the unhappy shadow of Harriet behind, the story of this young pair playing at life, talking so splendidly, suffering and enjoying so passionately, with such reckless innocence and ignorance in all their ways, would be as pretty and amusing a picture (with all its despairs and destitutions) as could be found in literature. And such is the extraordinary absence of all perception of wrong in the highminded young culprits that the moralist, as we have said, finds himself altogether out of place between them. The same thing may be said of both Shelley's beginnings: it is a pair of children playing at matrimony, playing at existence, with a proud sense that they are not as others, and pleasure in defying the world, who are set before us. The tale in both cases is equally astounding, amusing, pathetic. Poor children of heaven astray, playing such pranks as make the angels weep, bewildered in the midst of an alien universe, "moving about in worlds not realised." The double tale is at once piteous and laughable, with differences which make it more comic in one case, more sad in the other. We know nothing like it either in fiction or life.

Professor Dowden has treated his subject with sufficient justice and sincerity so far as Shelley himself is concerned. He has "nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice," but this is not always the case in respect to the other personages of the tale. Thus we feel that Harriet's life, after the separation-which we must still, notwithstanding Professor Dowden's objections, call her desertion by Shelley is left in a midst of unfavourable inference, which is very injurious to that unfortunate girl. A supposition, or suggestion, that she fell into evil ways, and that the despair which caused her death

arose from a second desertion by some one else, "upon whose gratitude she had a claim," is skilfully disposed, in the haze which surrounds her miserable end, to withdraw our thoughts from the possibility that both misery and death were to be attributed to Shelley. In this Professor Dowden follows several of his predecessors in the Shelley story, and there may or may not be truth in the suggestion. But justice requires a more even balance than is here attempted. Her husband had seen her after his return with Mary. He had suggested, in his inconceivable way, that they should all live together. He had borrowed money even, as it is asserted, from his forsaken wife. That he should have lost sight of her altogether, meant of course that he also must have lost sight of the two children who were in her hands, and about whom, so far as can be seen, he never asked a question until the moment when they were torn from his arms (according to the cant of the biographers) by the Court of Chancery. Surely it would be worth while to ascertain what really was this poor young woman's life up to the moment when she plunged into the dark and dreary Serpentine and made an end of it. Hogg's scornful banter of the young wife who rejected his own evil overtures, the always blooming, smiling, imperturbable Harriet, with her passion for reading aloud, and her equable voice, really affords us an extremely clever, distinct, and humerous sketch of character, though he did not so intend it; a character not at all in keeping with the suggestion of dull dissipation and despair which is hazarded but never proved against this poor victim-the victim of high-flown sentiment and false imperfectly understood theory, as well as of Shelley. Such a discrepancy, if

nothing else, should secure a little more attention to her sad fate.

And this all the more that Mary for whom she was deserted-Mary, the object of the poet's impassioned love, the heroine of that strange idyl of wandering romance which occupied his happiest years-Mary, too, ceased to be the ideal companion whom his heart required, and was, before many years had passed, found as incapable of giving the sympathy that was necessary to him, and responding in all things to his capricious appeals, as Harriet had been. Her own expressions in her journal appear to imply that the heaven of happiness in which they began was very soon overclouded. The two following extracts from her diary will show something of the under-current of Mary's thoughts; the first is written in the midst of deep grief for the loss of her children, and yet would seem to imply something more than bereavement :

"

August 4, Leghorn.-I begin my journal on Shelley's birthday. We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy; but to have won, and thus cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.

Saturday, August, 4. Shelley's birthday. Seven years are now gone. What changes! What a life! We now appear tranquil-yet who knows what wind—but I will not prognosticate evil: we have had enough of it. When Shelley came to Italy I said, All is well if it were permanent; it was more passing than an Italian twilight. I now say the same. May it be a Polar day. Yet that day too has an end."

These are sad utterances for the woman beloved, and evidently mean much more than they say. About the same time Shelley writes to the Gisbornes: "I feel the want

of those who can feel for and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. It is the curse of Tantalus that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life." Strange and tragical commentary upon the impassioned beginning of this life of disappointment and dissatisfaction! They had broken all laws. and cut all ties of nature to form the bond which already strained the nerves and tried the hearts of both. Alas for Love if this were all its meaning! Professor Dowden gives a little explanatory defence of both, which is curious as the plea of a generous partisan who cannot escape from the necessities of the proverb, and instinctively accuses in exusing.

He

"His love for Mary had become a more substantial portion of his being than the love of these early days of poverty in London, when he addressed to her his little morning and evening letters of rapturous devotion. constituted himself, as far as might be, the guardian of her tranquility: made less extravagant demands, dealt prudently with her peace of mind; acknowledged the bounds of life. In this there was loss and there was gain; upon the whole it was a serviceable education for Shelley's sympathies bringing them close to reality and helping to mature his mind. Mary's moods of dejection, the disturbance of serenity, in one whose nature was deep and strong, caused him disturbance and pain, from which he instinctively sought protection. He was at times tempted to elude difficulties, rather than with courage to meet and vanquish them. For his own sake perhaps unwisely, and for hers, he avoided topics which could surface any imperfections of sympathy couse her agitation, or bring to the that existed between them. . . . It is true, indeed, that such a spirit as

and purest draught. 'Some of us,' Shelley wrote in October 1821, 'have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie,"

In short, it was scarcely worth while to have gone through that dream of passion and rapture-to have driven poor Harriet adrift on those wild waters in which she sank; Harriet, after all, would have done as well as Mary to fill that always unsatisfying place, and afford an excuse for the wayward and capricious poet to snatch a draught at every fountain he passed.

Of the extraordinary and involved relations which made Shelley always the dominant figure in a trio, with both wife and sister always at his heels-and of his friends, so strangely chosen, and of all the odd unrealities of his life the reader will find Professor Dowden's book an admirable and interesting record. Merely as a dramatic study of character, it is well worthy attention. The strange, wild, impetuous being full of unreason, yet now and then turning a sudden unexpected side of good-sense and judgment to the light--full of the most elfish freaks and fancies, the most sudden and complete changes: yet faithful to his friends (who were men and not women) with a faithfulness which was unaffected by the misbehaviour of the object of his regard: and with all the instincts of a man born to wealth and lavish expenditure subsisting through the hardest struggles of actual poverty,

is as unusual in his nature as in his genius. Nor are his friends less worthy attention. The God

deed

as congenial as anything earthly could be to the Elfin Knight. But by what strange magic that Will-o'-the-wisp should have drawn to himself and found pleasure in the witty and cynical Hogg, and the strange humourist Peacock, is as inexplicable as any other wonder of Shelley's life. Byron was a more natural and fitting mate for his brother poet; but the stcry of their intercourse is one of the darkest and most painful here recorded. There seems no reason to connect Shelly with the beginning of the shameful tale of cruelty and falsehood, of which the little Allegra is the innocent heroine, and her mother the victim; nor does he play in it any but an honourable part, except in condoning by his friendship, or pretence at friendship, the heartless baseness of the noble poet, whose conduct, so far as we are aware, has never before been set in so scathing a light.

There is little criticism, as we have said, in this book; and not much even of that story of poetic development, or of the growth of Shelley's wonderful music of expression, which we might have looked for. We will only pause to note, as a writer seated in this chamber of associations and memories is bound to do, that to the little group of friends upon the Italian coast, whose hearts had been lacerated by a furious onslaught in the Quarterly'not only upon the "Revolt of Islam," but upon the poet-there came balm from the kind hand of him who then was paramount in this centre of literature. January 1819 appeared a notice of the Revolt of Islam' from Wilson's pen, which had been justly described as by far the worthiest

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content with one full measure of applause, but returned again and again to subsequent poems, and did not hesitate to transfix with an indignant arrow his brother in the Quarterly.' "If that critic does not know that Mr Shelley is a poet almost in the very highest sense of that mysterious word," said our Professor, with all the authority and certainty of kindred genius, "then we appeal to all those whom we have enabled to judge for themselves, if he be not unfit to speak of poetry before the people of England." Such was the verdict which those pages carried to the world more than sixty years ago; and no man will dare to deny its justice now.

1

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use the name under which he won his principal triumphs, Lord Ashley, may justly be called one of the greatest philanthropists of his time. If there have been others whose charity has been more personal, and whose praise is sweeter in the common ear, there is none who has worked with such magnificient effect for the advantage of thousands who never could know his name or understand their obligations to him, or who has so much influenced his country and his kind. A serious, somewhat downcast youth, bred in an uncongenial home, somewhat cold in temper, somewhat estranged in opinion from the majority of his class and companions, and setting out upon life with not less but more necessity of doing the best he could for himself because of his rank and pretentions, he was suddenly seized upon in the beginning of his career by one of those great impulses which shape the lives of men and of nations. had fulfilled all the duties of youth with the conscientious and unswerving propriety which we are apt to think uninteresting, and had entered modestly and respectably into official life, prepared to follow his party so far as his conscience, ever wakeful and just, permitted-when this impulse suddenly seized upon him. He was not an impulsive man, but a deliberate one, thinking much, full of scruples, taking up nothing rashly; and much of the comfort of life depended on him on being able to maintain his standing in politics

From poetry to the Ten Hours Bill is a long leap, and not less wonderful is the step from Shelley's wild life of ill-regulated sentiment and wayward fancy, to that of the staid and serious man, a sage from his cradle, whose life was given up to philanthropical exertions, and who, after the straitest sect of that religion, lived and died an evangelical Low Churchman. The biography of Lord Shaftesbury, however, addresses itself to a still larger class than that which is interested in Shelley, and, take it all in all, contains the record of as worthy a life, full of public virtue and domestic excellence, as ever served for an example to generations to come. Proud may the family be which can point to such a name as that of the seventh Shaftesbury among its many records. Statesmen it has known before him, and its name had found a place in English his

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