udden changes through the
buffetings of fortune from without and the inconstancy of their own
purpose, than he was. His biographer has no little trouble to trace and
note with accuracy his perpetual flittings and the names of his
innumerable temporary residences. A month had not elapsed before Hogg
left him in order to begin his own law studies at York; and Shelley
abode "alone in the vine-trellised chamber, where he was to remain, a
bright-eyed, restless fox amidst sour grapes, not, as his poetic
imagination at first suggested, for ever, but a little while longer."

The records of this first residence in London are meagre, but not
unimportant. We hear of negotiations and interviews with Mr. Timothy
Shelley, all of which proved unavailing. Shelley would not recede from
the position he had taken up. Nothing would induce him to break off his
intimacy with Hogg, or to place himself under the tutor selected for him
by his father. For Paley's, or as Mr. Shelley called him "Palley's,"
Evidences he expressed unbounded contempt. The breach between them
gradually widened. Mr. Shelley at last determined to try the effect of
cutting off supplies; but his son only hardened his heart, and sustained
himself by a proud consciousness of martyrdom. I agree with Shelley's
last and best biographer, Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his condemnation of the
poet's behaviour as a son. Shelley did not treat his father with the
common consideration due from youth to age; and the only instances of
unpardonable bad taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of
his conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who was really
more unfortunate than criminal in his relations to this changeling from
the realms of faery. It is not too much to say that his dislike of his
father amounted to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions
with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated fancy. How so
just and gentle a nature was brought into so false a moral situation,
whether by some sudden break-down of confidence in childhood or by a
gradually increasing mistrust, is an interesting but perhaps insoluble
problem. We only know that in his early boyhood Shelley loved his father
so much as to have shown unusual emotion during his illness on one
occasion, but that, while at Eton he had already become possessed by a
dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr.
Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expe