pose of construing the poet Horace. How she must have hated
all poets! She had other ideas,--ideas of ease, respectability,
baronetcy; and her disappointment was greater than she could bear.
Mr. Hogg says, she had a propensity to strong courses, and would talk
of suicide in a speculative way. It is not difficult to discover the
truth of that unfortunate union and disunion. Shelley, betrayed by
the impulses of his enthusiast nature and the ignorant and deplorable
credulity of a bookworm, allowed himself to be imposed upon by a
designing boarding-school girl and her relatives, and everything
followed as a matter of course. The unhappy wife recklessly broke the
bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would
have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her
passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,--and on him also, by a
Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since this article was written, Mr. Peacock, an early
friend of Shelley, has published a very different estimate of the
character of Harriet Shelley. See _Fraser's Magazine_ for March,
1860.]

The subject of Shelley's character is a delicate and a difficult one,
and Mr. Hogg and Mr. Trelawny, especially, show their inability to
understand it, by the way in which they put forward and dwell upon
the poet's peculiarities. Trelawny, a hard-minded, thorough-paced man
of the world, publishing garrulously in his old age what he was
silent about in his better period, talks of the poet's oddity,
awkwardness, and want of punctuality,--as if Percy were some clerkly
man on 'Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so
erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown
in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a
wall,--Mr. Hogg's own style of description being the wall,--"O wall,
O wall, O sweet and lovely wall!" He also tells us, to instance the
poet's familiarity with the sex, a story of Shelley sitting with one
of his lady friends and being plied with cups of tea by that fair
sympathizer,--the poet talking and letting his saucer fall, and the
lady wiping his perspiring face with a pocket-handkerchief. Such
scraps of silly gossip are not biography; they may do for tea-table
chit-chat, but show very feebly in the place where one looks for
something like a philosophical criticism on the mind of so
extraordinary a man as Shelley.

Genius alone can do just