ince it
appears to give as well as to receive a color of verisimilitude from
the usual written description, which represents Shelley as "feminine,"
"almost girlish," "ideal," "angelic," and so forth. The accounts of
him by firmer hands are still cramped by the individuality of the
authorship.

His school-friend, Hogg, is a gentleman of independent property;
Shelley detected the sensitiveness of his nature; and I know that the
man has been capable of truly generous conduct. How is it, then, that
he has written such utterly unintelligible stuff, and has descended to
such evasions as to insert initials, lest people should detect amongst
Shelley's correspondents a most admirable friend, who happened, it
is supposed, to be of plebeian origin? Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg,
I surmise, was conscious, somewhat early in life, that his better
qualities were not fully appreciated; and his love of ease, his wit,
his perception of the ludicrous, made him take refuge in cynicism
until he learned almost to forget the origin of the real meaning of
the things he talked about. His account of Shelley is like a figure
seen through fantastically distorting panes of glass.

Thomas Love Peacock, again, is a man to whose extraordinary powers
Shelley did full justice. He has worked through a long official career
without losing his very peculiar dry wit; but a dry wit was not the
man exactly to discern the form of Shelley's mind, or to portray it
with accuracy and distinctness.

Few men knew the poet better than my father; but a mind checked by
"over-refinement," excessive conscientiousness, and an irresistible
tendency to find out niceties of difference,--a mind, in short, like
that of Hamlet, cultivated rather than corrected by the trials
of life, was scarcely suited to comprehend the strong instincts,
indomitable will, and complete unity of idea which distinguished
Shelley. Accordingly we have from my father a very doubtful portrait,
seldom advancing beyond details, which are at once exaggerated and
explained away by qualifications.

Byron, I suspect, through the natural strength of his perceptive
power, was likely to have formed a better design; but the two were
separated soon after he had begun to learn that such a man as Shelley
might be found on the same earth with himself.

One or two others that have written have been mere tourists or
acquaintances. Unquestionably the companion who knew him best of all
was Mary; and although she lack