her he
had now become a pupil." Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter
Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to
receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no
"cause for discontent."

Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned.
The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and
the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but
were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and
there that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For
instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with
a pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous
instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime,
that man is dog-tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife
Latin; it would be unreasonable to expect it.

Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed upon
us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer
drops her now, of his own accord. Cornelia "perhaps" is sole teacher.
Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy, arising from
causes purely imaginary; she required consolation, and found it in
Petrarch. He also says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into her views
and caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest
melancholy, as every true poet ought."

Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine
compliment to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew
her well "in later years." It is a very good compliment indeed, and she
no doubt deserved it in her "later years," when she had for generations
ceased to be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in
enchanting young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives. But why is
that compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there? Is it to make
the reader believe she was well-chosen and safe society for a young,
sentimental husband? The biographer's device was not well planned. That
old person was not present--it was her other self that was there, her
young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self, in those early sweet
times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back.

"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville,
and Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and
discrimination." That is the fabulist's opinion--