f it to polite society--at all events on paper. He owes
his notoriety, therefore, entirely to the boy-poet, into whose way
the good man was thrown by one of those inexplicable freaks of chance
which often bring about such strange results both to subject and
object.

John Joseph Stockdale was, like his father, a bookseller, who did
a low sort of business in Pall Mall. For some forty years the
Stockdales, father and son, were jointly or separately the John
Murrays of the London Bohemians. Their house was the resort of
novelists, poets, and especially dramatic writers, for twenty years
before and twenty years after the close of the eighteenth century,
and they were purveyors-general of circulating libraries, tempting the
ambition of young authors with rosy promises of success and alluring
baits of immortality, if they could only find the base metals _in
quantum stiff_, to pay the cold-blooded paper-merchant and the vulgar
type-setter. Many a poetic pigeon did the Stockdales pluck, no doubt,
by these expedients. For in those days, as in these present, a young
suckling full of innocence and his mother's nourishment deemed it the
highest earthly honor to be admitted to the society of Bohemian bulls
and fire-breathing poets; and to be further allowed the privilege of
paying for dinner and wine, with dramatists and men of the Bohemian
kidney as guests, was a distinction for which no amount of pecuniary
disbursement could by any possibility be regarded as an equivalent.

It is hardly to be supposed, however, that Shelley--even if it could
be shown that he actually joined the mob of Stockdale's wits as
hale-fellow-well-met--ever participated in this loyalty to their
sovran virtues and superiorities. He was the god, not they; and
although he hid his divinity under a mask and knew the value of
silence in a court of fools, yet he could not fail to be conscious
that small and unimportant as he was held to be among those Titans of
imagination and song, yet it would be found upon trial that he alone
could bend the mighty bow of Ulysses, and had the right to wear the
garland and singing-robes of the poet.

But the prior question remains, how Shelley, of all men then living,
came to have any knowledge of such a person as Stockdale--still more,
any dealings with him.

And it is remarkable that the answer to this question comes from one
and the same source; and that is the private journal of Stockdale
himself, who, like the petty Bosw