fore her voluntary departure from Shelley."

Trelawney says:

"I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both
Shelley and his wife--Hookham, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the
Godwins--that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence."

What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from
malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl's
head? Her very defencelessness should have been her protection. The fact
that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her own
writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a
voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband's side had
been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought
to trial. Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned
in her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the
help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury.

Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July. On the
28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire
to the Continent. He deserted his wife when her confinement was
approaching. She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress
bore him another one something over two months later. The truants were
back in London before either of these events occurred.

On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support
his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his
that was in her hands--twenty pounds. Yet the mistress was not moved
to gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her
engagements, the mistress makes this entry in her diary:

"Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we shall
have to change our lodgings."

The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obloquy of her situation two
years and a quarter; then she gave up, and drowned herself. A month
afterwards the body was found in the water. Three weeks later Shelley
married his mistress.

I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's
concerning Harriet Shelley:

"That no act of Shelley's during the two years which
immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act
which brought her life to its close seems certain."

Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a
concubine all that ti