time I called. Mr. Rogers was regular in his daily visits; and Lord Holland, he told me, was very kind.

Lord Byron, at this juncture, took the blame of the quarrel upon himself. He even enlisted the self-love of his new visitor so far on the lady's side, as to tell him " that she liked my poem, and had compared his temper to that of Giovanni, the heroine's consort." He also showed me a letter which she had written him after her departure from the house, and when she was on her way to the relations who persuaded her not to return. It was signed with the epithet before mentioned; and was written in a spirit of good-humour, and even of fondness, which, though containing nothing but what a wife ought to write, and is the better for writing, was, I thought, almost too good to show. But a certain over-communicativeness was one of those qualities of his lordship, which, though it sometimes became the child-like simplicity of a poet, startled you at others in proportion as it led to disclosures of questionable propriety.

I thought I understood the circumstances of this separation at the time, and still better some time afterwards; but I have since been convinced, and the conviction grows stronger every day, that no domestic dispute, even if it were desirable or proper to investigate it, can ever be thoroughly understood unless you hear both parties, and know their entire relative situations, together with the interests and passions of those about them. You must also be sure of their statements, and see whether the statements on all sides themselves are prejudiced or the reverse. Indeed you cannot know individuals themselves truly, unless you have lived with them; at all events, unless you have studied them long enough to know whether appearances are realities; and although you may, and to a certain degree must, draw your own conclusions respecting people from statements which they give to the world, whether for or against themselves, yet it is safer, as well as pleasanter, to leave that question as much as possible in the place where it ought ever to abide, unless brought forward on the highest and noblest grounds; namely, in the silence of the heart that has most suffered under its causes.

more of a business which Lord Byron soon afterwards

I shall, therefore, say nothing nobody ought to have heard of. left England, and I did not see him again, or hear from him, scarcely of him, till he proposed my joining him in Italy. I take my leave of him, therefore, till that period, and proceed to speak of the friends with whom I became intimate in the meanwhile-Shelley and Keats.

I first saw Shelley during the early period of the Examiner, before its indictment on account of the Regent; but it was only for a few short visits, which did not produce intimacy. [It was indeed Mr. Rowland Hunter who first brought Leigh Hunt and his most valued friend personally together. Shelley had brought a manuscript poem which proved by no means suited to the publishing house in St. Paul's Churchyard. But Mr. Hunter sent the young reformer to seek the counsel of Leigh Hunt.] He was then a youth, not come to his full growth; very gentlemanly, earnestly gazing at every object that interested him, and quoting the Greek dramatists. Not long afterwards he married his first wife; and he subsequently wrote to me while I was in prison, as I have before mentioned. I renewed the correspondence a year or two afterwards during which period one of the earliest as well as most beautiful of his lyric poems, the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, had appeared in the Examiner. Meantime, he and his wife had parted; and now he re-appeared before me at Hampstead, in consequence of the calamity which I am about to mention.

But this circumstance it will be proper to introduce with some remarks, and a little previous biography.

It is hardly necessary to inform the reader at this present day, that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle-Goring, in Sussex. He was born at Field Place, in that county, the 4th of August, 1792.

It is difficult, under any circumstances, to speak with proper delicacy of the living connections of the dead; but it is no violation of decorum to observe, that the family connections of Mr. Shelley belonged to a small party in the House of Commons, itself belonging to another party. They were Whig Aristocrats, voting in the interest of the Duke of Nor

folk. To a man of genius, endowed with a metaphysical acuteness to discern truth and falsehood, and a strong sensibility to give way to his sense of it, such an origin, however respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the very luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keeping him within ordinary bounds. With what feelings is Truth to open its eyes upon this world among the most respectable of our mere party gentry? Among licensed contradictions of all sorts? among the Christian doctrines and the worldly practices? Among fox-hunters and their chaplains? among beneficed loungers, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling young ones, who are old in the folly of knowingness? people not indeed bad in themselves; not so bad as their wholesale and unthinking decriers, much less their hypocritical decriers; many excellent by nature, but spoilt by those professed demands of what is right and noble, and those inculcations, at the same time, of what is false and wrong, which have been so admirably exposed by a late philosopher (Bentham), and which he has fortunately helped some of our best living statesmen to leave out of the catalogue of their ambitions.

Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think, too, of these anomalies. He saw that at every step in life some compromise was expected between a truth which he was told not to violate, and a colouring and double-meaning of it which forced him upon the violation.

With this jumble, then, of truth and falsehood in his head, and a genius born to detect it, Shelley was sent to Eton, and afterwards to the University of Oxford. At Eton a Reviewer recollected him setting trees on fire with a burning-glass; a proceeding which the critic set down to his natural taste for destruction. Perhaps the same Reviewer (if we are not mistaken as to the person) would now, by the help of his own riper faculties, attribute it to the natural curiosity of genius. At the same school, the young reformer rose up in opposition to the system of fagging. Against this custom he formed a conspiracy; and for a time he made it pause, at least as far as his own person was concerned. His feelings at this period of his life are touchingly and powerfully described in the dedication of the Revolt of Islam.

"Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.
I do remember well the hour which burst

My spirit's sleep: a fresh May day it was,
When I walk'd forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I know not why, until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes-
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
"And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around,-
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground:
So without shame I spake: I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.' I then controll'd

My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

"And from that hour did I, with earnest thought,
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn; but from that secret store
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind."

Shelley, I believe, was taken from Eton before the regular period for leaving school. His unconventional spirit—penetrating, sincere, and demanding the reason and justice of things-was found to be inconvenient. At Oxford it was worse. Logic was there put into his hands; and he used it in the most uncompromising manner. The more important the proposition, the more he thought himself bound to investigate it the greater the demand upon his assent, the less, upon their own principle of reasoning, he thought himself bound to grant it for the university, by its ordinances, invited scholars to ask questions which they found themselves unable to answer. Shelley did so; and the answer was expulsion. It is true, the question he asked was a very hard one. It was upon, the existence of God. But could neither Faith, Hope, nor Charity find a better answer than that? and in the teeth, too, of their own challenge to inquiry? Could not some gentle and loving nature have been found to speak to him in private, and beg him at least to consider and pause over the question, for reasons which might have had their corresponding effect? The Church of England has been a blessing to mankind, inasmuch as it has discountenanced the

worst superstitions, and given sense and improvement leave to grow; but if it cannot learn still further to sacrifice letter to spirit, and see the danger of closing its lips on the greatest occasions and then proceeding to open them on the smallest, and dispute with its very self on points the most "frivolous and vexatious," it will do itself an injury it little dreams of with the new and constantly growing intelligence of the masses; who are looking forward to the noblest version of Christianity, while their teachers are thus fighting about the

meanest.

Conceive a young man of Mr. Shelley's character, with no better experience of the kindness and sincerity of those whom he had perplexed, thus thrown forth into society, to form his own judgments, and pursue his own career. It was Emilius out in the World, but formed by his own tutorship. There is a novel, under that title, written by the German La Fontaine, which has often reminded me of him. The hero of another, by the same author, called the Reprobate, still more resembles him. His way of proceeding was entirely after the fashion of those guileless, but vehement hearts, which not being well replied to by their teachers, and finding them hostile to inquiry, add to a natural love of truth all the passionate ardour of a generous and devoted protection of it. Shelley had met with Godwin's Political Justice, and he seemed to breathe, for the first time, in an open and bright atmosphere. He resolved to square all his actions by what he conceived to be the strictest justice, without any consideration for the opinions of those whose little exercise of that virtue towards himself ill fitted them, he thought, for better teachers, and as ill warranted him in deferring to the opinions of the world whom they guided. That he did some extraordinary things in consequence is admitted: that he did many noble ones, and all with sincerity, is well known to his friends, and will be admitted by all sincere persons. Let those who are so fond of exposing their own natures, by attributing every departure from ordinary conduct to bad motives, ask themselves what conduct could be more extraordinary in their eyes, and at the same time less attributable to a bad motive, than the rejection of an estate for the love of a principle? Yet Shelley rejected one.