menaces of despair, all the evidence on which our faith is built. Seize on any one of these inquirers at this peculiar crisis, and expel him for atheism, and, if he be a man of quick feelings, and a high spirit, you will pretty certainly make him that for which you have stigmatized him. His pride will unite with his doubts to fix him, to petrify him, as it were, into incurable unbelief. It would be a brutal and murderous procedure. Such procedure had the worst effect on Shelley. The consequences were a sort of repudiation of him by his father and family, who had built the highest worldly hopes on his talents. There was a fierce hue and cry set up after him in the world, and the very next year saw him sit down and write Queen Mab. The actions of this portion of his life are the least defensible of any portion of it. He seemed restless, unhappy, and put into a more antagonistic temperament by his public expulsion from college, which he felt more deeply than was natural to him, or could have arisen, had he been treated differently. At this period he made his first unfortunate marriage, with a young woman of humble station, and, as it proved, of very uncongenial mind. They separated, and in her distress she, some time afterwards, drowned herself. Differing as I do most widely from Shelley, both in his ideas regarding Christianity and marriage, it is but just to say that they who knew him best, and his second wife, the celebrated daughter of celebrated parents, Godwin and Mary Wolstancroft, most emphatically assert their assurances that “in all he did, at the time of doing it, he believed himself justified to his conscience, while the various ills of poverty, and the loss of friends, brought home to him the sad realities of life." My opinion is, that at this period the state of excitement into which so gross an outrage on his sensitive nature had thrown him, is to be regarded as the most palliating cause of anything in Shelley which was not in perfect harmony with the general tone of his benign spirit. For his errors at this period, though they never could be run into by Shelley wilfully, and with a consciousness of error, he suffered deeply and severely. One of

his biographers says, "Nobody could lament the catastrophe of his wife's death more bitterly than he did. For a time it tore his being to pieces."

VOL. I.

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For about two years after his wife's death, he seemed to be wandering about in quest of rest, and not finding it. He was at one time at the Lakes on a pilgrimage to Southey, which, when Coleridge heard of, he said, "Why did he not come to me? I should have understood him." Most true. Most true. He was in London, and 90, Great Russell-street, oddly enough kept by a person named Godwin, and in Mabledon-place, a corner house next to Hastings-street, are known as lodgings of his. He was also in Dublin, and in North Wales, where, in the absence of his landlord, Mr. Maddocks, an extraordinary tide menacing his embankment against the sea, Shelley put his name at the head of a subscription paper for £500, and, carrying it round the neighbourhood, raised a sum sufficient to prevent this truly Roman work being destroyed. In 1814 he made a tour on the continent, visiting France, Switzerland, the Reuss, and the Rhine, the magnificent scenery of which produced the most striking effects on his mind. In 1815 he made a tour along the southern coast of Devonshire, and then renting a house on Bishopsgate heath, on the borders of Windsor forest, he spent the summer months in ruminating over the scenes he had visited, and produced there his poem of Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The next year he again visited the continent. He was now married to Mary Wolstancroft Godwin, who accompanied him. They fixed their residence for a time on the banks of the Lake of Geneva.

Here Shelley and Lord Byron first met; they had corresponded before, but here began that friendship which contributed so palpably to the purification and elevation of tone in the higher poetry of Byron. They seemed equally pleased with each other. Byron was occupying the Villa Diodati; a name connected with Milton, and perhaps one of the noble poet's reasons for choosing it as a residence. Shelley engaged one just below it, in a most sequestered spot. There was no access to it in a carriage, it stood only separated from the lake by a small garden, much overgrown by trees, and a pathway through the vineyard of Diodati communicated with it. The two poets entered deeply into poetical disquisition. Nothing could be more opposite than their natures, and their poetic tendencies. Shelley

was all imagination; Byron had a strong tendency to the actual, or to that which must tell upon the general mind: Shelley was purely spiritual; Byron had much of the world in him: Shelley was all generosity; Byron, with a great show of it, had a tremendous dash of the selfish. Still, they had many things in common. They were fond of boating and pistol shooting; they were persecuted by public opinion; they had broken from all bonds of ordinary faith, and were free in discussion and speculation, as the birds were in their flight over their heads. They rowed together round the lake, and were very near being lost in a storm upon it. They visited together Meillerie and Clarens; and the effect of the scenery on Shelley, with the Nouvelle Heloise in his hand, was entrancing. He visited also Lausanne, and while walking in the Acacia walk belonging to Gibbon's house, he could not help saying, "Gibbon had a cold and unimpassioned spirit. I never felt more inclination to rail at the prejudices which clung to such a thing, than now that Julie and Clarens, Lausanne and the Roman Empire, compel me to a contrast between Rousseau and Gibbon." His lines on the Bridge of Arve and his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty were written at this time.

The poets and Mrs. Shelley were constantly together, out in the air amid that sublime scenery in fine weather, and in the evenings at each other's houses; and during a week of rain, they horrified themselves with German ghost stories, and gave a mutual challenge to write each one of their own. To this we owe the Vampire, which was, on its first appearance, attributed to Lord Byron, but was in reality written by his vain satellite of a physician, Polidori. Byron wrote a story called The Marriage of Belphegor, which was to narrate the circumstances of his own, as he was now smarting under the recent refusal of his wife to live with him; but on hearing from England that Lady Byron was ill, with an impulse that did him honour, he thrust it into the fire. What Shelley did does not appear, but the production of Mrs. Shelley was Frankenstein.

On his return to England in the autumn of that year, he had to endure the misery of his two children being taken from him by the Court of Chancery, on the ground of his disbelief of

revealed religion, and the authorship of Queen Mab, a work published without his consent. It was at this period that he went to live at Great Marlowe, in Buckinghamshire. Mrs. Shelley says—“Shelley's choice of abode was fixed chiefly by this town being at no great distance from London, and its neighbourhood to the Thames. The poem of the Revolt of Islam was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for its peculiar beauty. The chalk hills break into cliffs that overhang the Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech. The wilder portion of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation; and the cultivated part is particularly fertile. With all this wealth of nature, which, either in the form of gentlemen's parks, or soil dedicated to agriculture, flourishes around, Marlowe was inhabited—I hope it is altered now-by a very poor population. The women are lace-makers, and lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they are very ill paid. The poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The change produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. In winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of opthalmia, caught while visiting the cottages. I mention these thingsfor this minute and active sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousand-fold interest to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for the human race."

Shelley does not seem to have had any acquaintance at Marlowe or in the neighbourhood; it was simply the charm of the country and the river here which attracted him; but his friend Mr. Peacock, of the India House, was residing there at the time, either drawn there by Shelley, or Shelley by him. Marlowe stands in a fine open valley, on the banks of the Thames. The river here is beautiful, running bankful through the most beautiful meadows, level as a bowling green, of the richest verdure, and of a fine, ample, airy extent. Beyond the river these meadows are bounded by steep hills clothed with noble

woods, and a more charming scene for boating cannot be imagined. The grass and flowers on the river margin overhang and dip lovingly into the waters, which, from running over a chalk bottom, are as transparent nearly as the air itself; and at the various turns of the river new features of beauty salute you. Impending woods, which invite you to land and stroll away into them; solitary valleys, where house or man is not seen; and then again cultivated farms, and hills covered with flocks. No wonder that Shelley was all summer floating upon this fine river, and luxuriating in the composition of his splendid poem. A little below the town stands the village of Little Marlowe, with its grey church, and old manor-house, called Bisham Abbey, amid its fine trees; and around, a lovely scene of the softly flowing beautiful river, the level meads, and the hills and woods. On the other side of the town, the country is of that clear, bright aspect, with its tillage farms and isolated clumps of beech on swelling hills, which always marks a chalk district. The town itself is small, and intensely quiet. The houses are low and clean looking, as if no smoke ever fell on them from the pure diaphanous air. It consists of three principal streets, something in the shape of the letter T, with some smaller ones. In passing along it, you would not suspect it of that intense poverty which Mrs. Shelley speaks of, though, from the wretched depression of the hand lace weaving, it may exist. The houses have a neat miniature look, and the people look cheerful, healthy, and the women of a very agreeable expression of countenance.

Such was the spot where Shelley resided, eight and twenty years ago. His house was in the main street,-a long stuccoed dwelling, of that species of nondescript architecture which once was thought Gothic, because it had pointed windows, and battlements. It must have been, then, a spacious and a very pleasant residence. It is now, as is the lot of most places in which poets have lived, desolated and desecrated. It is divided into three tenements, a school, a private house, and a pothouse. I entered the latter, and with a strange feeling. In a large room with a boarded floor, and which had probably been Shelley's dining-room, was a sort of bar partitioned off, and a number of visitors were drinking on benches along the walls, which still