may have been the first sketches

and studies for _Queen Mab_. It is, however, well to refer again to the

metrical performances that, engaging Shelley's attention in the autumn of

1810, were published by the Oxford printer and bookseller, J. Munday, in

the middle of the November of that year, under the title of _Posthumous

Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_. In a contemptuous notice of the _Victor

and Cazire_ poems, the _British Critic_ (1811) spoke of the volumes as

'sentimental nonsense and very absurd tales of horror' in terms, that seem

to dispose of Mr. D. F. MacCarthy's suggestion that the _Posthumous

Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_ may be a mere reproduction of the _Victor

and Cazire_ poems, _minus_ the verses that might have brought the

publisher into the Court of Chancery. In comparing Byron's story with

Shelley's story, one is struck by the numerous resemblances and

coincidences of the two careers. Even as Byron employed a country printer

to produce his first volume of boyish verse, Shelley employed a country

printer for the production of his first book of jingle. Even as the

indiscretions of Byron's first book constrained him to suppress it,

Shelley was forced to suppress his first thing of rhymes by fear of

consequences.

What was the year of Shelley's correspondence with Miss Felicia Dorothea

Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), the correspondence, in which he

impregnated her mind with sceptical thought, and so far disturbed her

religious life that Mrs. Browne (Felicia's mother) wrote to Mr. Medwin the

elder, begging him to use his influence with Shelley, so that he should

desist from writing to the girl he had never seen? In the absence of dated

documents, I answer this question with some hesitation by assigning the

interchange of letters to 1810. There are reasons for giving a somewhat

earlier date to the correspondence, and reasons for thinking the boy and

girl were writing to one another even so late as the spring of 1811. But,

speaking doubtfully, I regard the interchange of epistles as an affair of

the spring and summer of 1810.

With his usual ambiguity of expression, Medwin says, or seems to say, that

he made Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne's acquaintance in North Wales at the

beginning of 1808 or somewhat before that year; subscribed for a volume of

her poems when she was sixteen years old; and on his return from North

Wales (in the earlier part of 1808) spoke of her and her writings to

Shelley, in terms that caused him to write to the young lady. The

perplexing Mr. Thomas Medwin writes thus:--

'In the beginning of the first of these two years' (_i.e._ 1808 and

1809), 'I showed Shelley some poems to which I had subscribed by

Felicia Browne, whom I had met in North Wales, where she had been on a

visit at the house of a connexion of mine. She was then sixteen, and

it was impossible not to be struck with the beauty (for beautiful she

was), the grace, and charming simplicity and _naiveté_ of this

interesting girl; and on my return from Denbighshire, I made her and

her works the frequent subject of conversation with.... He desired to

become acquainted with the young authoress, and using my name wrote to

her, as he was in the habit of doing to all those who in any way

excited his sympathies. This letter produced an answer, and a

correspondence of some length passed between them, which, of course, I

never saw, but it is to be supposed that it turned on other subjects

besides poetry. I mean that it was sceptical. It has been said by her

biographer, that the poetess was at one period of her life, as is the

case frequently with deeper thinkers on religion, inclined to doubt;

and it is not impossible that such owed its origin to this interchange

of thought. One may, indeed, suppose this to have been the case, from

the circumstance of her mother writing to my father, and begging him

to use his influence with Shelley to cease from any further

communication with her daughter,--in fact, prohibiting their further

correspondence.'

Medwin is obviously not right in his dates. Born on 23rd September, 1793,

Felicia Browne (Hemans) attained the age of sixteen on 23rd September,

1809. If he made the young lady's acquaintance at the end of 1807, or in

the beginning of 1808, she was only fifteen years of age when he first

made a bow to her. If she was in her seventeenth year when he first saw

her, the meeting took place on some day between 23rd September, 1809, and

23rd September, 1810. It is much more probable that he was right about her

age than about the year. The girl's precise age is much more likely than

the precise number of the year, in which he first saw her, to have lived

in his memory. The admiration with which he regarded and remembered her is

a state of feeling much more likely to have been caused by a girl of

sixteen than a child of fifteen. If he made her acquaintance at the end of

1809, he made it at a time closely preceding the winter in which he saw so

much of Shelley. If he made her acquaintance at the close of 1807, or the

beginning of 1808, he would have had fewer opportunities for speaking

about her to his cousin (still an Eton schoolboy); and in the spring and

summer of 1809, he would scarcely have been cognizant of the

correspondence of the boy at Eton and the girl in Wales. In the winter of

1809-10, and in the following spring, he would naturally know of the

correspondence, and hear something of the letters he was not permitted to

see.

It matters little whether the correspondence was an affair of this year or

that year. The important fact is that, whilst still a stripling, the

future poet opened a correspondence with the young lady, and used the

opportunities of the correspondence to infuse her with sceptical

sentiment, and disturb her faith in the religion in which she had been

trained. What might come to Miss Felicia Browne from his intrusion on her

spiritual life was no question to trouble him. What misery might ensue to

the girl's mother and other kindred from his action was no matter for him

to consider. The rights and feelings of parents were rights and feelings

to which the young gentleman (who might have been the Saviour of the

World) was sublimely indifferent, whenever it pleased him to talk with a

school-girl (whose acquaintance he had made without the sanction or

knowledge of her parents) on the evidences of Christianity, the soul's

immortality, the existence of the Deity. No less heedless was he of his

own mother's wishes, anxieties, fears, hopes, when the humour came upon

him to enlighten his sisters on matters about which she wished them to be

left in ignorance. Himself a passionate disbeliever of the Christian

religion, Shelley was possessed by a passion for making other people

sharers of his disbelief, especially for raising the young ladies of his

acquaintance to his own philosophical contempt for the delusions of

Christianity. Any one who humoured his propensity to win converts to his

own particular infidelity was a philosopher; every one who presumed to

oppose it was an intolerant bigot. In the indulgence of this passion for

making converts to unbelief, he was selfish.

Without receiving or seeking Mrs. Browne's permission to address her

daughter on matters pertaining to religion, or to have any kind of

confidential relations with her, he opened a correspondence with the

sixteen-years-old girl, and did his best to lure her from the religion in

which she had been educated,--and was so far successful as to shake her

faith in Christianity. A few weeks or months later, without receiving or

seeking Mrs. Grove's permission to address her daughter (a young girl of

his own age) on matters of religion, he did his best by spoken words and

written words to lure the girl from Christianity, though he must have

known that he could not effect his purpose without inflicting

inexpressible pain on his mother's sister. Knowing his mother's repugnance

to infidelity, he did his best to lure his eldest sister (a girl of

poetical sensibility and genius, who idolized him) from the Christian

religion. In the following year, finding Harriett Westbrook still a

sixteen-years-old school-girl, who held the usual religious views of an

English school-girl educated within the lines of the Established Church,

he approached her without asking her parents' authority to do so, lured

her from Christianity to Atheism, set her in rebellion against her father,

and having made her an undutiful daughter and an atheist, married

her,--marrying her instead of making her his mere mistress, _only_

because Hogg made him see he was bound in honour to make her his lawfully

wedded wife, before possessing himself of her person. In this period of

his early manhood, he approached other girls of tender age in the same

manner,--addressing them on matters of religion, disturbing their

spiritual life, and shaking their faith in Christianity, when he did not

succeed in his efforts to extinguish it. With the single exception of Miss

Harriett Grove (who does not seem to have suffered from his sophistries)

he seems to have been more or less successful in all his attempts on the

faith of young girls.

In acting thus to young girls, without the sanction or knowledge of their

natural guardians, the apt pupil of the hard-swearing Windsor doctor is

declared by the most fervid of his admirers to have been justified,

because he was a sincere and earnest teacher of what he believed to be the

truth, an enthusiastic assailant of error, and a fervid enemy of

intolerance. Though his action was often strangely wanting in candour and

openness, was sometimes odiously secretive and treacherous towards the

parents of the young girls with whose faith he tampered, the sincerity of

his religious sentiments and utterances is open to no suspicion. It is

unquestionable that he believed what he tried to make others

believe,--that he was wholly convinced and absolutely certain of the

falseness of the opinions which he entreated other people to repudiate as

false. It cannot be doubted he was an enthusiastic assailant of what he

thought to be error, and the majority of his acquaintance thought to be

the reverse of error. In one sense, he was no doubt a disinterested

assailant of what he thought to be error. But how about his tolerance? his

hatred of intolerance? For the moment we are not thinking of the Italian

Shelley, who, after warring wildly with all who differed from him in

opinion, desisted in some degree from the bootless strife,--on discovering

that what was truth to him might be error to higher intelligence, that the

people from whom he differed in opinion had the same right to their

manifestly erroneous opinions as he had to his possibly erroneous views;

that human creatures could not be forced out of their errors by passionate

speech; that disputants fighting with subtle arguments and hot words might

be as essentially intolerant as disputants fighting with instruments of

torture and blazing faggots. To say that the Shelley, who, after

surviving the phrensies of his earlier manhood, wrote the _Essay on

Christianity_, was devoid of tolerance would be unjust. But how about the

Shelley who wrote _Laon and Cythna_, who raved against religion in _Queen

Mab_, and was moved by hatred of error to teach Harriett Westbrook (ætat.

16), Harriett Grove (ætat. 17), his sister Elizabeth (ætat. 16), Felicia

Browne (ætat. 16), that Christianity was made up of monstrous fables and

delusions; that the Christian religion was accountable for the worst evils

of human society; that the sentiment of the Christian faith was pernicious

and execrable. Was this enemy of intolerance chiefly remarkable for

tolerance? Whilst railing at the world's want of tolerance, Shelley was

himself a caricature of intolerance.

In regarding Shelley during the earlier stages of his crusade against

Christianity, more especially in regarding his endeavours to dispel the

religious delusions of Felicia Browne, Harriett Grove, his sister

Elizabeth, Harriett Westbrook and other young ladies of his acquaintance,

readers should judge him at least quite as severely as they would judge

any young man of the present period, whom they should detect in sapping

the religious faith and disturbing the religious life of young girls,

still under their governesses. I might even go a step further and say that

they should judge him even more severely than a young man of the present

period: as in these days of Free Thought, when it is questioned by a

considerable minority of people whether children are the better for being

kept well within the lines of religious orthodoxy, a young man guilty of

infusing the damsels of his familiar circle with sceptical sentiment,

would offend social opinion less flagrantly and universally, than the

Oxford undergraduate who was guilty of such conduct in days, when society

was almost unanimous in attaching the highest value to religious

orthodoxy, and in believing that to depart from it was to lay aside the

only effectual armour against temptations to immorality.

Still, it is enough for readers to judge Shelley in this matter, precisely

as they would judge a youthful delinquent of the present period, when the

wholesome opinion still prevails that the man is guilty of heinous

domestic treachery, who abuses the opportunities of familiar intercourse,

so as to disturb the religious life of the young people of his

acquaintance, and lure them from the tenets in which their natural

guardians have educated them, and desire them still to be educated. What

would the readers of this page say of any clever Etonian or Oxford

undergraduate, whom they should overhear and catch in the very act of

luring a girl of tender age from the religion of her parents (the religion

in which they wish to confirm her) into Atheism? I conceive most readers

of this page would pass judgment on the offender, without reference to the

relative merits or demerits of the religion the girl was being lured to

repudiate. I do not hesitate to say that in such a case I should tell the

youthful apostle of Free Thought my opinion of his conduct, in a few words

of homely English, that would make his ears tingle;--and the words of

homely English would be none the less stinging and disdainful, because I

knew the young gentleman to be a rather clever fellow, and even thought

him likely to write good poetry some years hence.

Why do I presume to say without hesitation that Miss Harriett Grove's

correspondence with, and so-called engagement to, her cousin, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, were affairs of the year 1810, whilst Lady Shelley (writing

'_from authentic sources_') declares them to have been affairs of the

previous year 1809?

The authorities have blundered curiously about this affair of the two

cousins. Mr. Thomas Love Peacock makes a great slip, where he says that

'Shelley's expulsion from Oxford brought to a summary conclusion his

boyish passion for Miss Harriett Grove.' Letters published in Hogg's first

volume put it beyond question that, whilst the brief familiar intercourse

was an affair of the latter half of 1810, it was all over by the end of

that year, or at latest before the end of the Christmas holidays of

1810-11. Shelley had ceased to sigh for Harriett Grove, some weeks before

the expulsion.

In the note, which reveals his disposition to think the dedicatory verses

of _Queen Mab_ may after all have been addressed by the poet in the first

instance to Harriett Grove, Mr. Forman does an injustice (for which he

has, however, a sufficient excuse) to Mr. Thomas Medwin, in representing

him as giving the summer of 1809 as the summer in which the young lady and

the poet 'met for the first time, since they had been children, at Field

Place.' An inexact author must be read with proper regard for his

besetting infirmity, even as an unsound horse must be handled with due

regard for his particular unsoundness. Half-a-score facts show that in

speaking of the winter of 1809 (the winter next after Shelley's

withdrawal from Eton), Medwin was speaking of the winter of 1809-10. From

that date on p. 53, vol. I., of the _Life of Shelley_, the narrative is

carried on throughout the winter and ensuing spring into the summer, when,

on p. 66 of the same volume, the biographer says, 'It was in the summer of

this year that he became acquainted with our cousin, Harriet

Grove;'--obviously meaning the summer of 1810. Lady Shelley, who makes

free use of Medwin's book (blunders and all), probably made her mistake of

the year by reading Medwin, even as Mr. Forman in later time read him,

without sufficient care.

What does Mr. Charles Henry Grove (Harriett's brother) say about the

matter in a very interesting letter? Writing from Torquay on 16th

February, 1857, when still only in his 63rd year, this gentleman (after

mentioning the Brentford schoolboy's visit to Fern for the Easter

holidays), remarks:--