Percy Bysshe Shelley

The college authorities heard of the pamphlet, identified Shelley as its author, and summoned him before them—"our master, and two or three of the fellows." The pamphlet was produced, and Shelley was required to say whether he had written it or not. The youth declined to answer the question, and was expelled by a writ ten sentence, ready drawn up. Hogg was next summoned, with a result practically the same. The precise details of this transaction have been much controverted; the best evidence is that which appears on the college records, showing that both Hogg and Shelley (Hogg is there named first) were expelled for "contumaciously refusing to answer questions," and for "repeatedly declining to disavow" the authorship. Thus they were dismissed as being mutineers against academic authority, in a case pregnant with the suspicion—not the proof—of atheism; but bow the authorities could know beforehand that the two undergraduates would be contumacious and stiff against disavowal, so as to give warrant for written sentences ready drawn up, is nowhere explained. Pos sibly the sentences were worded without ground assigned, and would only have been produced in terrorem had the young men proved more malleable.

Harriet Westbrook.

Shelley and Hogg came up to London, where Shelley was soon left alone, as his friend went to York to study conveyancing. Percy and his incensed father did not at once come to terms, and for a while he had no resource beyond pocket-money saved up by his sisters (four in number altogether) and sent round to him, sometimes by the hand of a singularly pretty school-fellow, Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a retired and moderately rich hotel-keeper. Shelley, in early youth, had a some what "priggish" turn for moralizing and argumentation, and a mania for proselytizing; his school-girl sisters, and their little Methodist friend Miss Westbrook, aged between fifteen and six teen, must all be enlightened and converted to anti-Christianity. He cultivated the society of Harriet, being encouraged in his assiduity by her much older sister Eliza. Harriet fell in love with him; and he, though not it would seem at any time ardently in love with her, dallied along the pathway which leads to senti ment and a definite courtship. This was not his first love-affair; for he had but a very few months before been courting his cousin Harriet Grove, who, alarmed at his heterodoxies, finally broke off with him—to his no small grief and perturbation at the time. It seems that Shelley never indulged in any sensual or dissipated amour; and, as he advances in life, it becomes apparent that, though capable of the passion of love, and unusually prone to regard with much effusion of sentiment women who interested his mind and heart, the mere attraction of a pretty face or an alluring figure left him unenthralled.

After a while Shelley was reconciled to his father, revisited his family in Sussex and made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Hitchener, a school-teacher at Hurstpierpoint with whom, for the space of one year he pursued an intimate and voluminous cor respondence. He then stayed with a cousin in Wales, from whence

he was recalled to London by Harriet, who wrote complaining of her father's resolve to send her back to her school, in which she was now regarded with repulsion as too apt a pupil of the atheist Shelley. He replied counselling resistance. "She wrote to say" (these are the words of Shelley in a letter to Hogg, dating towards the end of July 181 I) "that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection." Shel ley returned to London, where he found Harriet agitated and wavering; finally they agreed to elope, travelled in haste to Edin burgh, and there, on Aug. 28, were married with the rites of the Scottish Church. Shelley had by this time openly broken, not only with the dogmas and conventions of Christian religion, but with many of the institutions of Christian polity, and in especial with such as enforce and regulate marriage ; he held—with William Godwin—that marriage ought to be simply a voluntary relation between a man and a woman, to be assumed at joint option and terminated at the after-option of either party. If, therefore, he had acted upon his personal conviction of the right, he would never have wedded Harriet, whether by Scotch, English or any other law; but as they were married without delay on their arrival in Edinburgh, it. is probable that Harriet may have consented to the elopment on the understanding that Shelley would marry her.

Harriet Shelley was not only beautiful; she was amiable, ac commodating, adequately well educated and well bred. She liked reading, and her reading was not strictly frivolous. But she could not (as Shelley said at a later date) "feel poetry and understand philosophy." She appears to have been a simple-minded affection ate girl who did her best to respond to her husband's somewhat nebulous ideas on sociology and politics. For nearly three years Shelley and she led a shifting sort of life upon an income of f400 a year, one-half of which was allowed (after his first severe indig nation at the mesalliance was past) by Mr. Timothy Shelley, and the other half by Mr. Westbrook. The couple left Edinburgh for York and the society of Hogg ; broke with him upon a charge made by Harriet, and evidently fully believed by Shelley at the time, that, during a temporary absence of his upon business in Sussex, Hogg had tried to seduce her (this quarrel was entirely made up at the end of about a year) ; moved off to Keswick in Cumberland, where they received kind attentions from Southey, and some hos pitality from the duke of Norfolk, who, as chief magnate in the Shoreham region of Sussex, was at pains to reconcile the father and his heir; sailed thence to Dublin, where Shelley was eager in the good cause of Catholic emancipation, conjoined with repeal of the union; crossed to Wales, and lived at Nant-Gwillt, near Rhayader, then at Lynmouth in Devonshire, then at Tanyrallt in Carnarvon shire. All this was between September 181i and February 1813.