ealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley--indeed she
was not a suitable companion for the poet--his first wife Harriett
must have been more suitable--Mary was the most conventional slave
I ever met--she even affected the pious dodge, such was her
yearning for society--she was devoid of imagination and Poetry--she
felt compunction when she had lost him--she did not understand or
appreciate him."

There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838
to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we
find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings
harden with my bones--age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived
through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parnassus he had been
shot through the body and had pardoned one of his assailants; he had
swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South
Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran
and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade
and the Sussex fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe
that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his
letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin--men
have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "---- is as gross and fat
as ---- and from the same cause--gluttony and sotting--it's all the
fashion."

And here we would interpose a query--Was it really necessary to suppress
the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of
the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their
descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people
been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading.
After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on
their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think
at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted
that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think
much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say
that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything
about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort
public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be
impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for
the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend