wing much additional light on the wayward heart
and pilgrimage of the poet. Mr. C.S. Middleton has published a book
upon Shelley and his writings; Mr. T.J. Hogg has given a sketch of
his life; and E.J. Trelawny some recollections of him, as well as of
Byron. None of these pretends to explain that eccentric nature, or
harmonize in any way his acts and his feelings; though a few things
may be gathered that tend to make the biography somewhat more
distinct than before, in some particulars. On the subject of his
first unfortunate marriage, we are made aware that his wife was a
self-willed, ill-taught young woman, who set her own father at
defiance, and threw herself on the protection of such a wandering
oddity as Percy Shelley. She was strong-minded, and brought with her
into her husband's house her elder sister, also strong-minded, a
ridiculous and insufferable duenna, whom Shelley hated with all
his heart and soul, and wished dead and buried out of his
sight,--finding, no doubt, his unsteady disposition controlled and
thwarted by the voice and authority of his sister-in-law, who, knowing
that her father furnished the young couple with their chief means of
livelihood, would be all the more resolute in advising them or
domineering over the migratory household. At last, these women grew
tired of the moping and ineffectual youth who still remained poor and
unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable, and all
hope of the baronetcy very far off indeed; they grew tired of him and
went away,--the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an
aimless, rhapsodizing vagabond. With her natural decision of mind,
aided and encouraged, very likely, by her astute relatives, she
thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the
contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have
felt the hardship of living with such a melancholy outlaw. Having
nothing in common with the devoted Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The
Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place
to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of
robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes
and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar.
She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have
nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a
pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her "attacking Latin" for
the pur