d infatuated me."

No, he could not go into those details, and we excuse him; but,
nevertheless, we do not rest content with this bland proposition to
puff away that whole long disreputable episode with a single mean,
meaningless remark of Shelley's.

We do admit that "it is certain that some cause or causes of deep
division were in operation." We would admit it just the same if the
grammar of the statement were as straight as a string, for we drift into
pretty indifferent grammar ourselves when we are absorbed in historical
work; but we have to decline to admit that we cannot guess those cause
or causes.

But guessing is not really necessary. There is evidence
attainable--evidence from the batch discredited by the biographer and
set out at the back door in his appendix-basket; and yet a court of law
would think twice before throwing it out, whereas it would be a hardy
person who would venture to offer in such a place a good part of the
material which is placed before the readers of this book as "evidence,"
and so treated by this daring biographer. Among some letters (in the
appendix-basket) from Mrs. Godwin, detailing the Godwinian share in the
Shelleyan events of 1814, she tells how Harriet Shelley came to her and
her husband, agitated and weeping, to implore them to forbid Shelley the
house, and prevent his seeing Mary Godwin.

"She related that last November he had fallen in love with Mrs.
Turner and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the
husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire."

The biographer finds a technical fault in this; "the Shelleys were
in Edinburgh in November." What of that? The woman is recalling a
conversation which is more than two months old; besides, she was
probably more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon
its unimportant date. Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it;
for that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body
of the book. Still, that would not have answered; even the biographer's
enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real
grievance, this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this
rawhead-and-bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams,
those rickety spectres labeled WET-NURSE, BONNET-SHOP, and so on--no,
the father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his
pathetic goblins to a competition like that.

The fabulist finds fault wi