extremely fond of it (the child), and would walk up and
down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it
a song of his own making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his
own coining. His song was Yahmani, Yahmani, Yahmani, Yahmani." To the
want of sympathy between the father and the mother in this matter of
Ianthe, Mr. Peacock is inclined to attribute the beginning of troubles
in the Shelley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the revelation
of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been extremely painful to her
husband; and how far she carried her insensibility, may be gathered from
a story told by Hogg about her conduct during an operation performed
upon the child.

During this period of his sojourn in London, Shelley was again in some
pecuniary difficulties. Yet he indulged Harriet's vanity by setting up a
carriage, in which they afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh
and back. He narrowly escaped a debtor's prison through this act of
extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg was arrested for
the debt due to the coach-maker. His acquaintances were few and
scattered, and he saw nothing of his family. Gradually, however, he
seems to have become a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies.
The views he had propounded in "Queen Mab", his passionate belief in the
perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, and his readiness to
adopt any new nostrum for the amelioration of his race, endeared him to
all manners of strange people; nor was he deterred by aristocratic
prejudices from frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial
to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic sketches from his
pen. His chief friends were a Mrs. Boinville, for whom he conceived an
enthusiastic admiration, and her daughter Cornelia, married to a
vegetarian, Mr. Newton. In order to be near them he had moved to
Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cottage named High Elms, at
Bracknell, in Berkshire, had the same object. With Godwin and his family
he was also on terms of familiar intercourse. Under the philosopher's
roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of miscellaneous
inmates--Fanny Imlay, the daughter of his first wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft; Mary, his own daughter by the same marriage; his second
wife, and her two children, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring
of a previous union. From this connexion with the Godwin household
events o