To the young gentleman, who made the Bishop imagine him a lady, and had confidential relations with John Munday (the Oxford bookseller and printer of the Oxford Herald), it is no injustice to suggest that, instead of being a veritable copy of the Herald, the paper exhibited to Hogg may have been a ‘bogus’ copy of the journal, made up in accordance with Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s instructions, for his private use. No reader, acquainted with Oxford and the ways in which things are done in the University (and in ‘the city’ whose people stand, or used to stand, in wholesome awe of the academic authorities), can need assurance that the business of the expulsion was a strictly private affair; that no proceedings in the case afforded diversion to a public assembly; that Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley delivered no grand oration on the degeneracy of collegiate establishments; and that it is highly improbable any Oxford printer ventured to offer the readers of any bonâ fide Oxford journal any ‘such speech in the potential mood.’

On the morning following their expulsion (the morning of 26th March, 1811), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, formerly of University College, Oxford, made the journey to London on the outside of a stage-coach. Thus Shelley passed in disgrace from his University at the close of his second residence-term; an event that may be regarded as the termination of the first period of his literary career. What a disastrous period it was! How fruitful of misadventure, ridicule, catastrophe, and shame! No literary aspirant, destined for imperishable fame, ever made a more inauspicious beginning. In his first voyages on literary waters, Byron encountered stormy weather and rough usage. His first book of poetry resembled Shelley’s maiden volume, in being suppressed for fear of consequences. Ere his first razor had lost its edge, he was assailed by the Edinburgh Review. But having weathered the gale, that almost wrecked The Hours of Idleness, he enjoyed merry seas and favourable breezes. A notability before starting for Greece, he returned from the ‘pilgrimage,’ to spring to the highest pinnacle of fame. On leaving Oxford, Shelley had produced the Victor-and-Cazire book (suppressed for want of originality); two of the feeblest and absurdest novels ever written in the English tongue; the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, that, despite all Hogg says to the contrary, made him the laughing-stock of Oxford; the advertisements of the Poetical Essay that never saw the light; and (with Hogg’s help) the little syllabus that brought him to great grief,—to about the greatest disgrace a young man can undergo at manhood’s threshold, without falling in the grip of the criminal law.

CHAPTER XIV.

Leaving Oxford on 26th March, 1811 (Tuesday), the expelled Oxonians reached London at the close of the day, and after dining at the coffee-house near Piccadilly (where they put up for the night) took tea in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with Shelley’s cousins, described by Hogg as ‘taciturn people, the maxim of whose family appeared to be, that a man should hold his tongue and save his money.’ Though the Groves never wasted words, it is conceivable that their extreme taciturnity on the present occasion was in some degree due to Hogg’s embarrassing presence. In the hearing of the stranger, whom they most likely held accountable for the catastrophe that had befallen their kinsman, they could scarcely talk, even in their usual guarded manner, of the news the visitors brought with them from the seat of learning. ‘Bysshe,’ says Hogg, ‘attempted to talk, but the cousins held their peace, and so conversation remained cousin-bound.’ The position so fruitful of embarrassment cannot have induced the two comrades in misfortune to prolong the visit to a late hour; and it may be presumed that before midnight they were at Piccadilly, in the beds for which the long day on the roof of the stage-coach had disposed them. The next morning they sallied forth to look for lodgings, and before dusk they were settled in the Poland Street lodgings, where they lived together till about 18th April, 1811. Hogg says they ‘lived together nearly a month,’ before he went off to North Wales, whence he journeyed to York, to make the acquaintance of the provincial conveyancer who had undertaken to introduce him to the mysteries of the law. But as they did not take possession of the lodgings till 27th March, 1811, and Shelley’s first letter addressed to his absent friend is dated 18th April, 1811, their joint-tenancy of the Poland Street rooms barely exceeded three weeks.

Mr. Timothy Shelley was not in town when his scapegrace heir alighted from the coach in Piccadilly; but the news of ‘the late occurrence at University College’ was not long in travelling to the Squire of Field Place, who, putting pen to paper just about the time when the naughty boys were settling into their temporary quarters in Poland Street, wrote from Sussex a characteristic note, recalling the invitation Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg had received to visit Field Place in the Easter holidays. Nine days later (5th April, 1811) the honest and kindly gentleman was in town, and writing from the House of Commons a no less characteristic and even more comical letter (vide Hogg’s Life) to Hogg’s father. Thinking it needful in the highest degree that the Oxonian ‘Inseparables’ should be separated, Mr. Timothy Shelley invited Mr. Hogg, senr., to co-operate with him for that end. ‘These youngsters,’ the Member for New Shoreham wrote from the House of Commons, ‘must be parted, and the fathers must exert themselves.’ On the same day the Member for New Shoreham (who without seeing his son had corresponded with him since Lady-day) wrote his ‘dear boy’ a kindly, reasonable, and affectionate letter, to be found in Hogg’s book. Alluding briefly to his son’s serious disgrace, the father expressed sympathy with the offender under the shame and trouble he had brought upon himself by ‘criminal opinions and improper acts,’—no harsh words, surely, for the description of the youngster’s misconduct. In this letter (worded the more cogently because Shelley had already shown his resolve to oppose his father’s wishes) the Squire of Field Place set forth the terms on which he would forgive his errant child: (1) Shelley was directed ‘to go immediately to Field Place and abstain from all communication with Mr. Hogg for some considerable time.’ (2) The Squire wrote to his son, ‘Place yourself under the care and society of such gentleman as I shall appoint, and attend to his instructions.’ The gentleman, who has been charged with driving his boy from his boyhood’s home for publishing The Necessity of Atheism, only required that the lad (ætat. 18) should go straight home, forego the pleasure of Hogg’s society for a time, and pursue his studies under the direction of a private tutor. Were these terms hard and unreasonable? After setting them forth, the Squire no doubt wrote a few big words about his boy’s unjustifiable and wicked and diabolical opinions, in the fashion of fathers of the period. But these were the father’s terms:—Go home, where you will see me next Thursday; keep clear for awhile of your partner in mischief, and be a good boy with the tutor who will be found to take charge of you.

On the morrow (6th April, 1811) the honest and troubled gentleman wrote again (vide Hogg’s Life) to Mr. Hogg the Elder, urging that their boys should be parted, instead of being allowed ‘to go into professions together,’ as they wished. It was the Squire’s intention to use Paley’s arguments for the correction of his dear boy’s erroneous views; to make his young man read Paley’s Natural Theology; to go through the Natural Theology with him. ‘I shall,’ wrote the sorrowful father of Field Place to the other sorrowful father near Stockton-on-Tees, ‘read it with him. A father so employed must impress his mind more sensibly than a stranger.’ This is droll and comical from one point of view, no doubt. But it is also pathetic, and very much to Squire Timothy’s credit.

Hitherto Mr. Timothy Shelley had not seen his son since ‘the late occurrence at University College;’ but on the day following the date of his second letter to Mr. Hogg, senior—i.e. on 7th April, 1811, the first Sunday of the month—the young men dined with the Member for New Shoreham, by invitation, at his hotel (Miller’s) on the Surrey side of the river, hard by Westminster Bridge. Leaving Poland Street at an early hour, the two youngsters prepared themselves for the repast, to which they had been bidden, with a long walk, during which Shelley read aloud several passages, to the excessive ridicule of the Jews and their religion, from some critical work on the Old Testament.

On coming to Miller’s Hotel, with faces brightened by exercise in the spring breezes, and complexions reddened by laughter at their author’s satirical jocosities, they were welcomed with kindness by Mr. Timothy Shelley, and with cordiality by Mr. Graham, the Squire’s ‘factotum.’ The reception was courteous, but the genial warmth and courtesy of Mr. Shelley’s manner did not render Mr. Hogg blind to its comical extravagances. ‘He presently,’ Hogg remarks of the Squire’s demeanour, ‘began to talk in an odd, unconnected manner; scolding, crying, swearing, and then weeping again; no doubt, he went on strangely;’—even as honest gentlemen of an old school were apt to do under impulses of strong and conflicting feelings. Glad to see his boy who had offended him, angry with himself for letting this pleasure appear, and feeling it incumbent on his parental dignity to affect an air of sternness, Mr. Timothy Shelley was stirred far too deeply to play the part he wished to play, and ‘broke down’ in an absurd and rather ludicrous fashion, scolding a little, swearing a great deal, and blubbering hysterically in his want of self-control. Most young men would have been touched by these exhibitions of feeling, but to Hogg and his friend nothing was more obvious than that the ‘old boy’ was going on strangely.

‘What do you think of my father?’ Shelley inquired in a whisper of Hogg, whilst the senior was contending with too powerful emotion.

‘He is not your father,’ Hogg replied slily in reference to the Pater Omnipotens, of whom they had been reading in the satirical treatise on their way to the hotel. ‘It is the God of the Jews: the Jehovah you have been reading about!’—an answer that tickled Shelley’s never fine sense of humour so acutely, that he slipt from the edge of his chair, and ‘laughing aloud with a wild, demoniacal burst of laughter,’ measured his length on the floor, to the surprise and alarm of his father, and Mr. Graham, who hastened to raise him from the ground. If Mr. Shelley the Elder ‘went on strangely,’ Mr. Shelley the Younger cannot be said to have behaved in an orderly and commonplace manner.

Dinner being announced, just as Mr. Timothy Shelley and his factotum had raised the younger Mr. Shelley to his feet, the party went to the meal, which passed off agreeably. After dinner (in the absence of Percy Bysshe), Hogg had some friendly conversation with the Member for New Shoreham, about his perplexing son.

‘You are a very different person, Sir,’ said the Squire, ‘from what I expected to find; you are a nice, moderate, reasonable, pleasant gentleman. Tell me what you think I ought to do with my poor boy. He is rather wild; is he not?’

‘Yes, rather.’

‘Then, what am I to do?’

‘If he had married his cousin, he would perhaps have been less so; he would have been steadier.’

‘It is very probable that he would.’

‘He wants somebody to take care of him—a good wife. What if he were married?’

‘But how can I do that? It is impossible. If I were to tell Bysshe to marry a girl, he would refuse directly. I am sure he would. I know him so well.’

‘I have no doubt he would refuse, if you were to order him to marry; and I should not blame him. But if you were to bring him in contact with some young lady, who, you believed, would make him a suitable wife, without saying anything about marriage, perhaps he would take a fancy to her; and if he did not like her, you could try another.’

It has been remarked by Mr. Rossetti that this conversation accords in some of its particulars with Thornton Hunt’s unsatisfactory evidence, that Shelley indulged at Oxford in dissipation, hurtful to his health. Hogg’s admission that Shelley had been ‘rather wild,’ followed immediately by advice that he should be happily married to a young lady qualified to ‘take care of him,’ would bear this construction; but it may admit of a different interpretation. Young men may be rather wild without being rakish; and rakishness is not the only kind of wildness for which early marriage is often prescribed as a remedy.

Shelley’s reappearance (after executing the errand on which his father had sent him) having put an end to the talk about various young ladies, any one of whom might be appointed to wean him from wildness, tea was served; and after tea there was some conversation on matters pertaining to religion, of which Hogg gives the following example:—

‘There is certainly a God,’ ejaculated the Squire of Field Place abruptly; ‘there can be no doubt of the evidence of a Deity; none whatever.’

No one showing any disposition to question the assertion, the Squire, turning sharply upon Hogg, inquired, ‘You have no doubt on the subject, sir; have you?’

‘None whatever.’

‘If you have, I can prove it to you in a moment.’

‘I have no doubt.’

‘But perhaps you would like to hear my argument?’

‘Very much.’

‘I will read it to you, then,’ exclaimed the Squire, taking out a sheet or two of letter-paper, on which he had jotted down some familiar arguments taken from Paley’s Natural Theology.

‘I have heard this argument before,’ remarked Shelley in an under-tone to Hogg.

A minute or two later, whilst the Squire was still delivering from notes his demonstration of the existence of a Deity, Shelley repeated to Hogg, ‘I have heard this argument before.’

‘They are Paley’s arguments,’ said Hogg.

‘Yes; you are right, sir,’ assented the Squire, as he folded his paper and restored it to his pocket;—adding with delicious frankness and self-complacence, ‘They are Palley’s arguments; I copied them out of Palley’s book this morning myself; but Palley had them originally from me; almost everything in Palley’s book he had from me.’

For a pleasant quarter-of-an-hour readers should refer to Hogg’s diffuse and piquant account of the meeting and talk at Miller’s Hotel, but enough has been taken from the humorous narrative to show how little reason Lady Shelley had for reprehending the severity, which distinguished the Squire’s treatment of Shelley, immediately after his expulsion from Oxford.

On Hogg, the born humourist, it is needless to say that Shelley’s father made a most agreeable impression,—none the less agreeable because his hearty air, grotesque speech, extravagant emotionality, and egregious self-complacence, afforded so much food and many occasions for merriment. To the young man from the north country it was manifested his friend’s father was by ‘no means a bad fellow!’ In later time Hogg used to think with cynical sadness and humorous regret how differently life might have gone with Shelley had he only borne himself to his sire as leal and loving sons are wont to bear themselves to their fathers. Thus thinking, it was small comfort to the biographer to reflect how impossible it was for a man of Shelley’s brilliant genius and poetic sensibility to pursue the path of homely filial duty. Small blame to Hogg that he refrained from reflecting severely on the failings of the son who, instead of gossiping sociably with his sire over the daily bottle or two of old port, was quick to show contempt for his understanding, and ‘to take umbrage at the poor man’s noise and nonsense.’ Loyalty to the former friend forbade the historian to utter all he knew and felt on this subject. It was enough for him to intimate lightly that Shelley was no less to blame than his father for their bitter severance. ‘It is,’ says Hogg, ‘only fair to the poor old governor to add that he was the kind master of old and attached servants, and that his surviving children speak of him at this hour with affection.’

It is, however, a matter of reproach to Hogg, that, taking this view of the elder Mr. Shelley in 1811, he never appears to have urged his friend to behave with filial loyalty and dutifulness to a substantially good father; that, on the contrary, he encouraged the son to make a jest of his sire, to exhibit him to the ridicule of his acquaintance, to write of him in terms of vulgar flippancy as ‘the old boy,’ ‘the old fellow,’ ‘the old buck,’ ‘old Killjoy,’ ‘the enemy,’ and ‘a practitioner of the most consummate hypocrisy,’—all which expressions are used to the Squire’s discredit in his son’s familiar letters to his especial friend, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg.

Seven days had not passed since the dinner at Miller’s Hotel, before the conflict of the father and son resulted in distinct issues. To the paternal order that he should ‘go immediately to Field Place,’ Shelley replied that for the present it was his intention to stay in Poland Street. To the requirement that he should ‘abstain from all communication with Mr. Hogg for a considerable time,’ Shelley (ætat. 18) responded that he could not for a moment think of foregoing the pleasure of his friend’s society. To the requirement that he should submit to the government of the tutor to be selected for him, Shelley replied he would do no such thing. Rejecting his father’s requirements, and assuming that he was the person to offer the terms of reconciliation, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley demanded (1) unrestrained freedom of correspondence with Hogg, and (2) freedom to choose his own profession, as soon as Hogg should enter one of the Four Inns of Court, or apply to any other calling. On these terms, he would consent to visit Field Place and receive his father into favour. On receiving his son’s ultimatum, the Squire of Field Place wrote (14th April, 1811) in great excitement to Mr. C. (a gentleman who acted for Mr. Hogg the Elder) a letter of lively animadversion on the presumption of the two disrespectful, undutiful, ‘opinionated youngsters.’ To his son’s ultimatum, the Squire of Field Place replied by stopping his pocket-money, and bidding him keep away from his boyhood’s home. There being evidence of all this, surely there is good evidence that the future poet was not banished from his home, and denied the society of his mother and sisters, at the instigation of religious intolerance, because he published The Necessity of Atheism.

How, then, did Mr. Timothy Shelley deal with his son on his expulsion from Oxford, when the eighteen-years-old boy was lodging in Poland Street? Did he denounce and discard him? On the contrary, he invited him and his friend in trouble to dinner. Did this hard-hearted, unnatural father at once forbid the boy to come into his presence, and order him to keep away from the home of his infantile years? On the contrary, he bade him go quickly to his mother and sisters, and resolve to be a better boy under the private tutor, who would soon be found to take charge of him, than he had been under his masters at Eton and his tutors at Oxford. Did he speak of the boy as hopelessly bad and unreasonable? By no means. Taking a cheery view of the case, he thought the boy could be brought out of his spiritual disease and mental disorder by a course of ‘Palley.’ And believing that the course of ‘Palley’ would operate more quickly and efficaciously if the reasonings of the divine were enforced by the luminous comments of an equally sagacious and affectionate father, the honest gentleman got down his copy of Paley’s Natural Theology and worked away at it so that he might be ready to be his boy’s preceptor. The absurdity of his proceedings and purpose must be admitted. No doubt, he went on strangely at Miller’s Hotel. His notion that with Paley’s help he could recover his son from infidelity, and bring him back safe and sound to orthodoxy, is exquisitely droll. But one looks in vain to discover unnatural harshness and cruelty in his measures for his son’s benefit. Urging that this troubled father should not be utterly condemned for his action to his son, and speaking of ‘some excuse’ that may be fairly made for his conduct, Lady Shelley (writing from those ‘authentic sources’ which afford her so little information) says:—‘Still, it is to be regretted that a milder course was not pursued towards one who was peculiarly open to the teachings of love.’ If Mr. Shelley did and said a few unreasonable things, when his conciliatory action was answered with unqualified rebellion, it cannot be denied that the line of action he proposed to take to his boy at the end of March and the beginning of April was reasonable, moderate, generous, and affectionate. What could be milder than his requirements, that the eighteen-years-old boy should go home to his mother and sisters, read with a tutor, and desist from intercourse with Hogg ‘for some considerable time,’—not for ever; not for many years; but for some considerable time,—say, till he should come of age and be master of his own actions?

Was this third requirement preposterous? Mr. Shelley had grounds for thinking Hogg a hurtful companion for his boy. Whatever his grounds for it, the opinion was just. Hogg’s influence had been very harmful to Shelley. But for Hogg, it is possible that Shelley would never have been an atheist. It is certain that if he had gone to atheism without Hogg’s help he would have gone to atheism at slower pace. It is certain that Hogg was the influence which moved him to the deed that had caused his expulsion from University College. The two youngsters had got into trouble and dark disgrace together. What was there harsh in the demand that the disastrous association, which had been fruitful of so much evil in less than six months, should be broken for ‘some considerable time?’ Paternal authority is an empty name, if a father in Mr. Timothy Shelley’s position may not say to an eighteen-years-old son in the future poet’s position, ‘Now, my boy, I will do my best for you; but, at least for some time, you must forbear from intercourse with that young scapegrace who was your associate in the ugly business which occasioned your expulsion from Oxford.’

When Lady Shelley speaks of Shelley as ‘one who was peculiarly open to the teachings of love,’ she is not writing true biography, but biographical romance. From the moment, when he comes clearly before us, to the moment when he sunk beneath the angry waves, Shelley never paid any heed to the teachings of the love, if they admonished him to do what he could not do, without sacrifice of his own strongest feelings. Like Byron he had no care for the feelings of the man or woman with whom he came into conflict. In his contention with his father it never seems to have occurred to him that his father had feelings to be considered, rights to be respected. As he wished to associate with the friend whom he was still set on marrying to his sister Elizabeth (without consulting her parents on the subject), he thought it monstrous that he should be required to cease from associating with him for a considerable time. He would not assent to so intolerable a demand. Hogg was everything to him,—his father nothing to him but a dolt, a fool, an ass, a tyrant. It was preposterous that his father should presume to offer him terms. It was for him to offer terms to his father. Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s terms were that his father should make him a sufficient allowance; that he, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, should live where he pleased and do what he pleased; and above all, that he should be free to maintain the closest intercourse with his dear friend, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg. This was modest from a young gentleman (ætat. 18), immediately after his expulsion from his Oxford College!

The ever-choleric Mr. Timothy Shelley was furious for several days, for some few weeks, at these proposals from the young gentleman whom he had hoped, with ‘Palley’s’ help, to bring round to religious orthodoxy; and in his wrath, he said and did foolish things after the wont of extremely angry fathers. He vowed he would ‘stop the supplies,’ and so far as his own pocket was concerned, he did stop them for some few weeks; during which time the naughty boy lived comfortably enough on money lent him by Hogg (who was in funds), money sent to him by his sisters, and money given to him by his uncle, Captain Pilfold. On 18th April, 1811, when his father was in the purple stage of his fury, Shelley received a present of money from his mother, which, however, he returned from some scruple of delicacy or dignity. ‘Mr. Pilfold,’ he wrote on that day from Poland Street to Hogg, ‘has written a very civil letter; my mother intercepted that—sent to my father, and wrote to me to come, inclosing the money. I, of course, returned it.’ The ‘stopping of the supplies’ from the paternal purse made them flow in all the more plentifully—from irregular sources. The exile from his home was therefore in easy circumstances so far as money was concerned. The pictures of the future poet languishing in penury, and menaced with starvation, whilst his wealthy father fared sumptuously, may be tossed aside with other biographic fictions.

Whilst he received no money from his father, the exile of 15 Poland Street was also under order to keep away from Field Place and its inmates,—an order that may perhaps be referred rather to the Squire’s wrath, no less than to a sincere belief that the youngster’s presence there would do his sisters any serious injury; though, doubtless, Mr. Shelley the Elder attributed the prohibition to the more creditable motive. It is also conceivable how the Squire explained the apparent inconsistency of his conduct in forbidding the boy to do at the end of April, what he had wished him to do a fortnight earlier. At the beginning of the month, when he hoped to find his son comparatively docile and tractable after his humiliating misadventure at Oxford, the Member for New Shoreham doubtless imagined the scapegrace (out of respect to a paternal injunction to that effect) would refrain from talking with his sister Elizabeth on religious questions. His son’s defiance of parental authority, in respect to his intercourse with Hogg, may have caused his father to assume he would be no less unwilling to respect parental orders touching his intercourse with his eldest sister,—an assumption that would put Mr. Timothy Shelley in the way to argue that he was only actuated by care for his daughter, in forbidding her brother to approach her. If the Squire of Field Place put the matter thus to his own conscience, he only contrived to deceive himself as resentful gentlemen are wont to deceive themselves. Anyhow, he was determined for a few weeks to keep the brother and sister apart.

The order to keep away from Field Place and from his sister, of course, made Shelley desirous of visiting them. In no hurry to return home, whilst his father wished him to go there quickly, Shelley had no sooner been commanded to refrain from entering Field Place than he resolved to go there.

On hearing that, if he tried to visit his sister at Field Place, she would be removed from home, the young gentleman declared he would follow her, whithersoever she should be taken. Jubilant over an assurance that ‘the estate was entailed on him,’—totally out of the power of ‘the enemy’ (i.e. his father) he declared his intention of entering the enemy’s dominions (i.e. Field Place) as soon as he wished to do so. He would walk into Field Place, whether his father liked or disliked it. And on this point he was as good as his word: for returning to the place something sooner than the Squire wished to see him there, he chuckled over the inefficacy of his father’s arrangements for putting restrictions on his intercourse with his eldest sister.

The quarrel of the father and son was at its fiercest heat when, on 24th April, 1811, they met one another in the passage of John Grove’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; a scene occurring which (if Shelley reported it truthfully to Hogg) was creditable to neither of them, but far more discreditable to the good feeling of the son than to the good sense of the sire. If the father did ill in returning an inquiry for his health with a look as black as a thundercloud, the son did worse by answering the look with a bow, whose extreme lowness rendered the formal show of obeisance a mere act of insult.

That even in his wrath the Squire of Field Place was not wholly unreasonable is shown by the shortness of the time that had elapsed since he ‘stopt the supplies,’ when he consented to make his son an allowance of 200l. a-year. Only five days after the exchange of offensive greetings in John Grove’s passage, the future poet was in high hope that his father would forthwith allow him 200l. a-year.

Sixteen days later (15th May, 1811), the arrangement was made on conditions that left Shelley free to live and go wherever he liked, so long as he kept away from York, whither Hogg had gone for twelve months, to read law and acquire the rudiments of legal draughting in a conveyancer’s chambers. The scapegrace of Field Place had reason to exult at the liberal terms, for which he was indebted no less to his father’s placability than to the Duke of Norfolk’s influence over the Member for New Shoreham. So soon did the cruel and parsimonious father renew the current of ‘supplies,’ after stopping it in a season of fierce anger. No more than seven weeks and two days had passed since his expulsion from Oxford, when the future poet was enjoying a sufficient income, granted on no ignominious conditions.

The smallness of this allowance having been often adduced in evidence of Mr. Timothy Shelley’s niggardliness to his eldest son, readers should recall what they have already been told respecting the pecuniary circumstances of the Squire of Field Place up to the date of his father’s death, till which event he was by no means wealthy for his social position. Dependent on his father, who, loving money more passionately as his fingers grew more feeble, was incessantly bickering with his heir-apparent about the excesses of his expenditure, Mr. Timothy Shelley (with several children on his hands) could not make his son a larger allowance. Two hundred a-year was a far better bachelor’s income seventy years since than it is now-a-days. Thirty years later it was still regarded as more than a sufficient allowance for a briefless barrister. Shelley was still only eighteen years old when it was allotted to him. Moreover at the time of the arrangement, it was not contemplated that it would be his only means of subsistence; for it was made in anticipation that he would be a frequent visitor at his father’s house. Had he from early boyhood lived harmoniously with his father, and been a loving and dutiful son, Shelley in his nineteenth year could not reasonably have looked for a larger income from his father during his grandfather’s life. Getting so handsome an allowance from his father so soon after his expulsion from Oxford, he was treated in money-matters with liberality by the father, who is generally conceived to have treated him with vindictive stinginess.

These are the facts of the matter about which Lady Shelley writes in these words:—

As Lady Shelley’s published book about her husband’s father is still regarded as a work of authority, readers should examine this curious conglomerate of misrepresentations. (1) Instead of being exasperated by his son’s avowal of atheism, Mr. Timothy Shelley, though naturally shocked and grieved by the incident, treated the eighteen-years-old youngster with affectionate consideration and tenderness, in respect to that serious offence. (2) Instead of excluding him from Field Place for that reason, he told him to go home quickly, when the boy’s Atheism was his only reason for displeasure. (3) Mr. Timothy Shelley’s vehement anger with the youngster was due to his contumacious refusal to comply with the reasonable requirement touching his intercourse with Hogg. (4) Lady Shelley speaks of ‘the young controversialist,’ as though the profession of atheism were one of the Liberal professions, and as though Mr. Timothy Shelley should have been grateful to the boy for embracing so honourable a vocation. (5) Instead of inflicting a bitter pang on his sensitively affectionate feelings, the sentence of exclusion from his boyhood’s home merely caused Shelley a little irritation and a vast amount of amusement. (6) Instead of ‘determining to bear it, for the sake of what he believed to be right and true,’ Shelley resolved to treat the sentence of exclusion with contempt; to go to Field Place whenever it should please him to go there, ‘to enter his father’s dominions, preserving a quaker-like carelessness of opposition ... and turning a deaf ear to any declamatory objections,’—and he was as good as his word. The sentence of exclusion had been delivered barely a month, when (15th May, 1811) Shelley was back at Field Place; from which date till the middle of July, 1811, when he went to stay with his cousins at Radnorshire, he remained in Sussex staying alternately with his uncle Pilfold at Cuckfield, and with his mother and sisters in the home of his boyhood, from which he is said to have been so barbarously excluded. The sentence ceased to be operative as soon as the exile cared to disregard it. Keeping out of his father’s way, so long as the ‘old buck’ was in his hottest ‘rage’ (to use the gentle Shelley’s nice way of talking of his father and his father’s displeasure), the exile of Poland Street went down to Field Place as soon as he thought life in the country would be pleasanter than life in London. The sentence of exclusion was from the first a mere brutum fulmen. It is absurd to speak of this exclusion as a real exclusion. At the worst it was nothing more than such an exclusion from his boyhood’s home, as most undergraduates undergo, when they are ‘rusticated’ for one or two terms.

It is needful to return to Poland Street, and the time when the exiles lodged there. Reading divers books, besides The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, writing letters, and blotting no little paper in the composition of essays that never found publishers, the expelled students lived as far as they could in the manner of Oxonians. The cousins Grove dropt in upon them in the afternoons, and were less taciturn than they had been in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on the evening of March 26th. Sometimes by themselves, sometimes with a Grove to conduct them by ‘the shortest cuts,’ the exiles perambulated the town, and amused themselves after the manner of young gentlemen from the country, thrown upon the London pavements seventy years since. One day they dined in the chambers of a smart Templar (given to talk about duchesses and countesses) on ‘steaks and other Temple messes.’ Another day they roamed about Kensington Gardens to the delight of Shelley, who was charmed with the sylvan aspect of the timbered lawns. On a third day they walked out to Mrs. Fenning’s boarding-school for young ladies on Clapham Common, where Shelley saw his little sister Hellen, scampering about with her light locks streaming over her shoulders. One of their favourite places for lounging was St. James’s Park, where Bysshe, after watching the soldiers at drill, inveighed against standing armies, as hostile to the liberties of the people. At least on one occasion Shelley was seen at the British Forum near Covent Garden, where he harangued the assembled Radicals on the vices of all governments:—the sentiments of the orator being so acceptable to his auditors that, when he ceased to scream at them in his shrillest notes, they rushed upon him to discover who he was and whence he came,—inquiries to which the apostle of liberty (with a large stock of aliases at command) replied with a false name and address.

Because the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things was advertised in the Times of the 10th April, and 11th April, 1811, and because Hogg says never a word about that perplexing publication (that in all probability was never published), Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy maintains that the poem was on sale during that month in London, and that (without letting Hogg know aught of the matter), Shelley made daily runs from Poland Street to Messrs. B. Crosby and Co.’s shop, to inquire how much the sale of the poem was doing for Mr. Finerty’s advantage. It may be taken for certain that if Shelley made daily calls on the booksellers, Hogg knew why his friend called on them. It may also be assumed that, instead of appearing in the Times because the poem was then on sale, the advertisements appeared in the morning journals because their insertion had been ordered (with the usual prepayment) from Oxford some three weeks earlier, when there was, perhaps, an intention to publish the poem, that probably never was published. But if he never crossed the bookseller’s threshold, Shelley was seen more than once at Mr. Abernethy’s anatomical lectures, and oftener in the dissecting-room of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Charles Henry Grove (nearly two years Shelley’s junior) was at that time a medical student.

Hogg would have us believe that to his people in Durham Co. and Yorkshire, Mr. Timothy Shelley (known to them by his not uniformly perspicuous epistles) appeared a ‘bore of the first magnitude, and a serious impediment to carrying into effect any ordinary arrangement.’ Facts, however, make it certain that Mr. Hogg, the Elder of Norton, agreed with this bore of the first magnitude in thinking their boys must be parted, and kept from one another, at least for a considerable period. The letter, in which Mr. Shelley spoke his mind to his afflicted fellow-sufferer, through the afflicted fellow-sufferer’s London agent, was dated 14th of April, 1811. Four days later (18th April, 1811), Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg was on the roof of a stage-coach, journeying from London towards North Wales, where he was allowed to visit a few friends, before going into pupilage under the conveyancer at York. The dates are eloquent. The joint rebellion against parental authority, which put Shelley in conflict with the Squire of Field Place, was fruitful of a paternal command to Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, that he should pack his traps and move out of London without delay. Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg did as he was bid, and for nearly twenty weeks the young men were separated. Thus rudely severed by domestic tyranny, they cheered one another through the post.

On Hogg’s withdrawal from London, Shelley had more time and a stronger disposition for the society of the Westbrooks, of Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. Something has already been said of charming Harriett Westbrook, of the influences that caused Shelley to be curious of her, of the circumstances under which he made the young lady’s acquaintance, and of the correspondence he held with her through the post during his second term of residence at Oxford. But the time has come for further particulars about the family, of which the poet became a member by marriage. The family consisted of Mr. John Westbrook (who must have been in the main a respectable person, as so little has been discovered to his discredit by the many persons who, at divers times, have hunted for evidence against him), his wife Mrs. Westbrook (‘a nonentity,’ as Mr. Rossetti styles her, so far as the Shelleyan drama is concerned), his daughter Harriett—the pretty child with whom Shelley fell in love, and her elder sister Elizabeth,[7] who has the reputation of making up the match, and the misery between her sister and the poet. The private residence of these people was in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square,—not far from Mr. Westbrook’s place of business in Mount Street.

Who was John Westbrook?—What was John Westbrook?—What was his place of business? Mr. Westbrook was a successful taverner, and as he was sometimes styled ‘Jew Westbrook,’ though he was Christian, it may be assumed that he was a taverner who (after the wont of successful tavern-keepers in London’s western quarters, in the earlier decades of the present century) lent money to those of his modish and more trustworthy customers, who cared to borrow it of him ‘on the usual terms.’ The development of modern club-life has affected in various ways the character and quality of the taverns in the western quarters of London, and nearly extinguished the sociable, and, in some degree, confidential relations that sometimes existed between the keepers and frequenters of those places of entertainment. Before clubs were numerous, modish gentlemen about town lived very much at their favourite taverns (or coffee-houses as they were usually styled), eating and drinking and seeing company at them, using them in fact very much as a gentleman about town now-a-days uses his club. Using his coffee-house in this fashion, it was natural for the gentleman about town, after losing heavily at cards, or emptying his pockets at the hazard-table, to look to his tavern-keeper for relief from urgent financial embarrassment. On the other hand, the business of a money-lender fitted in excellently well with the business of coffeehouse-keeper. Living sociably with his regular customers, who gossiped of one another as well as with one another, the tavern-keeper gathered from their gossip no little information that saved him from losses in the money-lending department of his business. Mr. Westbrook was a coffeehouse-keeper whose daughters had heard him spoken of as ‘Jew Westbrook.’ As he was a Christian by profession and bore a surname which countenances the assumption, it may be assumed that he was sometimes spoken of as ‘Jew Westbrook,’ not because he was of Israel, nor because he had an Israelitish look, but because he was known to lend money: ‘Jew’ being a familiar designation in the days of our grandfathers for every man of business who lent small sums of money, for short periods, on personal security.

Mr. Westbrook’s two-fold vocation may not have been in the highest social favour, but it was followed by many respectable men, and there is evidence that Mr. Westbrook was one of its most creditable followers. Living with the fear of God and good society before his eyes, he shaped his ways discreetly. Whilst his tavern was well spoken of for its wines and dinners, no evil stories were told of the transactions of the little parlour in which he counted out his money. With the views and tastes of a self-respecting and slightly ambitious tradesman, he was not wholly without the manners and feelings of a gentleman. Mrs. Westbrook (the nonentity) may have been a cook in early life; if so, she was a good cook, for Mr. Westbrook was not at all likely to have married a bad one. If he was a butler before keeping a tavern, we may be sure he was an honest butler. Without having grown inordinately rich by lawful business, he had acquired the measure of wealth that is styled a ‘comfortable independence’ or ‘moderate fortune.’ It is to his credit that on rising to easy affluence he withdrew his wife and daughters from the coffee-house, which was necessarily at times a rather noisy place, and planted them in a private house, where they lived as far as possible after the manner of gentle people. It is to his credit that he was at pains and charges to rear his daughters as far as possible to be ladies. Miss Elizabeth Westbrook and Miss Harriett Westbrook were every whit as well educated as Shelley’s sisters, that is to say, in all matters of book-learning and school-culture.

Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, late of University College, Oxford, had not been a week in Poland Street without calling at the house, where he made the acquaintance of the young lady, with whom he had been corresponding for more than a couple of months. In walking out to Clapham Common he was moved by a desire to see his sisters’ schoolfellow no less than by a desire to see his sisters. If she was not a weekly boarder at the Clapham School, Harriett used to visit her father’s house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, during the scholastic terms, and on these trips to town used to bring the poet money from his sisters. He saw her also during the Easter holidays.

Having seen something of the Westbrooks, whilst Hogg was staying in Poland street, Shelley saw more of them when Hogg had left London. Hogg had scarcely started for North Wales, when Miss Elizabeth Westbrook called upon the future poet at his lodgings, bringing her sister with her. On the evening of the 18th of April, 1811, the day of Hogg’s departure, Shelley wrote to his friend, ‘Miss Westbrook has this moment called on me with her sister. It certainly was very kind of her.’ Three days later (Sunday, 21st April, 1811), Shelley ‘took the Sacrament’ with the lady who had paid him so acceptable an attention. Another three days later (24th April, 1811), Shelley wrote to the same correspondent of the elder Miss Westbrook’s kindness, charity, and goodness. In a subsequent letter, recalling words he had uttered to her discredit, he commended her for cleverness. Thinking so well of the lady, with whom he had so lately taken the Sacrament, it was natural for Shelley to think he ought to illuminate her, as well as her sister, out of the Christian religion. Resolute to kill religious intolerance by killing creed, and to slay creed by converting people to his own views, he thought he should deal heavy and crushing blows to prevalent superstition by withdrawing John Westbrook’s daughters from the faith in which they had been educated. ‘The fiend, the wretch,’ he wrote of Christianity to Hogg on 28th April, 1811, ‘shall fall! Harriett will do for one of the crushers, and the eldest, Elizabeth, with some training, will do too.’

From the date of Hogg’s departure from London (18th April) to the middle of May, when he went into Sussex, Shelley saw much of both sisters. Seeing Harriett in Chapel Street, he saw her also at the Clapham school, which he described as the young lady’s ‘prison-house.’ Accompanying Elizabeth in an excursion to the ‘prison-house,’ he on one occasion spent two hours, walking about Clapham Common with the two sisters. On another occasion, he hastened in the evening (at the elder sister’s invitation) to Chapel Street, where he found Harriett ill and suffering from headache. After talking for some time with the elder sister, on love and other interesting subjects, he found himself closeted with Harriett, in the absence of Elizabeth, who left the boy and girl together: her complaisance going so far that Shelley sate in private conference with the beauty of the Clapham boarding-school till past midnight. Shelley, of course, availed himself of so good an opportunity for enlarging the child’s views of love and religion. By this time, Harriett had learnt a good deal on these matters from her future husband, and had proved so apt a pupil as to be in disgrace at Clapham for uttering sentiments of his teaching. The girls of the school were holding aloof from Harriett, on account of her awfully wicked opinions: some of them even going so far as to call her ‘an abandoned wretch.’ Shelley was under the impression that his little sister Hellen was the only one of the girls brave enough to hold friendly intercourse with Harriett, under the odium she had provoked. In his delight at his little sister’s courage, he determined to seize the earliest opportunity of illuminating her out of the Christian faith. ‘There are,’ he wrote to Hogg, ‘hopes of this dear little girl: she would be a divine little scion of infidelity. I think my lesson to her must have taken effect.’ Thus he was already taking measures to convert his little sister (still in her thirteenth year) to atheism. At Keswick (1811-12) Shelley told Southey (vide Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, 1881) that he endeavoured to make proselytes to atheism in Mrs. Fenning’s school; that he succeeded in making a proselyte of Harriett; and that he married her, because she was expelled from the school for accepting his doctrine, and doing her best to induce her schoolfellows to accept it. ‘One of the girls,’ Southey wrote to Shelley in August, 1820, ‘was expelled for the zeal with which she entered into your views, and you made her the most honourable amends in your power by marrying her.... I had this from your own lips.’ The words thus spoken by Shelley to Southey must be read with suspicion, like all Shelley’s other statements about himself and his own affairs. There is the more need for caution in this case, as Shelley certainly suffered from delusions at Keswick, and made Southey other statements clearly referable to hallucination. But his statements at Keswick, respecting his measures for making proselytes at Clapham in the previous spring, are notably confirmed in some particulars by what he wrote at the time to Hogg, of his measures for illuminating Harriett Westbrook and his little sister Hellen.

Writing from Field Place to Hogg on 16th June, 1811, Shelley says, ‘I shall see you in July. I am invited to Wales, but I shall go to York; what shall we do? How I long again for your conversation!’ the invitation being to Cwm Elan, the place of his cousin, Thomas Grove, five miles distant from Rhayader, Radnorshire, whither he went for three or four weeks, towards the middle of July; one at least of his motives for the trip to Wales being that he might stay with the Westbrooks at Aberystwith. Writing from Field Place on 21st June, 1811, to Hogg, at York, Shelley says, ‘I shall leave Field Place in a fortnight. Old Westbrook has invited me to accompany him and his daughters to a house they have at Aberystwith, in Wales. I shall stay about a week with him in town; then I shall come to see you and get lodgings.’ Hence, at the date of this epistle, the writer’s purpose was to leave Field Place somewhere about 5th July, and, after staying a week under Mr. Westbrook’s roof, in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, to go viâ York to Wales, for the visits to Cwm Elan and Aberystwith. Changing his plans (for reasons to be mentioned in a later page), he deferred the visit to York, and went by a less circuitous route to Rhayader in Radnorshire, whence he wrote to Hogg somewhere about the middle of July, ‘Miss Westbrook, Harriett, has advised me to read Mrs. Opie’s Mother and Daughter. She has sent it hither, and has desired my opinion with earnestness.’ A few days later he wrote to Hogg, without dating his letter, ‘I shall see the Miss Westbrooks again soon; they were very well in Condowell, when I heard last; they then proceed to Aberystwith, where I shall meet them.’ Yet some other few days later (also in an undated epistle), he writes to Hogg, ‘Your jokes on Harriett Westbrook amuse me; it is a common error for people to fancy others in their own situation, but if I know anything about love, I am not in love. I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.’ This disclaimer by Shelley of love for Harriett Westbrook, when he had for months been in love with her, may well remind readers of the way in which Byron disclaimed (in his private journal) all love for Miss Milbanke, when he had for months been loving her. ‘I am not in love,’ Shelley wrote from Wales within six weeks of eloping with Harriett Westbrook. ‘What an odd situation and friendship is ours! without one spark of love on either side!’ Byron wrote in his journal of the lady, to whom he had already made one offer and was still yearning to make his wife.

Including the time spent in journeying to and fro between London and Cwm Elan, Shelley spent some three weeks and three or four days on the Welsh trip, which he made in the hope of staying with the Westbrooks at Aberystwith. Leaving him in Radnorshire readers should return to the spring of the year, in order to take a view of the future poet’s relations with his sister, his mother and his Uncle Pilfold, from the date of his expulsion from Oxford to the midsummer of 1811.

Mr. Timothy Shelley’s withdrawal of the invitation he had given Hogg to visit Field Place, and his subsequent conflict with his son, did not cause the young men to relinquish their hope of becoming brothers-in-law. On the contrary, the new obstacles to the achievement of their purpose only quickened their desire for the realization of the romantic project. Whilst Shelley yearned to call Hogg his brother, the vein of romance, that mingled with the north-countryman’s lively humour and cynicism, caused him to be enamoured of the young lady, who was known to him only through her poetical compositions, her letters to her brother, and his report of her personal, mental, and moral endowments. But the brother, who loved her passionately so long as she worshipped him without presuming to oppose him in anything, had not been many days in conflict with his father, before he was disappointed in his sister, discovered faults in her poetry, suspected he had thought too highly of her intellect and courage, saw reason to bewail her mental narrowness, and to fear she was not worthy to be the wife of his incomparable friend. What caused this change of feeling and opinion?

On seeing the goal to which her brother’s influence and cautious teaching would carry her, Elizabeth started back in horror. Trustful in his superior wisdom so long as he only required her to think the legends of Christianity were in some particulars fabulous, she fell away from her confidence in the brother who had proclaimed himself an atheist. Instructed that Hogg’s influence had brought her brother to this extreme point of infidelity, she was of opinion that her father was right in determining to separate Bysshe from so hurtful a friend. Thinking that in this determination her father was only showing proper care for his son’s welfare, she thought Bysshe’s opposition to his father’s will undutiful and wicked. She was not brave enough to deny the existence of God; she had the courage to tell her brother he was not behaving like a good son. In the religious conflict, she was on the side of the Almighty. In the domestic conflict, she went with her father. No wonder Bysshe was disappointed by her servility and meanness of spirit. Hogg had barely left London when he was informed by Shelley of his sister’s deflection from the path of religious freedom and philosophy,—that she was lost to them. Hogg’s reply to this melancholy announcement was to the effect that, though lost for the moment, she was not lost for ever,—a sentiment which, on 26th April, 1811, moved the exile of Poland Street, to reply, ‘She is not lost for ever? How I hope that may be true! but I fear I can never ascertain; I can never influence an amelioration, as she does not any longer permit a philosopher to correspond with her. She talks of duty to her Father. And this is your amiable religion.’

Instead of writing to him in her old vein of enthusiastic and worshipful admiration, Elizabeth had the presumption to remind him of his and her duty to their parents; sending him the letters that moved him to charge her with ‘talking cant and twaddle.’ Had he not cause to think with sorrow and bitterness of the ‘young female,’ who, after asserting for a brief while her ‘claim to an unfettered use of reason,’ had returned to the sway of the bigots. How could he be sanguine of again reclaiming her from the darkness of mediæval superstition to the clear sunshine of philosophy, when to do so he must conquer her countless hateful prejudices, teach her to despise the world’s opinion; nerve her to repudiate the doctrines of ‘the tremendous Gregory,’ and purge her mind of the absurd notion that she ought to respect her father’s wishes. Fretted by her letters, he was depressed by her subsequent silence. On returning to Field Place in the middle of May, 1811, it was a relief to him to learn that, instead of resulting from unconcern for his misery, this silence was due to an attack of scarlet fever. At times, during her convalescence from this illness, he could hope faintly that even yet she would show herself worthy of his former confidence, and not unworthy to be the wife of his incomparable Hogg. But these passages of flickering hope closed in a renewal of his conviction, that she was far too weak a creature for the high place and service to which he had too hastily appointed her. There were moments when, instead of thinking her changed for the worse, he attributed her apparent deterioration to his own recently acquired power of perceiving mental and moral infirmities to which he had been formerly blinded by fraternal partiality. Possibly the sister, whom he used to adore and extol to Hogg, had been a creature of his imagination. Obviously it was his duty to put this view of the case before Hogg, so that so excellent a man should not be under misconceptions, arising from a friend’s imaginativeness and delusive speech, link himself for life with an uncongenial and miserably insufficient spouse. To Shelley it was no small trouble that his pen was powerless to make Hogg believe, either that Elizabeth was greatly altered, or that she had been greatly misrepresented to him. Whilst the humorous Hogg laughed secretly at the change of Shelley’s regard for his sister, the romantic Hogg declined to think either that she had changed for the worse, or that she had been offered in delusive colours to his fancy. To the humorous and romantic law student, it was clear that the change in Elizabeth was wholly referable to her brother’s changefulness, and to the lightness and activity of his imagination. Whilst Hogg refused to be enlightened, Shelley despaired of showing him by written words, so much less potent than speech, how ‘a change, a great and important change, had taken place in’ the girl who had been offered to him in marriage. Oh, that he could speak with his dear Hogg face to face! ‘Unwilling as I am,’ Shelley wrote from Horsham, on 16th June, 1811, ‘conviction stares me in the face. Oh, that you were here!’

This wish may have caused Hogg to entertain the notion of making a clandestine visit to Field Place, to inspect the home of the young lady he hoped to marry, and to get a furtive view of her personal attractions, which were still known to him only by her brother’s report. Or the wish may have been followed by a definite proposal from Bysshe that his friend should come to him. Anyhow, the friends now entertained a project for seeing one another in Sussex.

The Squire having recalled his invitation to Hogg, and Shelley (in consideration of his 200l. a-year allowance being under bond to hold no personal communication with his former college-friend), Hogg could not visit Field Place openly. It was therefore arranged that he should enter the house secretly, and by night, and that during his clandestine sojourn in the mansion, he should share Shelley’s study and bedroom,—two rooms never entered by Elizabeth (under the new rules for limiting her intercourse with her brother), and never entered by any one but Shelley himself, and the servant who attended to them. Taking his sleep by day, it was arranged that Hogg should take his exercise by night, when he would be able to pass through a window into the garden without fear of being observed. Through the same window, commanding a view of the lawn, he would be able to get a view of Elizabeth, when she walked in the garden. This project for a secret meeting of the separated ‘Inseparables’ at Field Place was dropt, probably on account of the risks the conspirators would run in carrying it into effect. But though it was not pursued to a point, at which the intruder could have been ejected ignominiously from the Sussex mansion, the boyish scheme came to the Squire’s knowledge,—possibly from the lips of a treacherous servant, in whom the future poet had confided; but more probably from a letter Shelley had written and forgotten to post to his especial friend. The project for a clandestine meeting at Field Place having fallen to the ground, Shelley (albeit, bound by honour, and the terms of his 200l. a-year allowance to have no personal intercourse with Hogg) bethought himself he would go to Wales viá York, and pass a few days with his peculiar friend at the archiepiscopal city. Could he do so without risk of forfeiting his allowance, he would go there openly on the way to Wales. Should ‘old Killjoy’ be too sharp for him he would outwit the ‘old buck’ by running from Wales to York under the assumed name of Peyton, in order that his movements should be less likely to come to the knowledge of the tyrant, who eventually threatened to stop the allowance, should his son carry out his purpose of paying Hogg a visit.

Too prudent to take openly a step that might result in a withdrawal of the allowance, and at the same time too wary to ask for a direct liberation from his promise to keep away from Hogg, the wily and diplomatic Shelley bethought himself of alluding to his purpose of visiting York in a letter, which his father might neglect to answer, or might answer without referring to the particular project. In either of those cases silence could be construed as consent; and to any subsequent expressions of displeasure at his breach of a chief article of their agreement, the son could reply by pleading that he had not gone to York without giving his father timely notice of his wish, or without grounds for supposing he had his father’s tacit permission to go there. In thus ‘trying it on’ with ‘the old buck,’ at a peculiarly inauspicious moment, Shelley encountered a rebuff for which he was not unprepared. Instead of overlooking the announcement, or treating it with indifference, the Squire of Field Place answered promptly, ‘Go to York if you like; but not with my money.’ Finding his father thus resolute in holding him to the terms of their compact, Shelley deferred his trip to the north, and went straight to Radnorshire. At the same time he determined that before many weeks had passed he would go to York under a false name, and breaking his promise do secretly what he dared not do openly. ‘Do not think, however, but that I shall come to see you long before you come to reside in London; but open warfare will never do, and Mr. Peyton, which will be my nom-de-guerre, will easily swallow up Mr. Shelley.’ In a later letter from Radnorshire, Shelley says of his motives for deceiving his father in this business:—‘When I come, I will not come under my own name. It were to irritate my father needlessly; this is entirely a philautian argument, but without the stream, of which he is the fountain-head, I could not get on. We must live; that is, we must eat, drink, and sleep, and money is the necessary procurer of these things!’ This from the young gentleman whose averseness to underhand ways is extolled so cordially by Lady Shelley!

Whilst the future poet was thus at open war and hollow truce with his father, the evidence is conclusive that he was treated (from the date of his expulsion from Oxford to the date of his first marriage) with sympathetic and conciliatory tenderness by his mother, who has been charged by successive historians with coldness and severity towards her perplexing and troublesome son. In the letter (of 28th April, 1811), which declares his disgust at the intolerance of his sister, who ‘talks cant and twaddle,’ Shelley speaks of his mother as a woman ‘who is mild and tolerant,’ though ‘narrow-minded.’ On the 15th of May, when the exile has come to terms with his father, and returned to the home from which he had been so inhumanly excluded, Shelley writes to Hogg, ‘My mother is quite rational.’ She says, ‘I think prayer and thanksgiving are of no use. If a man is a good man, philosopher, or Christian, he will do very well in whatever future state awaits us. This I call liberality.’ It was not in the nature of the callow philosopher and atheist, who wrote so bitterly of his sister’s ‘cant and twaddle,’ to bear this evidence to his mother’s liberality, had she vexed him with sorrowful censure or irritated him with bootless opposition. Between the naturally indignant father and the unnaturally rebellious son, this anxious and sorely troubled wife and mother seems to have played a difficult part with exemplary dutifulness and affectionateness to the husband she honoured and the boy she loved. It is conceivable, that once and again the Squire of Field Place may have had grounds for charging her with defective loyalty during the cruel contention, but the unruly boy certainly had no right to complain of the imperfect devotion of the mother who, in her desire to hold his affection and confidence, assured him she was tenderly interested in his friend at York.

Yet biographers have insisted that Shelley suffered in heart and fortune from the intolerance and frigid hardness of his mother; the intolerant mother who spoke to him on their differences of religious opinion with so much leniency and forbearance and large-hearted sympathy that he was constrained to extol her liberality: the unsympathetic mother who won so large a measure of his confidence, that he submitted some of Hogg’s letters to her perusal, and (probably because he had cautiously sounded her on the subject) was assured she would not use her influence to prevent the marriage of his sister to his friend.

To complete the view of the future poet’s relations with the principal members of his familiar circle, one must glance at the way in which he was treated by his Uncle Pilfold, and the characteristic way in which he repaid the cheery sailor for his good services. Instead of eyeing him askance, regarding him coldly, holding aloof from him, denouncing him as an incorrigible young reprobate, this kindly uncle grasped his nephew by the hand, as though it were a greater honour to be expelled from Oxford than to win ‘the Newdigate.’ Welcoming the boy to his house, the old sailor opened at the same moment his heart and his purse to the youngster in disgrace. When Mr. Timothy Shelley’s wrath at his boy’s rebellion had in ten days or a fortnight scolded off its fiercest heat, Uncle Pilfold became a mediator between the father and son, inducing the former to let the boy have intercourse with his sister, and at the same time making the latter see that he must concede something to his father who, though he had gone a deuced deal too far in stopping the supplies, was not without grounds for displeasure. ‘I am now with my uncle,’ the future poet wrote from Cuckfield to Hogg, on Sunday, 19th May, 1811; ‘he is a very hearty fellow, and has behaved very nobly to me, in return for which I illuminated him. A physician, named Dr. J——, dined with us last night, who is a red-hot saint; the Captain attacked him, warm from The Necessity, and the Doctor went away very much shocked.’ Grateful for his uncle’s kindness, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley rewarded him with characteristic munificence,—by illuminating him out of Christianity.

What reason had Shelley to complain of the way in which he was treated by his kindred in the season of his heavy disgrace? Expelled from Oxford for the gravest offence of which an undergraduate could be guilty, he was enjoined by his father to go home before being placed under a sufficient tutor. Having refused to obey his father’s orders, he was angrily told to keep away from the home he had declined to visit, when ordered to do so. Consenting for a few weeks to this barbarous exclusion from his boyhood’s home,—an exclusion which he knew he could terminate at any moment by simply walking into the house, and which he did terminate by that simple process,—the exile passed a few weeks very agreeably in London. During this so-called exclusion and banishment he was in affectionate communication with his mother, his sisters, his Uncle Pilfold, and his cousins Grove. On returning to his ‘boyhood’s home,’ within a month or five weeks of the sentence of exclusion, he was received with a measure of affectionate indulgence and consideration by his mother, that may well have surprised him. He was also treated affectionately by his sister Elizabeth, though she kept away from his study, and instead of assenting to his sceptical opinions, met them with much exasperating ‘cant and twaddle,’ and made him despair of illuminating her into a fit mate for his incomparable Hogg. At the same time he was treated with substantial kindness by his father (who, in return for a liberal allowance, only required him to desist for awhile from personal intercourse with Hogg), and with a flattering show of sympathetic concern by his father’s patron,—the Duke of Norfolk. Unless Shelley’s cousin, Charles Henry Grove, is in error as to the year, his Grace of Norfolk and the Squire of Field Place talked (in the spring of 1811) over a plan for bringing the youngster into Parliament, on the earliest opportunity, as Member for Horsham. It was thus that the future poet was persecuted by his kindred, and thus that he endured persecution at their hands in the months ensuing immediately on his expulsion. There must be an end of the wild nonsense about the poet’s sufferings for truth and conscience at this stage of his career. Perhaps no youngster was ever treated more tenderly by his nearest kindred, so soon after earning signal disgrace by extravagant misbehaviour.

Relinquishing his design to go to York before going to Radnorshire, when he saw the breach of promise and act of disobedience would be fruitful of pecuniary inconvenience, Shelley went (as we have seen) direct to Cwm Elan, Rhayader, in the middle of July, 1811, with the intention of staying there till the Westbrooks should have arrived at Aberystwith, when it was his purpose to run over to them, and enjoy the society of the young lady, with whom he was not at all in love. Had the Westbrooks’ movements accorded with Mr. Bysshe Shelley’s anticipations and wishes, there is reason to think he would have eloped with the sixteen-years-old school girl from Aberystwith, instead of eloping with her from London. Possibly on leaving town he had not fully made up his mind to do so. Possibly he took coach for Radnorshire, with no more definite programme of proceedings than that in the course of three weeks he should be with the Westbrooks at Aberystwith; after which event he would, somehow or other, be happy with Harriett for ever. It is, however, sufficiently manifest from the records, that he accepted his cousin’s invitation to Cwm Elan, because it afforded him a pretext for going to Wales, which would cover the real purpose of the journey from his father, and because the neighbourhood of Rhayader would be a convenient resting-place, whence he could slip away to Aberystwith, some thirty miles distant. Moreover, it is clear in the superlative degree that Shelley and Harriett had both set their hearts on meeting one another at Aberystwith; and that it was an occasion of the sharpest disappointment to both of them, when, after proceeding towards Aberystwith, as far as the place, called Condowell in one of Shelley’s letters, Mr. Westbrook suddenly faced about, and returned to London, with the intention of sending his younger daughter again to boarding-school, when she imagined herself to have ‘left school for good.’