ve
the janitor.

All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and
the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of
the rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he
tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's
desertion of his wife in 1814.

Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was
teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a
degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire
to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by
his various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual
wonder--which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him
valuable help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her
to correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking
of love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet
Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a
school-teacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the
letter-writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person
could have made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as
beautiful as an angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so
rich in unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made
his whole generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison.
Besides, he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an
atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university
with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against
him, his friends were cold. Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him;
and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her
from suicide but to marry her. He believed himself to blame for this
state of things, so the marriage took place. He was pretty fairly in
love with Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better. He wrote and
explained the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could
not have been franker or more naive and less stirred up about the
circumstance if the matter in issue had been a commercial transaction
involving thirty-five dollars.

Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had
any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years,
then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was
curious