'I did not meet Bysshe again after that till I was fifteen, the year I

left the navy, and then I went to Field Place with my father, mother,

Charlotte, and Harriet. Bysshe was there, having just left Eton, and

his sister, Elizabeth. Bysshe was at that time more attached to my

sister Harriet than I can express, and I recollect well the moonlight

walks we four had at Strode, and also at St. Irvings; that, I think,

was the name of the place, then the Duke of Norfolk's, at Horsham.

[St.[1] Irving's Hills, a beautiful place, on the right-hand side as

you go from Horsham to Field Place, laid out by the famous Capability

Brown, and full of magnificent forest trees, waterfalls, and rustic

seats. The house was Elizabethan. All has been destroyed.] That was in

the year 1810. After our visit to Field Place, we went to my brother's

house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Bysshe, his mother, and Elizabeth

joined us, and a very happy month we spent. Bysshe was full of life

and spirits, and very well pleased with his successful devotion to my

sister. In the course of that summer, to the best of my recollection,

after we had retired into Wiltshire, a continued correspondence was

going on, as, I believe, there had been before, between Bysshe and my

sister Harriet. But she became uneasy at the tone of his letters on

speculative subjects, at first consulting my mother, and subsequently

my father also, on the subject. This led at last, though I cannot

exactly tell how, to the dissolution of an engagement between Bysshe

and my sister, which had previously been permitted, both by his father

and mine.'

The bracketed words being regarded as 'editorial comment,' this quotation

from Mr. Charles Henry Grove's letter, and all the rest of the epistle,

are lucid and strenuous. The writer of so good a letter may have

exaggerated the fervour of Shelley's passion for his cousin Harriett, and

made a regular engagement out of a mere appearance of mutual liking that

promised to ripen quickly into a formal betrothal (of these errors I have

no doubt Mr. Charles Henry Grove was in some degree guilty); but he was

not likely to be wrong about the year, remembered as the year in which he

was fifteen, and the year in which he left the navy. That he was right

about the year appears also from divers of Shelley's letters to Hogg.

It requires no great effort of the imagination to create pleasant scenes

and incidents from the little that is recorded of this meeting and

association of the two families of the Wiltshire Groves and Sussex

Shelleys, families having their homes too far apart to see much of one

another in pre-railway time. Harriett and Percy Bysshe had not seen each

other (if we may trust Medwin) since they were children. No wonder the

young man was favourably impressed by his fair cousin,--a singularly

beautiful girl of graceful figure, clear blue eyes, a singular

superabundance of light golden-brown tresses, a complexion comparable with

his own complexion for show of pink and white, but surpassing it in

clearness and freedom from freckles. Cousins of the same age almost to a

day, they resembled one another in several personal particulars; but the

girl had the advantage of her cousin in the delicate symmetry of her

countenance, and the fine straightness of the feature that rendered the

fault of his small, turn-up nose more noticeable. In the dignity and

composure of her carriage she also had the advantage of the Oxford

undergraduate, whose movements were too nervous, and impetuous, and

irregular for stateliness. This difference of bearing and gesture in the

two cousins corresponded with the difference of their temperaments,--his

quick and vehement impulsiveness, her calm self-possession. Perhaps

Shelley liked the lovely girl all the more for her coldness, just as Byron

was fascinated by the frigid placidity of Miss Milbanke's demeanour. That

he had reason to admire her is unquestionable. After a lapse of

six-and-thirty years, Tom Medwin (who was one of the family party at Field

Place in 1810, and in those thirty-six years had seen many charming women

in divers lands) could recall no woman comparable with her for beauty.

Possibly the meeting of the two families had been arranged by the elders

to see if the two cousins were likely to care more than a little for each

other. It was not in human nature for the two families to live together

for two months without thinking that it might result in a wedding. Mr.

Grove (_ætat._ 51, a country gentleman with a large family:--I find no

sufficient reason to credit him with clerical quality, though he is styled

a clergyman by one of the poet's biographers; Burke only styles him

'esquire') may well have liked the thought of matching his lovely daughter

with the heir-apparent of the heir-apparent of the prodigiously wealthy

baronet of Castle Goring. Mrs. Grove would have been a strangely

unreasonable woman to think her nephew no sufficient match for her

beautiful daughter. The Member for New Shoreham and Mrs. Shelley of Field

Place may well have thought an early engagement, with a prospect of early

marriage, precisely the thing to keep their eccentric, troublesome,

scatterbrain boy steady and straight at Oxford.

Whilst the Eton-Oxford man certainly liked his cousin well enough to enjoy

the notion of becoming her husband, at least one member of the family

party was desirous, intent, busy on making a match out of such promising

materials. This would-be match-maker was Bysshe's sister Elizabeth,--the

Iza of Cazire, at the same time her brother's idol and idolater, a girl of

no common beauty and mental endowments, a maiden clever with her pen and

yet cleverer with her pencil. At her own instance, and at his request, to

please her brother and to please herself, she threw herself into his

purpose, and pleaded in his behalf to the Beauty of Fern, declaring he

possessed every noble quality, and was free from every failing of his sex;

insisting that he and the cousin whom he admired so enthusiastically were

designed by Heaven for one another; and imploring the tranquil, too

unresponsive beauty to rate Bysshe at his proper worth, and prize his

expressions of affection far higher than she seemed to prize them.

The poet must have mistrusted his power to win and hold the beauty when he

asked his sister to help him; and before she entreated the beauty to be

merciful, Miss Shelley must have felt her brother sorely needed her

assistance. My impression is that from first to last Shelley never had any

hold whatever on Miss Grove's affections, that he was no clever suitor,

that circumstances were from the outset against him. Before she came to

Field Place there may have been an understanding between the young lady

and the Somerset gentleman whom she married in the following year; an

understanding that, whilst binding her lightly though securely to him,

left her free to amuse herself with a little innocent flirtation with her

cousin of Field Place. I have reason to suspect that when she consulted

her father and mother about Bysshe's sceptical views after corresponding

with him for several months, she produced the letters not so much for the

benefit of their advice as for the assistance they would afford her in

inducing them to relinquish a scheme on which they had set their hearts,

and to sanction a scheme on which she had set her heart nine months since.

I cannot question that Bysshe diminished and weakened any slight chance he

may have had of winning the beauty's hand by talking sceptically to her,

and otherwise carrying her through the primer of infidelity. Instead of

taking the new doctrine to her heart, she was at first a little frightened

by it, and then strongly determined by it to take a path of life, in which

she would not be attended by the scatterbrain heir to the brand-new Castle

Goring baronetcy.

Still every girl likes to be admired, and Miss Grove liked her cousin's

admiration none the less because his sister entreated her so prettily to

accept it responsively. There was no reason why she should disappoint the

brother and sister with a promptitude, that would put a premature period

to an agreeable holiday. The obvious wishes of the elders of both families

may also have disposed the young lady to temporize. That the elders of the

family party wished for the match when the Groves went from Field Place to

town, may be inferred from the arrangement for the speedy reunion of the

young people in Lincoln's Inn Fields. That Bysshe, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss

Shelley, followed the five Groves to London so quickly, and spent a month

with them under the same roof of Lincoln's Inn Fields, is a significant

fact.

In London, as the reader doubtless remembers, the poet had other business

to look after besides the pursuit of his cousin's affection. It was

needful for him to come to an arrangement with a London publisher

respecting those already mentioned fourteen hundred and eighty copies of

_Original Poetry_, by Victor and Cazire. Needful, also, was it that he

should find a publisher for _St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian_, which would

soon be ready for the press. The poet's first visit to Mr. John Joseph

Stockdale's place of business in Pall Mall was paid whilst he was staying

with his mother, and his sister, and Harriett the Enchantress, under his

cousin Grove's house, hard by Lincoln's Inn. Since he entered the

publisher's office with a countenance eloquent of anxiety, one can imagine

the relief it was to Cazire (the sharer of his literary toil and anxiety)

to learn from Victor, on his return from Pall Mall, that he thought he saw

a way out of the bother with that embarrassing Horsham printer, who wanted

his money so much sooner than was reasonable and convenient.

But though she cannot have rated him highly as a partner in the dance, and

does not seem at any moment to have thought seriously of taking him for a

partner through life, the cousins played together prettily for two summer

months. The moonlight walks at Strode and about St. Irving's Hills were

followed by no less agreeable visits to the sights of the town. And when

Miss Harriett returned to Wiltshire, and the youthful poet went back to

Field Place, there was a commencement or renewal (Mr. Charles Henry Grove

is uncertain which it was) of their correspondence through the post, that

came to an end in, or shortly before, the ensuing Christmas holidays. It

is not surprising that spectators of the game, who, of course, could see

but little of it, mistook for an engagement what to outsiders seemed so

likely to become an engagement, though it never was an affair (if I read

the facts aright) that could have ended in marriage.

Peacock was justified in saying far too much had been made of this affair.

On Shelley's side, it certainly was no grand passion. On Harriett's side

it probably was nothing more than an innocent, perfectly feminine, and

scarcely avoidable, flirtation. To please her parents rather than herself,

she was something more complaisant to her cousin than she need have been.

To please him, she answered the letters he rained down upon her--letters

it would have been uncivil in her to leave altogether unnoticed. After

fuming for a week or ten days, on being told he might not write to her

again, Shelley never pretended that his heart had been seriously concerned

in the affair, that he was a blighted being, that Harriett Grove had dealt

him a blow comparable with the blow that drove Byron in anguish from

Annesley. In this matter, at least, he was wholly guiltless of

affectation, even whilst in his first annoyance he fumed and blustered in

a very absurd fashion, vowing war to the bitter end with the demon

Intolerance, that had severed him from his Harriett. He played a perfectly

natural, though scarcely heroic, part, when he had taken time to wipe his

eyes and recover his temper. The affair with his cousin had been ended

only a few months, when he went off cheerily to Scotland with the

sixteen-years-old daughter of a licensed victualler.

After leaving Oxford, Shelley never talked any nonsense about Harriett

Grove's unkindness, never affected to have suffered much from her

rejection of his suit, never accused her of having treated him badly. And

so long as he lived, no nonsense was written or talked about the matter by

the poet's friends. But when he had been dead for some few years, it

occurred to the Shelleyan zealots, who were decrying Byron on serious

questions for the advantage of their peculiar bard, that less important

matters might be handled in the same way to the benefit of the poet, whom

(to use an Americanism) they were 'running' against the author of _Childe

Harold_. Hence the extravagant talk about Shelley's ancient lineage and

patrician quality. If the opposition poet was a baron of the realm, a man

of splendid lineage, a descendant from the Norman Buruns, the poet of 'the

zealots' was next in succession to an English baronetcy, a gentleman of

Norman ancestry, a worshipful personage, who had reason to value himself

on his relationship to the Penshurst Sidneys, and on being heir to wealth

that could purchase a score such places as Newstead Abbey. Hence, also,

the talk about Byron's egotistic selfishness, insincerities, and

affectations, which made him show disadvantageously in comparison with

Shelley, who was (of course) so remarkable for simplicity and devotion to

the truth, so invariably considerate for the feelings of other people, and

so incapable of talking about himself in his poetry! Hence, also, the

disparagement of Byron's singular facial loveliness. When he discovered

that Byron's nose was too big for his face, and declared it had the

appearance of having been imposed upon the face instead of growing

naturally out of it, Leigh Hunt was trying (even in respect to so trivial

a matter as a single feature) to reduce the poet he hated, to an equality

with the poet, whose too small nose was 'a turn up,'--a blemish, that the

'Shelleyan enthusiasts' have done their best to withhold from the poet's

posterity.

Hence, also, the practice of making far too much of Shelley's passion for

Harriett Grove, and its disappointment. Readers do not need to be reminded

what good running Byron made during life with his droll piece of romance

about his passion for Mary Chaworth, and the ruin that came to him from

its disappointment;--the fiction, that originated in vanity and

sentimentalism, being subsequently embellished and emphasized at the

instigation of the poet's spite against his unforgiving wife. But the

sympathy and admiration, that came to Byron during his life from this

fantastic and lovely bit of poetical fibbing, were trivial in comparison

with the compassion and charity, lavished upon him in the grave by the

thousands and hundreds of thousands of simple persons, who had been taught

by his verse to believe he would have abounded in all the social virtues,

had it not been for that unfortunate business with Mary Chaworth. Under

these circumstances, it is not surprising that the zealots, who persisted

in 'running' Shelley against Byron, determined to 'run' Harriett Grove

against Mary Chaworth, and to teach mankind that Byron's passion for Mary

was no grander an affair than Shelley's passion for his Harriett (the

First).

CHAPTER VIII.

ST. IRVYNE; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN: A ROMANCE. BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

Venal Villains--'Jock' instructed to 'Pouch' them--At Work on another

Novel--The Dog of a Publisher--Devil of a Price--_St.

Irvyne_--Irving's Hill--Review of _St. Irvyne_--Wolfstein the

Magnanimous--Megalena de Metastasio--Olympia della Anzasca--Eloise St.

Irvyne--The Virtuous Fitzeustace--Ginotti's Doom--The Oxonian

Shelley's Repugnance to Marriage--His Commendation of Free

Love--Parallel Passages of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_--The Verses of

_St. Irvyne_.

As the hour drew near for the publication of _Zastrozzi_, Shelley was

urgent with his publisher to spend money in getting favourable reviews of

the superlatively foolish book. The publisher declining to part with his

money for that purpose, the literary aspirant (more truth-loving though he

was than other boys, if Lady Shelley may be trusted) discovered a

grievance in Mr. Robinson's niggardly reluctance to bribe the reviewers.

As the man of business would not make needful arrangements with the

'gentlemen of the press,' Shelley declared his intention (in a letter

dated 1st April, 1810), to see that the 'venal villains' were properly

'pouched.' Many a boyish author has talked and written in the same vein,

and even tipt a 'venal villain' for a lying paragraph, without bearing

himself in later time so as to acquire a reputation for untruthfulness or

for labouring under semi-delusions. A biographer might well disdain to

notice so trivial an indication of a readiness to tamper with the truth

and fib by deputy, had Shelley's veracity never been called in question in

later time. Under the circumstances of the case, one does not make too

much of the small matter, in remarking that, whilst it accords with the

action of the young man who offered verse for sale as 'original poetry'

with the knowledge that it was not 'original,' this resolve to buy

insincere praise, in order to deceive the public and win money or homage

from credulous readers, is out of harmony with the fine things that have

been said of the poet's sublime sincerity and passionate abhorrence of

falsehood. If Medwin was right in saying _Zastrozzi_ was favourably

reviewed and declared 'a book of much promise,' the critic must have been

a sufficiently 'pouched' and 'venal villain.'

In the same letter of 1st April, 1810, the poet and novelist, who ten days

later donned cap and gown at University College, is seen at work on

another novel, in the hope that it will bring him 60_l._, and place him

before the world as the author of the _New Romance_ in three volumes. If

'Jock' (otherwise styled Mr. John Robinson, of Paternoster Row) won't pay

him 'a devil of a price' for his new poem, and at least 60_l._ for his new

romance, 'the dog shall not have them.' It was thus the youngster

swaggered over a sheet of paper on April Fools' Day, about his dog of a

publisher, and the devil of a price the dog must pay him for the finest

fruit of his genius. The young man boasting of the 60_l._ he meant to have

for his _New Romance_ in three volumes, was the same boy who seems to have

set it about that he had been paid 40_l._ for _Zastrozzi_. What the poem

was, does not appear. It may have been the 'Original Poetry' that wasn't

original, or the _Wandering Jew_ that was subsequently offered for a devil

of a price, or a gentlemanly price to the Messrs. Ballantyne and Co. of

Edinburgh, and Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of 41 Pall Mall, or even the

first meagre sketch of _Queen Mab_; but I am inclined to think it was _The

Jew_. _Zastrozzi_ having fallen dead from the press (of course, for no

other reason than the dog's neglect to pouch the villains), Jock was not

in the humour to drop money either on the poem for which 'a devil of a

price' would be nothing more than fair payment, or on the novel that, on

being finished and 'fitted' for the press by a publisher, instead of

filling three volumes was (in bulk) a slighter and meaner book than

_Zastrozzi_. Placed in Mr. Stockdale's hands in September, 1810, and

'fitted' for public perusal by Mr. Stockdale himself, this performance in

prose fiction was published by the Pall Mall bookseller (not on the

payment of 60_l._ to the author, but altogether at the author's cost and

risk) in December, 1810, under the style and titles of _St. Irvyne_, or,

_The Rosicrucian_, the first of the two titles being an adaptation of the

names of the ducal seat (St. Irving's Hills)[2], in whose glades and

gardens he had walked by moonlight with the more cold than faithless

Harriett, not six months since.

For insufficient reasons _St. Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian_--an even

wilder piece of lunacy than _Zastrozzi_--has been assigned to a German

source. German tale-wrights may have been in some slight degree

accountable for its morbid extravagances, even as they were indirectly

accountable for some of the several hundreds of similar English romances,

that were produced in the poet's boyhood by the imitators of Mrs.

Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. But to speak of it as a tale _from_ the German,

or even _after_ the German, is to be guilty of a misdescription.

Consisting of two separate stories, stitched together by an inexpert

handler of the literary needle, _St. Irvyne_ is just such a performance as

might have been looked for from the author of _Zastrozzi_, eager to

produce a second romance, before 'clearing out' of the state of mental

disease, that was partly the effect and partly the cause of the efforts

that resulted in the earlier story. Something must be said of both parts

of the tale that, dropping still-born from the press, would have been

absolutely forgotten, had it not been for the author's subsequent

celebrity.

PART, NO. I.

Consenting to participate in the adventures and fortunes of the Alpine

Brigands, by whom he has been captured, the youthful and 'high-souled'

Wolfstein--an outcast from his noble family and from the society of his

equals--makes the acquaintance of Ginotti the Rosicrucian, whilst the

latter is acting as First Lieutenant under Cavigni, the captain of the

Banditti. Almost at the same time he falls under the influence of Megalena

de Metastasio, daughter of a wealthy Italian Count, who has been

despoiled, murdered, and thrown down a yawning precipice by the comrades

of the magnanimous Wolfstein. The association of the brigands with

Wolfstein is of no long duration: for when he has made two attempts to

poison their chieftain (the second attempt being successful), the allied

robbers expel Wolfstein of the lofty soul from their brotherhood.

In justice to the magnanimous Wolfstein, it must be admitted he did not

poison Cavigni without provocation. Not only does the robber-chief presume

to force his unacceptable addresses on the lovely Megalena de Metastasio,

but follows up this presumption with a threat of ravishing her. 'Then,'

cries the robber-chief, 'if within four-and-twenty hours you hold

yourself not in readiness to return my love, force shall wrest the jewel

from the casket.' Ere the four-and-twenty hours have passed, Cavigni has

drained the poisoned chalice, and is rolling in torments at his murderer's

feet.

Saved by Ginotti from the death to which other robbers would fain consign

him, Wolfstein goes off with Megalena to Genoa, where they enter the best

society. On the eve of their withdrawal from the Alpine cave, Megalena

shows 'Wolfstein jewels to an immense amount':--a sight that causes the

high-souled Wolfstein to exclaim, 'Then we may defy poverty; for I have

about me jewels to the value of ten thousand zechins.'

When they have settled themselves in their Genoese home, Wolfstein of the

lofty soul shocks Megalena by begging her to become his wife without a

nuptial ceremony. 'And is my adored Megalena,' he asks, 'a victim then to

prejudice?... Does she suppose that Nature created us to become the

tormentors of each other?'--questions that of course convince Megalena she

ought not to stand out for the empty forms of lawful wedlock. 'Yes, yes,'

the young lady exclaims with equal courage and sobriety. 'Prejudice,

avaunt! Once more reason takes her seat, and convinces me that to be

Wolfstein's is not criminal. O Wolfstein! if for a moment Megalena has

yielded to the imbecility of nature, believe that she yet knows how to

recover herself, to reappear in her proper character.' People differ in

their notions of propriety. To old-fashioned persons Megalena may seem to

'reappear in a very improper character.' She and the high-souled Wolfstein

henceforth live together as husband and wife without being husband and

wife. They 'acted on emotional theories of liberty.' But then, as Mr.

Froude would say, they were so young and enthusiastic!

The course of their mutual affections can scarcely be used as an argument

for Free Love. They 'act on emotional theories of liberty' in other

matters. Turning pettish and restless, Megalena plunges into 'dissipated

pleasures.' Less enamoured of his ringless bride than harassed by her

caprice, the high-souled Wolfstein takes to gambling, and forms an

embarrassing intimacy with the ardent and lovely Olympia della Anzasca

(daughter of the Count and Countess of the same rather uncomfortable

name), a young gentlewoman, whose passions, stimulated by 'a false system

of education and a wrong expansion of ideas,' impel her to quit her

father's palazzo one evening, and pay Wolfstein a visit, just as he and

Megalena are sitting down to a late supper.

'To what, Lady Olympia, do I owe the unforeseen pleasure of your visit?

What so mysterious business have you with me?' inquires Wolfstein, on

entering the room to which the untimely and unattended visitor had been

shown.

Acting on an emotional theory of liberty, the Lady Olympia della Anzasca

ejaculates, 'Oh! if you wish to see me expire in horrible torments at your

feet, inhuman Wolfstein, call for Megalena, and then will your purpose be

accomplished!'

Having no wish to see the Lady Olympia die in so unsuitable a place,

Wolfstein, instead of calling for Megalena, replies, 'Dearest Lady

Olympia, compose yourself, I beseech you. What, what agitates you?'

'Oh! pardon me, pardon me,' exclaims the Lady Olympia, with 'maniac

wildness,' 'pardon a wretched female who knows not what she does! Oh!

resistlessly am I impelled to this avowal; resistlessly am I impelled to

declare to you, that I love you! adore you to distraction!--Will you

return my affection? But, ah! I rave! Megalena, the beloved Megalena

claims you as her own; and the wretched Olympia must moan the blighted

prospects which were about to open fair before her eyes.'

With the propriety, to be looked for in a gentleman whose Megalena is

supping in the next room, and may come upon the scene at any moment, the

high-souled Wolfstein exclaims: 'No reflection in the present instance is

needed, Lady. What man of honour needs a moment's rumination to discover

what nature has so inerasibly planted in his bosom,--the sense of right

and wrong? I am connected with a female whom I love, who confides in me;

in what manner should I merit her confidence, if I join myself to another?

Nor can the loveliness of the beautiful Olympia della Anzasca compensate

me for breaking an oath sworn to another!'

On hearing this 'dreadful fiat of her destiny,' Olympia swoons at

Wolfstein's feet, a swoon from which she recovers, just as Megalena sweeps

into the room, at the instance of natural curiosity respecting the cause

of Olympia's visit. At the sight of Megalena's 'detested form,' the

'passion-grieving' Olympia, faintly articulating 'Vengeance!' rushes into

the street and bends her rapid flight to the 'Palazzo di Anzasca.' When

Olympia has thus departed in her 'passion-grief,' Wolfstein protests he

has never given the fair Anzasca's passion any encouragement.

'What further proof,' he asks of Megalena, 'can I give but my oath, that

never in soul or body have I broken the allegiance that I formerly swore

to thee?'

'The death of Olympia!' answers Megalena.

'What mean you?' ejaculates Wolfstein.

'I mean,' says Megalena, 'I mean that, if ever you wish again to possess

my affections, ere to-morrow morning Olympia must expire.'

'Murder the innocent Olympia?'

'Yes.'

'Will nothing else convince Megalena that Wolfstein is eternally hers?'

'Nothing!' says Megalena.

''Tis done then,' replies Wolfstein the Magnanimous, ''tis done. Yet' (he

mutters), 'I may writhe, convulsed in immaterial agony, for ever and

ever--ah! I cannot. No, Megalena, I am again yours; I will immolate the

victim which thou requirest as a sacrifice to our love. Give me a dagger,

which may sweep off from the face of the earth one who is hateful to

thee! Adored creature, give me the dagger, and I will restore it to thee

dripping with Olympia's hated blood; it shall have first been buried in

her heart.'

Armed with the dagger, which Megalena puts in his hand, the high-souled

Wolfstein goes off to the Palazzo della Anzasca (or 'di' Anzasca, the

author uses 'della' and 'di' indifferently), enters it, unobserved follows

Olympia to her bedroom, hides himself in the room till Olympia has put

herself to bed, and remains in his convenient corner of the chamber, till

she breathes the heavy breath of slumber. The moment for the ruthless deed

has come. Dagger in hand, Wolfstein of the exalted soul glides to the

sleeper's bed, watches her angelic features, gazes on the angelic smile

that plays over her countenance, nerves himself to deliver the fatal blow,

raises the poniard, and then--throws it from him. The noise of the falling

dagger rouses Olympia to consciousness. She is awake and recognizes him.

They speak to one another. For a moment Olympia imagines he has relented,

and has come to give her the strongest proof of his affection. Another

moment, and discovering her mistake, she leaps wildly from her bed.

'A light and flowing night-dress,' runs the narrative, 'alone veiled her

form; her alabaster bosom was shaded by the light ringlets of her hair,

which rested unconfined upon it. She threw herself at the feet of

Wolfstein. On a sudden, as if struck by some thought, she started

convulsively from the earth; for an instant she paused. The rays of a

lamp, which stood in a recess of the apartment, fell full upon the dagger

of Wolfstein. Eagerly Olympia sprung towards it, and, ere Wolfstein was

aware of her dreadful intent, plunged it into her bosom. Weltering in

purple gore she fell; no groan, no sigh escaped her lips. A smile, which

the pangs of dissolution could not dispel, played on her convulsed

countenance; it irradiated her features with celestially awful, although

terrific expression. "Ineffectually have I endeavoured to conquer the

ardent feelings of my soul; now I overcome them," were her last words. She

uttered them in a tone of firmness: and, falling back, expired in

torments, which her fine but expressive features declared that she gloried

in.'

The victim of 'a false system of education and a wrong expansion of ideas'

is at rest. All is silent in the chamber of death. As the stir, certain to

ensue on the tragedy of Olympia's bedroom, may render Genoa a perilous

place of residence for the man she adored and the woman she detested,

Wolfstein and Megalena fly to Bohemia, in which country he has recently

succeeded to immense wealth, through his uncle's death.

PART, NO. II.

Consisting of six chapters and a concluding note, the Second Part of this

marvellous combination of two several tales relates chiefly to the

fortunes of Eloise St. Irvyne, who accompanies her dying mother from the

Chateau de St. Irvyne in France to Geneva, where the elder lady expires of

a lingering malady, after solemnly admonishing her daughter to beware of

any man she may encounter, who shall be 'a man enveloped in deceit and

mystery.' Such a man Eloise has already encountered on her journey to

Geneva; and she falls under his fatal influence immediately after her

mother's death. Just as Wolfstein induces Megalena to become his ringless

bride, Nempere prevails on Eloise de St. Irvyne to become his mistress.

Growing weary of his victim's fascinations soon after he has gained

possession of her body, the villain Nempere (who in due course turns out

to be Ginotti, the Rosicrucian) offers Eloise St. Irvyne as a mere _fille

de joie_, in payment of a gambling debt, to the dissolute but essentially

honourable Chevalier Mountfort,--an Englishman of ancient lineage and

noble rank. Too chivalrous to take advantage of the power he has acquired

by purchase over the victim of Nempere's licentiousness and perfidy, the

Chevalier Mountfort places Eloise with an adequate allowance in a

picturesque cottage, under the chivalric surveillance of the exemplary

Fitzeustace (an Irish gentleman), who eventually makes her his wife.

Having thus provided for Eloise, the Chevalier Mountfort goes off in

pursuit of Nempere, to chastise him for his villany.

Eloise is left in good hands. 'He is an Irishman,' the Chevalier has

remarked to Eloise of the gentleman to whose care she is consigned, 'and

so _very moral_, and so averse to every species of _gaieté de coeur_ that

you need be under no apprehensions. In short, he is a love-sick swain,

without ever having found what he calls a congenial female.' The virtues

of this Irish gentleman are regarded by Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy as

indicative that, whilst writing _St. Irvyne_ in the summer of 1810,

Shelley was already disposed to regard the Irish with favour.

In Eloise this 'love-sick swain' discovers the 'congenial female' for whom

he has long been seeking. Admiring her beauty, he hangs upon the music of

her lips, pining for the time when he shall be permitted to salute them.

Nothing in her history moderates his passion for Nempere's abandoned

mistress. In his judgment it is nothing to her disadvantage that she has

been seduced, and is on the point of giving birth to a child of shame.

When she answers his prayer for their immediate union by saying: 'Know you

not that I have been another's?' he replies with passionate fervour: 'Oh,

suppose me not the slave of such vulgar and narrow-minded prejudice. Does

the frightful vice and ingratitude of Nempere sully the spotless

excellence of my Eloise's soul?' When Eloise gives birth to Nempere's son,

Fitzeustace officiates by turns as the mother's doctor and the infant's

nurse. At moments when he is necessarily 'absent from the apartment of the

beloved Eloise, his whole delight is to gaze on the child, and trace in

its innocent countenance the features of the mother he adores.'

Eloise having at length consented to become his wife, this Irish

gentleman remarks: 'But before we go to England, before my father will see

us, it is necessary that we should be married. Nay, do not start, Eloise:

I view it in the light that you do; I consider it as but a chain which,

although it keeps the body, still leaves the soul unfettered; it is not so

with love. But still, Eloise, to those who think like us, it is, at all

events, harmless; 'tis but yielding to the prejudices of the world wherein

we live, and procuring moral expediency at a slight sacrifice of what we

conceive to be right.'

Thus admonished, Eloise consents to the slight sacrifice of what she

conceives to be right, and promises to pass to her Fitzeustace's conjugal

embraces through the narrow gate of lawful matrimony, instead of by the

broad and higher way of Free Love. 'Well, well,' she says reluctantly, 'it

shall be done, Fitzeustace; but take the assurance of my promise that I

cannot love you more.' Partly, in palliation of the lady's weakness and

Fitzeustace's excessive care for the world's opinion in this business, the

author of the romance remarks in his own person: 'They soon agreed on a

point, in their eyes of so trifling importance, and arriving in England,

tasted that happiness, which love and innocence alone can give. Prejudice

may triumph for awhile, but virtue will be eventually the conqueror.'

Reappearing, in the last chapter, to compass the high-souled Wolfstein's

destruction, Ginotti, _alias_ Nempere, is left eventually in the darksome

vaults of St. Irvyne's ruinous abbey, to endure 'a dateless and hopeless

eternity of horror,' as a gigantic and conscious skeleton, with 'two pale

and ghastly flames glaring in his eyeless sockets.' The way in which the

narrative is wound up surpasses all human understanding. After 'fitting'

the manuscript for the press, Mr. John Joseph Stockdale may well have

entreated Shelley to reconsider some passages of the story, and to explain

or alter, certain matters of the _dénouement_. In answer to the

publisher's request for explanations and further instructions, Shelley

wrote lightly from University College, Oxford, on 14th November, 1810:--

'Dear Sir,--I return you the Romance by this day's coach. I am much

obligated by the trouble you have taken to fit it for the press. I am

myself by no means a good hand at correction, but I think I have

obviated the principal objections which you allege.

'Ginotti, as you will see, did _not_ die by Wolfstein's hand, but by

the influence of that natural magic which, when the secret was

imparted to the latter, destroyed him.--Mountfort being a character of

inferior import, I did not think it necessary to state the catastrophe

of _him_, as at best it could be but uninteresting.--Eloise and

Fitzeustace, are married and happy I suppose, and Megalena dies by the

same means as Wolfstein.--I do not myself see any other explanation

that is required.--As to the method of publishing it, I think, as it

is a thing which almost _mechanically_ sells to circulating libraries,

&c., I would wish it to be published on my _own_ account.

'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.--Should you still perceive in

the romance any error of flagrant incoherency, &c., it must be

altered, but I should conceive it will (being wholly so abrupt) not

require it.

I am your sincere humble servant,

Percy B. Shelley.

'Shall you make this in one or two volumes? Mr. Robinson, of

Paternoster Row, published _Zastrozzi_.'

The author's explanations in no degree diminish the difficulty of

understanding the story. On the contrary, they rather increase the

difficulty. Having done his duty in calling the author's attention to some

of the story's most glaring absurdities, and having (as he imagined) no

pecuniary interest to be cautious for in respect to a work that was to be

published at the charges of the young gentleman who, sooner or later,

would, of course, be able to pay a heavy bill, Mr. Stockdale sent to the

printers the thing of lunacy, of which Mr. Garnett says: 'Worthless as

_St. Irvyne_ is of itself, it becomes of high interest when regarded as

the first feeble step of a mighty genius on the road to consummate

excellence.'

It was enough for the author of _Zastrozzi_, in the first stage of his

fanatical abhorrence of lawful wedlock, to make the virtuous Verezzi speak

slightingly of the nuptial rite as needless for the consecration of his

spiritual union with the amiable Matilda di Laurentini. In _St. Irvyne_

this repugnance to the fetters put upon passion, that should be left in

absolute freedom, is declared more precisely and emphatically. Whilst the

exemplary Fitzeustace declares his contempt for the ceremony, Eloise makes

it clear she would rather be his mistress than his wife. At the same time,

the author in his own person declares that, when Virtue shall have

triumphed over Prejudice, women, instead of being given and taken in

Marriage, will be given and taken in Free Love. In this matter the Oxonian

surpasses the Etonian, and is seen to have advanced a long step towards

the conclusions that qualified him to proclaim the sanctity of Free Love

in _Laon and Cythna_,--the poem in which he 'startled' (his own word) the

men and women of England by insisting that in a perfect state of society a

brother and sister would be able, with perfect propriety, to live together

in Free Love, and beget children of one another.

In the article entitled 'A Newspaper Editor's Reminiscences,' to be found

in the June, 1841, number of _Fraser's Magazine_, the curious may find

some rather strong, but inconclusive, evidence that at some time between

October[3], 1811, and March, 1812, Shelley tried to sell to three or four

different London publishers, for a sum of 10_l._, certain tales in

manuscript, out of which he composed _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. If

Shelley, after publishing the two 'failures' in prose fiction, tried to

wheedle money out of booksellers for the materials out of which those

failures were made, he did what he should not have done, and received

less than his proper punishment in getting nothing by his pains. But the

evidence is so unsatisfactory that the young man did thus endeavour to get

money for stuff, whose worthlessness he had ascertained, I cannot hold him

guilty of the curious piece of sharp practice. The same newspaper editor's

evidence that one of these tales was either a translation from the German,

or alleged by Shelley to have been a translation from the German, being

still more unsatisfactory, there is no need to trouble the reader of these

volumes to consider the particulars of it.

As he delights in the dreary labour of collating the texts of worthless

books, it is strange that Mr. Buxton Forman (who has wasted a great deal

of time in collating the different editions of Shelley's writings) should

have failed to discover that _St. Irvyne_ consists, in a considerable

degree, of the characters, and positions, and incidents of _Zastrozzi_, so

changed by being turned inside out and differently coloured, as to be

likely to be mistaken, by hasty and unsuspicious readers of both books,

for new actors and positions and incidents. Towards the close of his

career, Thackeray said to a friend, 'I am no prolific creator of

characters. In that respect I have fairly worked myself out. It remains

for me now to redress my old puppets with new bits of riband and tinsel.'

The puppets of the Etonian romance are thus redressed in the Oxford story.

By change of costume, the puppet, who figures as a man in _Zastrozzi_, is

qualified for a woman's part in _St. Irvyne_. By being pulled inside out,

the position that was meant to rouse admiration in the one story, becomes

a position that (in the hands of an abler artist) would stir to pity in

the other. To escape from an humiliating position, Olympia poniards

herself in _St. Irvyne_; even as Verezzi, to escape a melodramatic

embarrassment, poniards himself in _Zastrozzi_. The slumbering Eloise in

the later fiction declares her passion for Fitzeustace to the listening

Irishman, even as the slumbering Verezzi in the earlier romance declares

his passion for Julia to the listening Matilda.

THE DAGGER SCENE IN 'ZASTROZZI.'

'_Madness--fiercest madness--revelled through his brain._ He raised

the poniard high, but Julia rushed forwards, and in accents of

desperation, in a voice of alarmed tenderness, besought him to spare

himself--to spare her--for all might yet be well.

'_"Oh! never, never!" exclaimed Verezzi, frantically, "no peace but in

the grave for me. I am--I am--married to Matilda."_

'Saying this, he fell backwards upon a sofa in strong convulsions, yet

his hand still firmly grasped the fatal poniard.

'Matilda, meanwhile, fixedly contemplated the scene. Fiercest passions

raged through her breast: vengeance, disappointed love--disappointed

in the instant, too, when she had supposed happiness to be hers for

ever, rendered her bosom the scene of wildest anarchy.

'Yet she spoke not--she moved not--but collected in herself, stood

waiting the issue of that event, which had so unexpectedly dissolved

_her visions of air-built ecstasy_.

'Serened to firmness from despair, Julia administered everything which

could restore Verezzi with the most unremitting attention. At last he

recovered. _He slowly raised himself, and starting from the sofa where

he lay, his eyes rolling wildly_, and his whole frame convulsed by

fiercest agitation, _he raised the dagger which he still retained,

and, with a bitter smile of exultation, plunged it into his

bosom!--His soul fled without a groan, and his body fell to the floor,

bathed in purple blood._'

THE DAGGER SCENE IN 'ST. IRVYNE.'

'_"Wilt thou be mine?" exclaimed the enraptured Olympia, as a ray of

hope arose in her mind. "Never! never can I," groaned the agitated

Wolfstein, "I am irrevocably, indissolutely another's."--Maddened by

this death-blow to all expectations of happiness_, which the deluded

Olympia had so fondly anticipated, she leaped wildly from the bed. A

light and flowing night-dress alone veiled her form; her alabaster

bosom was shaded by the light ringlets of her hair which rested

unconfined upon it. She threw herself at the feet of Wolfstein. On a

sudden, as if struck by some thought, she started convulsively from

the earth: for an instant she paused.

'The rays of a lamp, which stood in a recess of the apartment, fell

full upon the dagger of Wolfstein. _Eagerly Olympia sprung towards it;

and ere Wolfstein was aware of her dreadful intent, plunged it into

her bosom. Weltering in purple gore, she fell; no groan, no sigh

escaped her lips. A smile, which the pangs of dissolution could not

dispel, played on her convulsed countenance; it irradiated her

features_ with celestially awful, although terrific, expression.

"Ineffectually have I endeavoured to conquer the ardent feelings of my

soul; now I overcome them," were her last words. She uttered them in a

tone of firmness, and, falling back, expired in torments, which her

fine, her expressive features declared that she gloried in.'

Each of these passages is a fair example of the work from which it is

taken. Surely their resemblance in temper, moral fibre, style, verbiage,

affords sufficient evidence that the two passages were put together by the

same writer. What evidence do they afford that, whilst the passage, taken

from _Zastrozzi_ (the novel universally allowed to be a thing of Shelley's

own manufacture), was written as it is printed by the future poet, the

passage from _St. Irvyne_ (the novel generally assigned to a German

source) is a mere translation from a German original? Why (in the absence

of evidence that Shelley could translate a page of German, and in the

absence of any German novel, out of which _St. Irvyne_ could have been

made) are we to regard the passage of the earlier book as the pure product

of Shelley's mind, and the passage of the later romance as so much of the

translated product of a German writer's mind?

THE BEDROOM SCENE IN 'ZASTROZZI.'

'The morning came--Matilda arose from a sleepless couch, and with

hopes yet unconfirmed sought Verezzi's apartment. She stood near the

door listening. Her heart palpitated with tremulous violence, as she

listened to Verezzi's breathing--every sound from within alarmed her.

At last she slowly opened the door, and though adhering to the

physician's directions in not suffering Verezzi to see her, she could

not deny herself the pleasure of watching him, and busying herself in

little offices about his apartment.

'She could hear Verezzi question the attendant collectedly, yet as a

person who was ignorant where he was, and knew not the events which

had immediately preceded his present state.

'_At last he sank into a deep sleep._--Matilda now dared to gaze on

him; the hectic colour which had flushed his cheek was fled, but the

ashy hue of his lips had given place to a brilliant vermilion. _She

gazed intently on his countenance._

'_A heavenly yet faint smile diffused itself over his

countenance_--his hand slightly moved.

'Matilda, fearing that he would awake, again concealed herself. She

was mistaken: for, on looking again, he still slept.

'She still gazed upon his countenance. _The visions of his sleep were

changed, for tears came fast from under his eyelids, and a deep sigh

burst from his bosom._

'Thus passed several days: Matilda still watched, with the most

affectionate assiduity, by the bedside of the unconscious Verezzi.

'The physician declared that his patient's mind was yet in too

irritable a state to permit him to see Matilda, but that he was

convalescent.

'One evening she sate by his bedside, and gazing upon the features of

the sleeping Verezzi, felt unusual softness take possession of her

soul--an indefinable tumultuous emotion shook her bosom--_her whole

frame thrilled with rapturous ecstasy, and seizing the hand, which lay

motionless, beside her, she imprinted on it a thousand burning

kisses_.

'"_Ah, Julia! Julia! is it you?" exclaimed Verezzi, as he raised his

enfeebled frame; but perceiving his mistake, as he cast his eyes on

Matilda, sank back and fainted._

CHAPTER IX.

'The soul of Verezzi was filled with irresistible disgust, as,

recovering, he found himself in Matilda's arms. His whole frame

trembled with chilly horror, and he could scarcely withhold himself

from again fainting. He fixed his eyes upon her countenance--they met

hers--an ardent fire, mingled with a touching softness, filled their

orbits.'

THE PAVILION SCENE IN 'ST. IRVYNE.'

'Heedless yet of the beauties of nature, the loveliness of the scene,

they entered the pavilion.

'Eloise convulsively pressed her hand upon her forehead.

'"What is the matter, my dearest Eloise?" inquired Fitzeustace, whom

awakened tenderness had thrown off his guard.

'"Oh! nothing, nothing; but a momentary faintness. It will soon go

off: let us sit down."

'They entered the pavilion.

'"'Tis nothing but drowsiness," said Eloise, affecting gaiety; "'twill

soon go off. I sate up late last night: that I believe was the

occasion."

'"Recline on this sofa, then," said Fitzeustace, reaching another

pillow to make the couch easier, "and I will play some of those Irish

tunes which you admire so much."

'Eloise reclined on the sofa, and Fitzeustace, seated on the floor,

began to play; the melancholy plaintiveness of his music touched

Eloise; she sighed, and concealed her tears in her handkerchief. _At

length she sunk into a profound sleep_; still Fitzeustace continued

playing, noticing not that she slept.

'_He approached. She lay wrapped in sleep: a sweet and celestial smile

played on her countenance and irradiated her features with a tenfold

expression of etheriality._

'_Suddenly the visions of her slumber appeared to have changed; the

smile yet remained, but the expression was melancholy; tears stole

gently from her eyelids:--she sighed._

'_Ah! with what eagerness of ecstasy did Fitzeustace lean over her

form._

'He dared not speak, he dared not move; _but pressing a ringlet of

hair, which had escaped its band, to his lips, waited silently_.

'"Yes, yes; I think--it may,--" at last she muttered; but so

confusely, as scarcely to be distinguishable.

'Fitzeustace remained rooted in rapturous attention, listening.

'"_I thought, I thought he looked as if he could love me" articulated

the sleeping Eloise. "Perhaps, though he cannot love me, he may allow

me to love him.--Fitzeustace!_"

'On a sudden again were changed the visions of her slumbers;

terrified, she started from sleep and cried, "Fitzeustace."

CHAPTER XII.

'Needless were it to expatiate on their transports; they loved each

other, and that is enough for those who have felt like Eloise and

Fitzeustace.'

After comparing these two scenes of two sleeping lovers, each, of whom

reveals the heart's secret to an attentive watcher; after comparing the

literary characteristics of the one scene with those of the other, the

structure of the sentences, language, details, touches; after noticing the

identity of the very words used in some parts of the parallel passages,

can any reader think the two scenes were by two different writers? that,

whilst the extract from _Zastrozzi_ is a piece of original writing, the

extract from _St. Irvyne_ is a piece of a translation from the

undiscovered work of an undiscovered German author? These passages are

fair examples of the two books from which they are taken. Can any reader

hesitate in coming to the conclusion that Shelley reproduced in the later

the materials of the earlier romance? The writer may have been unaware he

was reproducing scraps of his former work. The reproduction may have been

the result of mental action, occasioned by the effort of producing the

earlier tale, rather than the consequence of a deliberate design to use

the old stuff for a second time. But the reproduction is obvious.

_St. Irvyne_ contains six sets of verses, that are interesting examples of

the earliest fruits of the poetical disposition, which soon developed into

Shelley's poetical genius. Resembling Byron's _Hours of Idleness_, in

affording only the faintest indications of the author's eventual faculty

for the service of the Muse, these sets of verses are chiefly noteworthy

for their evidence that the _Hours of Idleness_ may be styled 'the

horn-book,' from which Shelley acquired the rudiments of the art of poesy.

The resemblance of one of those pieces of versification to one of the

stanzas of 'Lachin-y-Gair' in the _Hours of Idleness_ is so remarkable,

that the Oxonian's lines may fairly be styled a plagiarism on the lines

that had come a few years earlier from the Byron of Cambridge.

THE STANZA OF 'LACHIN-Y-GAIR.'

'_Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices

Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?_

Surely the _soul of the hero rejoices_,

_And rides on the wind_, o'er his own Highland vale.

Round Loch-na-Garr, while the stormy mist gathers,

Winter presides in his cold icy car;

_Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers_:

They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch-na-Garr.'

THE VERSES OF 'ST. IRVYNE.'

'_Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling

Rise on the night-rolling breath of the blast_,

When o'er the dark ether the tempest is swelling,

And on eddying whirlwind the thunder-peal past?

'For oft I have stood on the dark height of Jura,

Which frowns on the valley which opens beneath:

Oft have I brav'd the chill night-tempest's fury,

Whilst around me, I thought, echo'd murmurs of death.

'And now, whilst the winds of the mountain are howling,

_O father! thy voice seems to strike on mine ear_;

In air whilst the tide of the night-storm is rolling,

It breaks on the pause of the elements' jar.

'On the wing of the whirlwind which roars in the mountain

Perhaps _rides the ghost of my sire who is dead_;

On the mist of the tempest which hangs o'er the fountain,

Whilst a wreath of dark vapour encircles his head.'

In a note to _St. Irvyne_ (in his edition of Shelley's 'prose works'), Mr.

Buxton Forman calls attention to the obvious adoption of the two first

lines of the quoted stanza of Byron's poem, as though they were the whole

of the youthful Shelley's 'small debt' in this particular matter, to the

youthful Byron. It cannot have escaped the notice of Shelley's careful

editor that, whilst Shelley speaks of his father's ghost as riding on the

whirlwind and the mist of the tempest, Byron sees 'the forms of his

fathers' in the clouds over-hanging Loch-na-Garr, and sings how the soul

of one of his ancestral heroes 'rides on the wind.' It can scarcely have

escaped the careful editor that the whole thought of Shelley's sixteen

verses was 'lifted' out of Byron's eight verses.

CHAPTER IX.

MR. DENIS FLORENCE MACCARTHY _v._ THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG.

Shelley's Matriculation at Oxford--Hogg's Matriculation at

Oxford--Hogg's First Arrival at Oxford--Lord Grenville's Election--Mr.

Denis Florence MacCarthy's Blunders--Hogg's 'New Monthly' Papers on

Shelley at Oxford--Mrs. Shelley's Reason for not Writing her Husband's

'Life'--Peacock's Reason for not Writing it--Leigh Hunt's Reason for

not Writing it--Hogg undertakes the Task--Hogg's Two Volumes--Their

Merits and Faults--Hogg dismissed by Field Place--His Mistakes and

Misrepresentations--Some of his Misrepresentations adopted by Field

Place.

In a previous chapter it was stated that Shelley matriculated at Oxford,

and entered University College on 10th April, 1810,--a date given for the

first time to Shelleyan students. Hogg had then been a member of the

University and the same College for more than two months, having

matriculated on 2nd February, 1810,--another date never before given to

Shelleyan students. To those who, unaware how much readier the Shelleyan

enthusiasts are to abuse writers who differ from them than to gather facts

needful for the perfect statement of the poet's story, it may well appear

strange that, after the publication of so many books and articles about

Shelley, it should have been left for me to ascertain from the archives of

University College, Oxford, these two important dates, by whose light the

greater part of Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's vehement manifesto against

Hogg's account of his academic career is seen to be one big tangle of

blunderings.

Seeing the need for the discovery of these dates, I wrote a letter that

within forty-eight hours received this answer:

'TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,

'_12th February, 1884_.

'DEAR MR. JEAFFRESON,

'The College Register of University College, Oxford, gives the date of

the matriculation of

'PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 10th April, 1810.

'THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG, 2nd February, 1810.

'I have this direct from the Master. This testimony, I suppose, will

be sufficient; so I return your stamps. I applied to the College

first, and not to the Registrar of the University.

'Ever yours truly,

'H. B. DIXON.'

In assuming that, because they were both first-year's men on making one

another's acquaintance in the dining-hall of their College, Hogg and

Shelley matriculated and went into residence on or about the same day, and

that, as they met one another for the first time in October, 1810, at the

same dinner-table, they both entered Oxford in the Michaelmas term of that

year, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy followed half-a-score Shelleyan

specialists in assuming as matters of course, what no old Oxford man would

have thought of assuming, even as mere _primâ facie_ probabilities.

Shelley's academic senior by more than two months, Hogg was his superior

in respect to 'residence' by a much longer time. After matriculating on

10th April, 1810, and passing a few days in the University, during which

time he visited the Bodleian Library, Shelley returned to Field Place,

kept 'grace-terms' in the country, and went 'into residence' in the

following October. Hogg, on the contrary, went into residence on the day

of his matriculation, and from that day till the next Long Vacation

remained at Oxford, with the exception of the brief break of the Easter

holidays, which he spent with friends who lived in counties more

accessible to the undergraduate, than his own home in the northern shire.

In Shelley's time, no less than in the present writer's time at Oxford, it

was usual for freshmen, coming to the University from homes or schools at

no great distance from Alma Mater, to 'go down' after matriculating, and

keep 'grace-terms' in the country, before coming into residence. On the

other hand, it was usual in pre-railway times for the academic freshman,

who could not return to his people without a long and expensive journey,

to matriculate and go 'into residence' at the same time.

For the information of those, who have been induced to regard Mr.

MacCarthy's book of blunders as an authoritative performance, it may be

well to add that the duly matriculated undergraduate, keeping

'grace-terms' in the country, was just as much a member of the University,

as the freshman staying at his College. Both alike had entered the

University, and become members of it. In respect to Hogg's time at Oxford,

it is also well to remark that, though he did not matriculate till 2nd

February, 1810, he came to Oxford from the north country in the previous

autumn. Everyone, who has read his delightful 'two volumes,' remembers

Hogg's account of his first arrival at Oxford, one 'fine autumnal

afternoon.' He may have come to Oxford to read with a tutor before

matriculation. Or on taking his first view of the University, he may only

have been passing through the seat of learning, on his way to friends in

some not remote county. Anyhow, it is certain that the youngster from the

north country visited Oxford, and took something more than a mere

tourist's interest in the place, at a time when the University was

already, or was soon to be, agitated by the fierce conflict of parties,

that resulted-in the election of Lord Grenville to be Chancellor, in the

place of the late Duke of Portland,--a fact to be remembered in connection

with certain of the charges made against the biographer by Mr. Denis

Florence MacCarthy.

The Duke of Portland died on 30th October, 1809; his successor in the

Chancellorship (Lord Grenville) was elected after an unusually vehement

contest on 14th December, 1809, by only thirteen votes over the number of

votes given for Lord Eldon. If he was not at Oxford during the election,

or during the canvass, Hogg was there shortly before the conflict of

closely-matched parties, and was a member of the University when the new

Chancellor had been chosen only seven weeks and one day. Let us now see

the way in which Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy presses charges of

inaccuracy against Hogg, in respect to what the latter says about this

election. After accusing Hogg of serious and suspicious misstatements on

other matters, the author of _Shelley's Early Life_ writes thus:--

'But even on questions which apparently he could have no motive in

misrepresenting, he is just as inexact as Captain Medwin. The

following is an instance of this.... "During the whole period of our

residence there,"--that is, at Oxford, says Mr. Hogg, in one of those

unguarded moments when he enables us to test his statements by

reference to a fixed date,--"the University was cruelly disfigured by

bitter feuds arising out of the _late_ election of its Chancellor; in

an especial manner was our most venerable college deformed by them,

and by angry and senseless disappointment, Lord Grenville had just

been chosen."... A few words will show how utterly irreconcilable

these statements are with the date of Shelley's entrance at University

College.... The candidateship of Lord Grenville, therefore, extended

from the 30th of October to 14th of December, 1809. But in 1809, as we

have seen, Shelley was at Eton and Field Place, _and did not go to

Oxford until the end of October, 1810_--that is, exactly a year after

the candidateship of Lord Grenville commenced, and ten months after he

had been elected. Even the installation of Lord Grenville as

Chancellor preceded _the entrance of Shelley into the University by

four months_. That event took place on June 30, 1810.... As Shelley

_did not enter the University of Oxford until the end of October,

1810_, ... that nobleman (_i.e._ Lord Grenville) had not "just been

chosen" as Mr. Hogg writes; _he had been elected ten months before_.'

Surely as he was speaking of the whole period, covering his own residence

as well as Shelley's residence (_our_ residence is the biographer's

expression), Hogg was not without justification in speaking of an event,

that had preceded his own entrance into residence by only seven weeks and

one day, as a recent occurrence. Whilst censuring Hogg for errors of fact,

Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy persists in saying that Shelley did not go to

Oxford, did not enter the University till the end of October, 1810, though

he might easily have ascertained that the young poet went to Oxford,

entered the University, put his name on the roll of University College,

and as a member of the University visited the Bodleian in the preceding

April, six months earlier than the time at which _Shelley's Early Life_

represents him to have joined the University. Mr. MacCarthy greatly

overstates the case in declaring Hogg as inaccurate as Medwin. Mr.

MacCarthy himself (though curiously inaccurate), is nothing like so

inaccurate as Medwin. And Hogg (though he often trips and sometimes

blunders seriously) is upon the whole nothing like so inaccurate as Mr.

MacCarthy. There is no need to weary readers with a complete list of Mr.

MacCarthy's exhibitions of inexactness. It is enough to have shown that if

Hogg is at times faulty, his censor is by no means faultless.

It is not surprising that Hogg's memoirs of his old college friend are

wanting in accuracy. Some nine years after the poet's death, some twenty

years after his expulsion from University College, in consequence of the

growing admiration of his writings, the increasing interest in his story,

and the general disposition of the literary coteries to regard his

failings charitably, pressure was put on Hogg to recall remote

circumstances, and tell the world what he could remember of his friend at

Oxford in the time of their closest intimacy. The result was that the busy

lawyer in 1832 contributed the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ to the _New

Monthly Magazine_, at that time edited by Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer,

afterwards Lord Lytton. It was in the nature of things that the Papers,

written after so long an interval of time, not from notes made at the time

of each recorded incident, but from recollection, assisted by a few

letters, should be much less than precisely accurate in all their numerous

details. To impart spirit to these reminiscences, to endow them with the

charm of the poet's personality, the writer every now and then called

imagination to the aid of his memory. For instance, to enable readers to

realize the disorderly appearance of the poet's college-room, and the

confusion of its multifarious contents, the author of the Papers, without

exceeding the license of a descriptive illustrator, threw into the

schedule of effects certain articles of furniture, scientific apparatus,

and personal apparel, which he would no doubt have declined to declare in

an affidavit to have been items of the medley. It is obvious that such a

picture was in some degree an imaginative sketch, in respect its details.

Yet Hogg's detractor has dealt with it as though it were an auctioneer's

catalogue of lots. In judging the picture, the question to be asked is,

whether the piece of descriptive writing gives the general appearance of

the room, as Hogg remembered it more than twenty years afterwards. The

very style of the writing is a frank announcement that the words must be

trusted only for their general effect.

In like manner the conversations, which Mr. MacCarthy derides as 'invented

conversations,' were of course given as nothing more than exhibitions of

certain matters, and the kind of matters on which he remembered himself to

have talked with the poet, and of the way in which they talked together to

the best of his recollection after a lapse of more than twenty years. To

the lawyer, familiar with questions of evidence, it never occurred that

'the conversations' would be read in any other way. To the humourist (and

that Hogg was a racy humourist is admitted even by his enemies) the bare

imagination that any supremely matter-of-fact mortal would read 'the

conversations,' as one peruses a short-hand reporter's notes of a legal

cross-examination, would have been provocative of vehement laughter. The

questions for the critic to ask about these conversations are, Do they

faithfully exhibit the kind of subjects on which the two friends

chatted?--the ways in which the talk flowed?--the sentiments and manner of

the young poet? Are they, in fact, faithful exhibitions of what Hogg

remembered, or believed himself to remember, after a lapse of more than

twenty years, of the talk he and Shelley had with one another when they

were undergraduates? No impartial and fairly intelligent reader of the

Papers will hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.

However defective, the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ were greatly

beneficial to the reputation of the poet, whose writings had found few

readers outside the literary coteries during his life, whose name was

still associated in the minds of the majority of educated Englishmen with

atheism, conjugal faithlessness, and dangerous politics, rather than with

the highest poetry. Written lightly and circulated widely, the sketches,

dealing only with the Oxonian Shelley, created an impression that the

undergraduate had been treated harshly by the authorities of his college,

and left readers in a mood to discover that he had been too severely

punished for the indiscretions of later stages of his career. Henceforth,

instead of being confined to the coteries, the desire for larger knowledge

of the poet's personal story found a voice in general society.

It was felt that the Papers should be followed up and superseded by a

complete biography. By turns, and repeatedly, several of the persons, who

had known him most intimately, were urged to produce a worthy record of so

remarkable a poet. Mrs. Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, and Hogg, were all

entreated to write the sufficient memoir. William Godwin's daughter would

have written the poet's _Life_ had not old Sir Timothy Shelley informed

her that, if she ventured to publish anything in the way of biography

about his family, she must go her way without the income he provided for

her own and her child's maintenance. Peacock declined to write the _Life_

because he had a strong opinion that it would be impossible to tell the

story honestly, without setting forth matters that, for the poet's sake,

had better be unrecorded. Leigh Hunt (eventually the author of a flimsy

and unsatisfactory memoir of the poet whose pocket had yielded him so many

guineas) was silent from the fear of provoking dangerous resentments.

'The book,' he remarked, in reference to Middleton's _Shelley and his

Writings_, in a letter dated to Edmund Ollier, 2nd February, 1858, 'is

a proof of what I have always said when applied to to write the _Life_

myself, viz., that it would be impossible to give a complete account

of Shelley and his connexions till the latter were all dead and gone;

even if it was possible then for any person to be so thoroughly well

informed or impartial as to do it, because facts would have to be so

coloured as to misrepresent both living and dead, some one way and

some another; or the living would be forced either to enter into the

most unseemly and worse than useless wars with one another, or to

maintain silences the most difficult and distressing to keep out of

delicacy, and the most self-condemning in appearance with some, and in

reality with others.'

Whilst William Godwin's daughter was silent from pecuniary prudence, Leigh

Hunt silent from fear of the consequence, and Peacock silent because he

thought the book (which, if written, should be written honestly) had

better not be written at all, Hogg was reluctant to produce the memoir,

which the success of the Papers had caused most people to think should

come from his pen. No one can charge him with intruding himself

prematurely, or without invitation, into the chair, out of which he was

thrust so discourteously by the very persons who had begged him to take

it. The man of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience (as he is

styled by Peacock) was not pricked into unauthorized action by the amateur

biographers, who, sometimes without acknowledgment, and always without

permission, pillaged his Papers. Medwin's _Life_ appeared in 1847; and

smiling at the _littérateur's_ blunders, the man of imperturbable temper

held his pen. He remained the man of adamantine patience, though rumours

came to him that Mr. Middleton was at work on a _Life_ of the poet, whom

he had never known at all; that Trelawny was threatening to produce a book

of gossip about the poet, whom he had known for only six months; and that

the works of these gentlemen would be followed at no great distance by a

work from the pen of the 'metropolitan versifier' (Leigh Hunt), of whom

his in due course remarked in the preface to his two volumes: 'If it were

a question of assets, of faculties, of effects, the taking of an account

of plunder,--an inventory of sums received, and of moneys to be received,

refunded, and disgorged,--a mere calculation of the wind that had been

raised, this indication of the person best qualified to be the biographer

of a prince amongst poets would be judicious.'

It was not till Field Place felt the necessity of correcting the numerous

misstatements about the man of genius by a complete and authoritative

biography, that the largely employed lawyer declared his willingness to

execute the difficult task, which had been deferred too long. Midway

between sixty and seventy years of age, when he thus accepted the

invitation of Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley, the man of many

affairs, and an exacting avocation, did not set to work on the _Life_ till

nearly a quarter of a century had passed since the publication of the _New

Monthly_ Papers; till the poet had been dead nearly thirty-five years;

till full forty-five years had passed since the poet, in the company of

his future biographer, set their faces for London, on leaving University

College, Oxford.

Though it took the outer world by surprise, the immediate result of the

publication of Hogg's two volumes was less surprising to the literary

coteries, and no matter of surprise whatever to the few members of those

coteries, who, knowing that Hogg was a robust enemy of shams, knew that no

biographer would satisfy Field Place, which should fail to accord with the

straight-nosed pictures, and with the notion that Shelley was a being of

stainless purity and angelic holiness.

If, in writing the _Life_, Hogg's first duty was to be thoughtful for the

sensibilities of Field Place, his book must indeed be declared a bad one.

Instead of giving readers the Shelley indicated by the frontispiece of the

first volume, or the Shelley who, under auspicious circumstances might

have been the Saviour of the World, or a Shelley who might have sobered

down into a pheasant-shooting squire and Chairman of Quarter-Sessions, the

biographer makes us acquainted with the wayward, freakish, impulsive,

scarcely sane, and ever restless Shelley of the poet's early manhood,--the

Shelley, whose great wit was divided from madness by a strangely thin

partition; the Shelley, whose earnestness was too often associated with

perversity, whose winning candour was curiously allied with secretiveness,

whose impulsive benevolence was perplexingly linked with indifference to

the feelings and rights of particular individuals; the Shelley, whose

several amiable and generous traits were attended by qualities that were

neither beneficent nor agreeable. Showing that this whimsical Shelley was

a frequent utterer of untruths that were altogether or partly referable to

delusions, Hogg also shows by evidence of the most conclusive kind that

this perplexing Shelley could also utter untruths, knowing them to be

untruths--was capable of telling fibs to escape a trivial

inconvenience,--was capable of writing false and wheedling letters to get

money, and of admitting with a singular, if not absolutely unique,

shamelessness, that he had told a lie, or meant to tell a lie for a very

slight reason.

No wonder that the biographer who dealt thus frankly with his friend's

infirmities is distasteful to the enthusiasts of Mr. Buxton Forman's

school. No wonder that his book was perused for the first time by Sir

Percy Florence and Lady Shelley 'with the most painful feelings of

dismay.' Their dissatisfaction with the biographer would have been more

painful had all four volumes of the _Life_ been published on the day, that

saw the publication of the earlier half of the book. Fortunately for Sir

Florence and Lady Shelley the biographer at the end of the second of the

two published volumes was only coming to the part of the poet's story

which they were especially desirous he should handle with extreme

delicacy. There is much about William Godwin in the two volumes, and a

little about his daughter. But the second volume closes at the moment when

Shelley is only at the threshold of his passion for his familiar friend's

sixteen-years-old child,--closes before he has told the 'marvellous tale'

of his father's cruelty, and barbarous purpose of shutting him up in a

madhouse, to the generous-hearted girl, in order to induce the naughty

child to fly with him to the Continent in the company of her

sister-by-affinity. It was obvious to Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley

that they had chosen the wrong historian to write about Mary Godwin, the

judicious treatment of whose scarcely edifying story was so needful for

the honour of the Castle Goring Shelleys. It had been hoped by Field Place

that Mr. Hogg would varnish ugly facts with specious phrases. Disappointed

in this hope, it was obvious to Field Place that the indiscreet biographer

must be sent about his business. Hogg having failed to write the _Life_

into harmony with the pretty picture facing the title-page, as Arthur

Pendennis wrote the verses to suit the picture of the country church, it

was manifest to the authorities of Field Place that they must discharge

their man of letters, and hide their time till they should find a fitter

instrument and happier season for their purpose. This was done. Hogg was

dismissed, and in these later years of grace Field Place has found in Mr.

Anthony Froude a man of letters, capable of writing about the poet's

flight with his intimate friend's sixteen-years-old daughter, as nothing

worse than 'the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty;' capable

of smiling at their concubinage as a pleasant passage of romance, because

they were so young and enthusiastic.

Though a grievous injury was done to English literature when Hogg was

treated in this manner, it must not be imagined that his book is devoid of

serious faults. Containing numerous trivial inaccuracies, it contains also

some grave blunders. The confusion of its materials may be compared to the

state of disorder in which the author found his friend's room at the

commencement of their acquaintance. The biographer was unwise to reproduce

in the book his early Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ without first revising

them carefully. Though he would have done ill to keep himself as much as

possible out of view, and was right in regarding passages of his own story

as part of his friend's story,--a part of it, moreover, that could not be

omitted without serious injury to the biographical narrative,--he says far

too much of himself. In some places, the biographer's egotism is

grotesquely garrulous. It is no sufficient excuse for such egregious

self-consciousness and self-intrusiveness, that the egotist is a droll,

piquant, racy, exquisitely humorous egotist. None the less true, however,

is it that,--their eccentricities and extravagancies notwithstanding,--the

two volumes give us a substantially truthful view of Shelley in his youth

and earlier manhood, and, in so doing, bring us face to face with the Real

Shelley. No intelligent and impartial peruser of the two volumes ever

closed them without feeling that Hogg's portraiture of Shelley is a

performance, from whose lines no biographer of the poet can depart widely,

without going widely astray.

There is no need to say more of the confusion, in which Hogg offered the

excellent materials of his book to the world. But so much has been said

about his dishonest treatment of letters, that some notice should be taken

of his various ways of dealing with evidential documents.

It must be admitted that his printed transcripts of epistles are often

inaccurate; a considerable proportion of the inaccuracies being slips, for

which the printer is not to be held accountable.

The letters are, in some cases, mis-dated, through the biographer's

carelessness in taking a postal-date, or the date of an addressee's

endorsement, as the date of the letter itself. Occasionally, also, he errs

by giving, as an ascertained and exact date, what appears, on examination,

to be nothing else than his own calculation of an approximate date.

Regardless of the paragraphical arrangement of a letter, when he is

desirous of saving space, he does not hesitate to bring several written

paragraphs into a single printed one,--an unobjectionable practice, when

it does not affect the force of the written words, in the case of letters

that are not exhibited in type as examples of epistolary style.

It is his practice to condense a letter, by picking out its most important

passages, and putting them together (without points indicative of omitted

words), as though they followed one another on the written paper,

precisely as they appear on the printed page:--a most objectionable

practice.

After condensing a letter in this manner, he sometimes exhibits the

abridgment in a way to make readers think it an entire letter:--also a

most objectionable practice.

In the case of one most important and interesting letter (of whose

contents more will be said in a subsequent chapter), he changes names for

purposes of concealment and mystification; but a fair consideration of his

reasons for thus tampering with an important evidential writing, acquits

him of dishonourable conduct in the curious and suspicious business.

Attention must also be called to the grounds for the gravest charge, that

has been preferred against Hogg's editorial treatment of evidential

writings. He has been declared guilty of altering such evidences by

inserting in his printed transcripts entire sentences that do not appear

in the manuscripts; and it cannot be denied that there are _primâ-facie_

grounds for the serious accusation. On careful examination, some of the

printed transcripts of the _Life_ are found to contain passages (some of

them long passages of several sentences) that do not appear in the

originals of the transcribed documents. As these passages appear without

any typographical indication that they are no part of the original

writings, and have every _primâ-facie_ show of being part of the

transcripts in which they are inserted, they may be fairly described as

'interpolations.' It is not, therefore, surprising that Hogg has been

charged with one of the gravest forms of editorial dishonesty. The

reader's attention has already been called to one of these editorial

notes,--a note printed, indeed, within brackets, but followed by no

indicatory initials. In subsequent chapters, examples will be given of

similar notes, printed without either brackets or initials. For the

present, it is enough to say they may be found in several of Hogg's

printed copies of documents. How can they be accounted for in a way, to

clear the biographer of reasonable suspicion of misrepresenting the

contents of evidential writings?

Instead of making his editorial comments on his transcribed documents in

paginal foot-notes, it was Hogg's most objectionable and dangerous

practice to insert them in the body of the transcripts. Of course, in

doing so, it was his rule to put his initials after each editorial note,

and to place each 'initialed' note between brackets. Thus exhibited

between brackets, with the biographer's initials put immediately before

the second bracket, an editorial note is recognized at a glance by the

most careless reader, as no part of the transcribed document, but a mere

editorial elucidation of the preceding passage. Printed as Hogg intended

them to be, no one of these editorial notes could have been mistaken, even

momentarily, for a part and parcel of the writing, in whose body it was

inserted. But, unfortunately, for the biographer's reputation, these notes

were not always printed as he intended them to be printed. In some cases

the first bracket, in some cases both brackets, are omitted, though the

initials are inserted. There are also cases where a scrap of editorial

explanation is found without either brackets or initials. As Hogg was no

regular author, but a slap-dash rough-and-ready legal draughtsman (plying

his pen, in his proper vocation, with perfect confidence in the ability of

solicitors and law-stationers to correct the literal slips of his

compositions), he wrote copy for the press just as he slapt and dashed

copy off for his ordinary clients. A careless writer, he was also a

careless corrector of proofs. Hence it came to pass that editorial notes,

which he meant to bracket and initial (notes, which, of course, should

have been made at the foot, instead of in the body of his pages), came

under the public eye without the brackets and initials, that should, and

would, have distinguished them at a glance from the printed matter they

were intended to elucidate. That this is the explanation of the

interpolations in Hogg's transcripts, appears from--(1), the biographer's

practice of peppering his transcripts with initialed and bracketed scraps

of editorial comment; (2), the grammatical construction that distinguishes

the interpolations from the text in which they are set; (3), the absolute

inefficacy of the inserted passages for any end a dishonest interpolator

could have in view; and (4), the conclusive fact, that, whilst it is a

mere perplexing disturbance to the narrative, so long as it is taken for

part of the transcript, each of the interpolations becomes an intelligible

and more or less serviceable comment on the context, as soon as the reader

puts it into brackets, and deals with it as an editorial note. In respect

to these interpolations, and also in respect to all the other errors which

the biographer's enemies are pleased to regard as deliberate

misstatements, Hogg must be acquitted wholly of dishonest purpose. Had he

been duly mindful for brackets and initials, the interpolations, of which

so much has been said to his discredit, would never have exposed him to a

suspicion, much less to a direct imputation, of editorial knavery.

It does not follow, however, that the _Life_ is disfigured by no

statements to be fairly rated as deliberate misrepresentations. Resenting

the calumnies, that have been poured on Hogg since his death; resenting

more especially the malice of those, who would fain extort evidence to the

biographer's infamy from what is mere evidence of one of Shelley's wildest

and most unwholesome delusions; I wish I were in a position to declare the

volumes altogether pure of falsehood. It would have been better for Hogg's

character in his life's closing years, and far better for his posthumous

fame, had he in his mature age written with candour and justice of the

incidents that resulted in his academic disgrace, and of the individuals

who only did their clear duty in bidding him and Shelley leave Oxford. But

whilst lacking the courage to be truthful about matters even more

discreditable to himself than to his friend, he wanted the highmindedness

that would have enabled him to speak fairly of the Master and Fellows,

whom he remembered to his last hour with a rancorous animosity that was

singular in the man of usually even and placable disposition. The story of

his academic disgrace was one of the very few subjects, on which the man

of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience could not keep his temper.

Whilst throwing off the papers for the _New Monthly_, Hogg surrendered

himself the more completely to his animosity against the Oxford dons,

because he could persuade himself that, in giving vent to his personal

resentment, he was only vindicating the honour of his friend. The

consequence was an account of Shelley's academic misadventure, so veined

with misrepresentation and loaded with untruth, as to defeat the purpose

for which it was written. It is needless to say that the Shelleyan

enthusiasts have never protested against the egregious perversity and

falseness of this portion of the biography. Attacking the book for its

inaccuracy, in respect to those of its passages that are substantially

honest, they have adopted as good history those of its pages that are

distinctly untruthful. That Field Place saw nothing to censure in the

faultiest part of the biographer's performance appears from the way, in

which Lady Shelley reproduced some of its most glaring misrepresentations

in her _Shelley's Memorials_.

CHAPTER X.

AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810.

Hogg's Toryism--Shelley's Liberalism--In Hogg's Rooms--Shelley's Looks

and Voice--Patron and Idolater--The Ways of Passing Time--Hogg's

Reminiscences--Nocturnal Readings and Conversations--Country about

Oxford--Pistol Practice--Playing with Paper Boats--Windmill and Plashy

Meadow--The Horror of it--Posthumous Fragments of Margaret

Nicholson--University Tattle and Laughter--Eccentric

Inseparables--Pond under Shotover Hill--Pacing 'The High'--Dons'

Civility to Shelley--His Incivility to Dons--Uninteresting Stones and

Dull People--'Partly True and Partly False'--The Fiery Hun!--'My Dear

Boy'--Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in Marriage--Hogg entertains

the Proposal--End of Term.

Though I have spoken warmly of Hogg's general honesty, and resent the

calumnies that have been rained down upon him in the grave, I must admit

that Hogg's friendship was so injurious that it might almost be called

disastrous to the Oxonian Shelley. Though the youth who had distinguished

himself by unruliness at Eton, whose views of life had come to him chiefly

from morbid romances, whose natural perversity disposed him to revolt

against control of every kind, was far more likely to abuse the liberty

and privileges of the academic course than to employ them to his

advantage, the conditions are conceivable under which he would have passed

through the University with honour--or at least without discredit. It

depended chiefly on the friendships he should form immediately upon coming

into residence at his college, whether, taking a new moral and

intellectual 'departure' he would disappoint the evil promise of his Eton

days, or whether he would persist in the perversities in which he had been

encouraged by Dr. Lind. For his welfare in the University, it was needful

that the young man, so sympathetic and fervid, but absolutely wanting in

common sense and mental sobriety, should have for his especial friend a

man devoid of moral levity, and should live in a set of young men who,

together with tastes congenial to his own, possessed the steadiness of

intellect and temper, calculated to restrain and correct the erratic

forces of his peculiar nature;--young men who, by their example, rather

than by their words, would dispose him to regard his University with

pride, his College with affection, his tutors with loyalty. It was a great

misfortune for Shelley that, on coming into residence, he found no such

companions, and took for his chief associate,--indeed, his only familiar

associate,--a young man, whose intellectual vigour and robustness were

curiously allied with an intellectual levity and a cynical sprightliness,

that rendered him a most baneful companion for a stripling of Shelley's

equally fervid and wayward disposition.

A stronger contrast of character is seldom witnessed than the contrast to

be noticed in the two undergraduates, who, through meeting casually, and

talking together freely at the same dinner table 'in hall,' formed at once

a close friendship, that (with the exception of the brief period of

estrangement, which renders the story of their intercourse more singular

and interesting), endured till death divided them for ever. Whilst Shelley

was a Liberal, whose liberalism even at the commencement of this

friendship was revolutionary in its aims and enthusiasm, Hogg was a

caricature of Eldonian Toryism, who held Dissenters in disdain, snapt his

fingers at Catholic Emancipation, and smiled contemptuously at every

reference to Irish grievances. In political sentiment the Hogg, who wrote

the _New Monthly_ Papers on 'Shelley at Oxford' differed from the Oxonian

Hogg, only as the Toryism of a middle-aged man differs from the Toryism of

a boy. The election that 'had just taken place,' when he entered

University College was a choice he disapproved; though animosity against

the Lord Chancellor, who deprived Shelley of his children, and animosity

against those of the Chancellor's supporters who expelled Shelley and

Shelley's friend from Oxford, caused him in later time to write of Eldon,

as though the Chief of the Law were greatly inferior in culture and mental

dignity to his victor in the academic conflict. Doubtless, on coming to

Oxford immediately after the election of Lord Grenville, the young

gentleman declared his disapproval of the triumph of the blue-and-buff

faction:--not passionately, for passion seldom stirred his breast; but

with much droll ridicule of a business so eminently ridiculous, for even

from his boyhood Mr. Hogg (a born humourist and cynic) turned everything,

even his own religious convictions, to jest.

Whilst the Oxonian Shelley, already a half-fledged republican, talked

tenderly of the poor and the populace, Hogg ever a provincial aristocrat

(and by no means devoid of provincial vulgarity), regarded the populace

with disgust, and maintained that all the poor wanted was to be kept in

their proper places and to their proper work. Ever impatient, Shelley was

fervid as fire itself, whilst Hogg, from youth to old age, was remarkable

for imperturbable temper and adamantine patience, on every question that

had no reference to his academic misadventure. Coming from the North of

England to Oxford in the autumn of 1809, some weeks before he donned cap

and gown in February, 1810, Hogg entered the University with the purpose

of taking honours, and had acquired the reputation of 'a reading man'

before the long vacation of 1810.

Coming to Oxford for residence in the autumn of 1810, when Hogg had

acquired status and character amongst the younger members of his academic

house, the sensitive, simple, never worldly-wise Shelley entered

University College with a strong appetite for general knowledge, and an

intention to peruse many books on many subjects for his own amusement, but

with no ambition for academic honours, no intention of competing for them,

no purpose of becoming, in the academic and limited sense of the term, 'a

reading man.' Hogg had not been three months in University College, before

the tutors saw he meant to put his name in a 'first class.' Shelley, on

the other hand, had not been three weeks in College before the tutors saw

he meant to go out with the 'pass men,' and were doubtful whether he would

take a degree.

As it must be held in some measure accountable for the influence he

acquired over Shelley, readers must assign considerable weight to the fact

that Hogg was qualified by several matters--his seniority on the College

books, priority in residence, greater knowledge of the University, higher

status in the lecture-rooms,--to play the part of academic superior to his

new acquaintance. Superlatively trivial to men of _the_ world, the matters

that gave Hogg this precedence and superiority over Shelley in University

College, are no light affairs in the small world of the University, the

still smaller world of a single College. The sensitive Shelley would not

have presumed to invite Hogg to his rooms after their first meeting 'in

hall.' It was for Hogg to pay the compliment to the freshman in his first

term of residence; and no old University man will doubt that Shelley felt

he received a considerable attention, when so notable a personage amongst

the first-year's men as Mr. Hogg said to him, 'Come and have wine at my

rooms.'

As Hogg and Shelley sat over their wine in consequence of this invitation,

the host took an opportunity to examine the aspect of his new acquaintance

more minutely, and to observe that his girlish pink-and-white complexion

was much freckled. 'His complexion,' says Hogg, 'was delicate, and almost

feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by

exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting;' a

piece of description that is referred to by 'the Shelleyan enthusiasts' as

an example of Hogg's imaginativeness. No one (if we may credit Shelleyan

enthusiasts) but a suspiciously imaginative historian would have ventured

to say he could remember, after twenty years, the sun-spots of an old

college friend's complexion. I venture to say that the disfigurement is a

good example of the kind of things, likely to live in the memory of

certain observers.

In respect to a part of what he says of the freckles in Shelley's skin,

Hogg is corroborated in a remarkable manner by Medwin, who (his inaccuracy

notwithstanding) was generally right in the main facts, and not always

wrong in the details of his statements. 'He,' Medwin says of Shelley's

shooting in the winter of 1809 and the autumn of 1810, 'had during

September often carried a gun in his father's preserves; Sir Timothy being

a keen sportsman, and Shelley himself an excellent shot, for I well

remember on one day in the winter of 1809, when we were out together, his

killing, at three successive shots, three snipes, to my great astonishment

and envy, at the tail of the pond in front of Field Place.' The three

successive and successful shots are good examples of the small incidents

likely to live in a sportsman's memory. What old sportsman, with snow upon

his head, cannot remember quite as vividly just as small matters, that

occurred long since on the moors or during a run across country?

Another of the small matters of Hogg's _Life_, that unquestionably lived

in his memory. He remembered how, in the early morning at the close of

Shelley's first visit to his rooms, after 'lighting' the poet downstairs

with the stump of a candle, he 'soon heard him running through the quiet

quadrangle in the still night,'--adding in the words of truth's own music,

'That sound became afterwards so familiar to my ear, that I still seem to

hear Shelley's hasty steps.'

The evidence is clear that whilst Shelley, the freshman (ever a feminine

creature on one side of his nature), regarded Hogg as an exemplary

scholar, great thinker, and worthy leader,--the self-sufficient,

hard-headed, cynical, humorous youngster from the North of England

regarded Shelley as a delightful plaything, a brilliant absurdity, a

piquant joke. When the 'reading man,' who rose from his bed every morning

as the clock struck seven, had spent the first six hours of the day in

strenuous study and attendance at lectures, he went to his 'young friend'

for diversion, never before one o'clock, oftener when the clock had struck

two p.m. It amused the north-countryman, as he lay back in the easiest

chair of his young friend's well-furnished and disorderly room, to watch

his young friend work fiercely at the handle of his electrical machine,

till the crackling and snapping sparks flew forth viciously; to see the

youngster's long locks bristle and dishevel into wildness, surpassing

their usual disorder; to observe the animation of his countenance, the

singular brightness of his prominent blue eyes, and to hear him talk

volubly for half-hours together, in the thin shrill voice that often

screamed as harshly as the voice of a highly excited parrot, about the

blessings that would flow from chemistry to the ill-fed, ill-clad,

ill-treated toilers of the human race.

The excruciating voice, that was so 'intolerably shrill, harsh, and

discordant' to the north-countryman's sensitive ear at the opening of his

acquaintance with this eccentric and delightfully unconventional

undergraduate, became less disagreeable, even in its sharpest notes, to

the critical auditor as it grew more familiar. Moreover, the voice was not

always at torture-pitch. It was only when he was under excitement that the

youngster afflicted his hearers by 'speaking' (to use Peacock's

description of the poet's vocal peculiarity) 'in sharp fourths, the most

unpleasing sequence of sound that can fall on the human ear.' When he

spoke calmly, the voice was not otherwise than agreeable; when he read

poetry that delighted him, the voice became musical, 'was good' (says

Peacock) 'both in tune and in tone; was low and soft, but clear, distinct,

and expressive.' Hogg had not known his young friend many days without

discovering that the voice could be no less melodious and charming than

harsh and screeching. In these vocal characteristics, as in so many other

matters, Shelley resembled Byron, who used to shriek and scream in his

frequent paroxysms of hysterical rage, and yet had a voice sweeter even

than his verse, when he gossiped contentedly with women, and prattled

lovingly with little children.

It is not wonderful that the self-sufficient, critical, humorous Hogg's

interest in his young friend was composed equally of amusement and

admiration, cynical curiosity and amiable contempt; a disposition to love

him, and an even stronger disposition to laugh at him. There was so much

to admire and love in the eccentric boy, who overflowed with pity for the

miseries of mankind, and prattled with almost childish communicativeness

about his cousin Harriett's beauty and his sister Elizabeth's perfections;

so much that was inexpressibly ludicrous in the youthful chemist and

scientific enthusiast who, believing in the 'Elixir Vitæ,' was at the same

time an astronomer and astrologer--in the sceptical philosopher who,

equally credulous and incredulous, spoke no less reverentially of dreams

than irreverentially of the Scriptural miracles, could embrace any fable

provided it were not one of 'the delusions' of Christianity, and had no

doubt he ought to believe in ghosts, whilst deeming it questionable

whether he ought to believe in God. Under Hogg's tuition this last

question was erased from the list of Shelley's moot points. Having

repudiated Christ at Eton, the freshman had not entered on his second term

of residence at Oxford without finding himself under 'the necessity' of

repudiating God; and, though he would probably have come to this

conclusion by himself somewhat later in his career, it is certain he came

to it the sooner for Hogg's assistance and encouragement.

It is uncertain what Hogg's real sentiments on matters pertaining to

religion were at the close of 1810 and 1811. In later time he was one of

those Tories who reflected with pride on the support their party had given

Bolingbroke, and on the protection it had afforded Hume:--one of those

Tories, of gentle birth and culture, who deemed it their peculiar

privilege to think and say amongst themselves whatever they pleased on

ecclesiastical polemics, provided they did nothing to weaken the popular

belief in the doctrines of the Church of England, as by law

established--doctrines that were so eminently conducive to social order,

by disposing persons of the less fortunate classes to do their duty

submissively in that state of life to which God had been pleased to call

them. Whilst commiserating Shelley for being, by education and familiar

conditions, one of those 'buff-and-blue folks' who naturally could not

speak their own minds freely lest their words should be misconstrued into

treason and infidelity, and could not, therefore, carry the poet safe

through the difficulties arising out of his ill-advised publications, Mr.

Hogg, the mature biographer, observed:--

'As to my own family, and my immediate connexions, we were all persons

whose first toast after dinner was invariably "Church and State!" warm

partisans of William Pitt, of the highest Church, and of the high Tory

party; consequently we were anything but intolerant, we were above

suspicion and ordinances.... My relatives felt that they had margin

enough, plenty of sea-room, that whatever might be said or done, their

good principles could not be doubted, but would always carry them

through.... If the _Age of Reason_ had been republished by myself or

one of my earliest friends, the world would have supposed that it was

put forth merely to show the utter futility and impotence and vanity

of the author's arguments.'

The self-sufficient young gentleman, who quickened Shelley's steps to his

final academic disaster, was the veritable father of the man who wrote

thus lightly of what Tories (provided they were highly-educated gentlemen)

might do within the lines of Free Thought. From strong, but not conclusive

evidence, I think that in his Oxford days he might have summarized his

creed by saying: 'There's nothing new, and there is nothing true; and it

don't much sinnify, provided we don't let vulgar people find it out.'

Whatever his belief on sacred questions, he never allowed so immaterial a

consideration to affect his course in discussion. Speaking first on one

side of a question, and then on the other side, and then for a third time

just to show he had been equally and utterly wrong in his arguments on

both sides, Hogg always played the part Shelley wished him to play. What

Shelley said, Hogg contradicted--never angrily (for his temper was

imperturbable), never impatiently (for his patience was adamantine), never

discourteously (for he was courteous by nature, and on principle), often

lightly and with fine raillery (for he was a born humourist), always

considerately (for the reading man delighted in his play-fellow). It was

thus the two young men wrangled together amiably, keeping the ball of

doubt flying to and fro between them till the one or the other sent it

flying out of bounds. A game often congenial to clever youngsters, it was

a game especially congenial to these two undergraduates; all the more so,

because Shelley was altogether in earnest, Hogg altogether at play.

If the reading-man had reason to congratulate himself on finding so good a

playmate for his hours of relaxation, the freshman may well have been

flattered by the attention of a fellow-student, so considerably his senior

in academic status and worldly wisdom. With all his imperfections, Hogg

had no vice or fault to repel his young friend. Shelley, who would have

held aloof from an undergraduate with a propensity to any kind of

dissoluteness, found in Hogg a man no less temperate in eating and

drinking than himself, no less incapable of uttering or relishing an

obscene jest, no less averse to gambling with dice and cards, no less

disdainful of the ordinary dissipations of academic idlers. On the other

hand, Hogg's natural endowments and intellectual attainments were

especially calculated to commend him to Shelley's confidence, and render

him the object of Shelley's admiration. Shelley had enough of classical

taste and culture to respect the reading-man for being so greatly his

superior in Latin and Greek, and to be delighted at the moderate praise

accorded by so considerable a scholar to his performances in Latin prose

and Latin verse. But classical studies were not the only studies to

interest Hogg. The reading-man delighted in English literature, amused

himself occasionally by writing English verse, and had some thought of

writing a book of poetry or romantic fiction, when he should have taken

his 'first class.' Instead of being indifferent to his young friend's

literary ambition, Hogg participated in it. The youngster who had already

published a novel (what a novel it was!), and the young man who was

thinking of writing a novel, were, in their simple, boyish way of

regarding the matter, kindred spirits and men of letters. Their

association at college would prove the first stage of a life-long

friendship!

The relation in which Steerforth and Copperfield stand to one another in

the earlier stages of their friendship is comparable with the relation in

which Hogg and Shelley stood to one another at University College. Hogg

patronized Shelley very much as Steerforth patronizes Copperfield; and

just as Copperfield idolizes Steerforth, Shelley idolized Hogg. At the

present time one may well smile at these relations between the humorous

north-countryman, who never became anything more than a successful

chamber-barrister, and the poet, whose name will never perish from the

story of his race. But it is no unusual thing for time and the development

of mental forces to reverse the relations of ancient comrades; placing

the former idolater on the idol's pedestal, and converting the receiver of

homage into the worshiper. Whilst the Hogg of University College gave

promise of being a very remarkable personage, Shelley had given no promise

of becoming a supremely great poet--on the contrary, had raised

expectations that he would be a very contemptible poetaster. In 1810-11

Shelley was the one of these two friends to render worship, Hogg the one

to receive it.

In the earlier weeks of their friendship, Hogg and Shelley used to

exchange visits; but soon Shelley's room was the usual meeting-place of

the two friends--the choice of the room being made partly (Hogg says

wholly) because Shelley, still delighting in his scientific toys, liked

'to start from his seat at any moment' and play with his air-pump and

electrical machine; and partly (we may surmise) because the hard reader

wished to guard his severely studious hours from the intrusion of his

choicest and most particular friend. But though they never met before

luncheon, save when they passed one another at morning chapel, or on their

ways to and from different lectures, Shelley and Hogg lived together as

completely as they would have done, had they been 'chums' sharing a single

set of rooms, like the 'chums' of older academic time.

Meeting at one or two p.m., they seldom separated before one or two a.m.

In foul weather they read, talked, wrote letters in each other's company,

without going out of college. They read together Locke's _Essay concerning

Human Understanding_, Hume's _Essays_, several of Plato's Dialogues (by

means of Dacier's translations), several of the works of Scotch

metaphysicians, not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with

Hume, treatises of Logic, and divers English poets and Latin poets. But

Plato, Locke, and Hume were the authors who held their attention most

often, stirred their minds most deeply, provoking them at every turn to

pass from study to talk, and argue out the questions raised by printed

text. Of Locke's and Hume's writings they made careful notes, that in some

cases were precise abstracts of the author's several arguments on a

question of supreme importance. That Hume whetted Shelley's appetite for

sceptical literature may be inferred from the note, in which (on November

11th, 1810, _Sunday_) he begged Stockdale to look out for a translation

into Greek, Latin, or any of the European languages, of a certain 'Hebrew

essay, demonstrating that the Christian religion is false, that was

mentioned in one of the numbers of the _Christian Observer_, last spring,

by a clergyman, as an unanswerable, yet sophistical argument.'

When the weather was fair, or not so foul as absolutely to prohibit

exercise in the open air, the two friends went for walks in the

country,--sometimes for very long walks, that kept them for four, or even

six hours, in the open air. Excellent pedestrians, they delighted in

walking; and Shelley was never happier than when he and his peculiar

comrade started out for the country in the early afternoon for an unusally

long walk, with the intention of 'cutting hall' (the hour for the

college-dinner in those days was 4 p.m.), and returning in the evening,

for the equally welcome and needful supper, ordered to be ready for them

on their return to the poet's first-floor rooms,[4] in the principal

quadrangle of their college. In these long walks it was that the two

inseparable undergraduates walked repeatedly over and about Shotover Hill;

threaded meandering ways through Bagley Wood; traversed the farmstead in

which the furious dog seized with his teeth, and almost tore off, the tail

of the poet's brand-new blue coat; and leaped through the gap of an aged

fence into the trim garden,--leafless on that mid-winter day, had it not

been for the evergreen shrubs; flowerless, had it not been for the brumal

flowers here and there faintly visible; but still trim, daintily kept, and

eloquent of peacefulness, seclusion, and human care,--the garden where the

poet gathered the first of those seeds of pathos and delicate sentiment,

that slowly germinating in his fancy, bore fruit long years afterwards in

_The Sensitive Plant_.

It was in Hogg's memory, when he wrote the _New Monthly_ sketches, how,

after retreating from this tranquil spot as suddenly as he had entered it,

Shelley spoke of the sacredness of the spot, that of course owed its

attractiveness to the ministrations of feminine goodness and beauty; and

how, after making it the haunt of a single enchantress, he changed the

picture so far as to give her a sister, fair and sensitive as herself, for

the sharer of her gentle toil and pure enjoyment of the garden in brighter

seasons.

In another of these walks, the inseparable undergraduates came, in a

desolate part of the country, on a little girl, so young and small that

she might almost be called a nursling, who had been placed there in her

weariness to await the return of her mother and some other women. Having

waited till she imagined herself deserted, the cold, hungry, miserable

child was weeping and wailing piteously, when Shelley accosted her (ugly

little brat though she was), won something of her confidence, and induced

her to accompany him to the nearest dwelling, where he restored her to

comparative contentment with a bowl of warm bread and milk.

'It was,' says Hogg, 'a strange spectacle to watch the young poet,

whilst ... holding the wooden bowl in one hand, and the wooden spoon

in the other, and kneeling on his left knee, that he might more

certainly attain to her mouth, he urged and encouraged the torpid and

timid child to eat. The hot milk was agreeable to the girl, and its

effects were salutary; but she was obviously uneasy at the detention.

Her uneasiness increased, and ultimately prevailed; we returned with

her to the place where we had found her, Shelley bearing the bowl of

milk in his hand, even to the spot where the child was already being

sought for by her mother and friends.'

To discredit this story, and press it into evidence that Hogg was an

egregious liar, your true Shelleyan enthusiast does not hesitate in crying

triumphantly, 'Is it possible for any man, after a lapse of two-and-twenty

years, to remember whether his friend on a particular occasion knelt on

his right knee or his left knee?' Yet I conceive no judicial reader will

deny that the story bears the brand of substantial truthfulness; that the

incident was just the incident to live in the spectator's memory; that the

story accords with what has come to us from other sources of information

respecting Shelley's womanly concern for children,--the feminine

tenderness with which he nursed little Allegra in her infancy, and his own

babes in their times of sickness.

Other pleasant examples are given by Hogg of the fine human interest

Shelley took in the humble, and sometimes unlovely, children they

encountered in their pedestrian excursions round about Oxford,--such

children as the gipsy girl whom he visited in her parental tent, and her

brother, the little gipsy boy, into whose hands he rolled the big orange,

which he had brought out with him from Oxford, for his own refreshment

during a long walk. It may serve the purpose of Hogg's detractors to decry

these stories as manifest fabrications; but to me they are evidential of

Hogg's substantial truthfulness, because whilst they commemorate just such

characteristic trifles as are apt to survive far more important matters in

our recollections of the dead who were dear to us long ago, they are the

mere trifles which no fraudulent tale-wright would think of inventing.

Only to the narrator, who remembered them feelingly, would such trifles

appear worthy of record.

The walks in the country round about Oxford took the longer time, because

of two of Shelley's favourite diversions--his delight in pistol-practice,

and the pleasure he found in folding and twisting pieces of paper into

little boats, and putting them afloat on the surface of pond or streamlet.