e; and when I was "done up,"
he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback. Our
communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a
pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence
in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that
he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me
with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors
a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the
sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The
chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, and,
to inflict the cruellest stroke I could think of, I looked him in the
face, and expressed a hope that he would be beaten in the trial and
have his children taken from him. I was sitting on his knee, and as
I spoke, he let himself fall listlessly back in his chair, without
attempting to conceal the shock I had given him. But presently he
folded his arms round me and kissed me; and I perfectly understood
that he saw how sorry I was, and was as anxious as I was to be friends
again. It was not very long after that we were playing with paper
boats on the pond in the Vale of Health, watching the way in which the
wind carried some of them over, or swamped most of them before they
had surmounted many billows; and Shelley then playfully said how
much he should like it, if we could get into one of the boats and be
shipwrecked,--it was a death he should like better than any other.

After the death of Harriet, Shelley's life entirely changed; and I
think I shall be able to show in the sequel that the change was far
greater than any of his biographers, except perhaps one who was most
likely to know, have acknowledged. Conventional form and Shelley are
almost incompatible ideas; as his admirable wife has said of him, "He
lived to idealize reality,--to ally the love of abstract truth, and
adoration of abstract good, with the living sympathies. And long as he
did this without injury to others, he had the reverse of any respect
for the dictates of orthodoxy or convention." As soon, therefore,
as the obstacle to a second marriage was removed, he and Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin were regularly joined in matrimony, and retired
to Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. A brief year Shelley passed in
the position of a country-gentleman on a small scale. His abode was
a rough house in the village, with a garden at the b