ells of the serial literature of the
present day, cozened, by flattery and other arts best known to
that class, a considerable number of scholars and authors into a
correspondence with him, and carefully preserving these their private
letters until time should have enhanced the value of the autographs,
and he could glorify himself in the fame of the writers, deliberately
ransacked his old archives for this purpose; and finding a number of
the boy Shelley's business-letters to him--curious, to be sure, and
interesting enough to a hero-worshiper--he audaciously published them
in an unclean magazine called _Stockdale's Budget_.

Personally, we know nothing of the _Budget_, but an English bookworm
sets it down as "a sort of appendix to the more celebrated _Memoirs
of Harriet Wilson"_, which Stockdale had himself published a few years
before. This was so boldly licentious, and so reckless in its attacks
upon the private characters of the Upper Ten, that the publisher was
prosecuted with merciless persistency until his business gave up the
ghost. To convince the public that he was a martyr he started the
_Budget_ in 1827, and still appears to have kept his poets and
dramatic satellites around him, and to have been a man of some repute
for good-nature to young authors. Indeed, it is but fair to say that
from the first moment of Shelley's introduction to him until we find
him betraying Shelley's confidence in him to his father, to save him,
if possible, from the publication of an atheistic theorem, he seems to
have been fascinated by the young poet's character, and has testified
under his own name that he had the highest confidence in his
integrity, although it seems he lost a round sum by him in the end;
and he adds that, in his belief, Shelley would "vegetate rather than
live, in order to pay any honest debt."

It was in 1810 that Shelley, impressed somehow or other with the
belief that Stockdale was the poet's friend, rushed pell-mell into
the publisher's _Pall Mall_ shop, and besought him to do the friendly
thing by him, and help him out of a scrape he had got into with his
printer by ordering him to print fourteen hundred and eighty copies of
a volume of poems, without having the money at hand to pay him. "Aldus
of Horsham, the mute and the inglorious," was finally, appeased,
although not by Stockdale's money, and the edition of the poems passed
into Stockdale's hands for sale. The book was entitled _Original
Poetry, by