Shelley's acquaintance with Miss Godwin must, therefore, have begun between the 18th of April and the 8th of June; much nearer, I apprehend, to the latter than the former, but I cannot verify the precise date. On the 7th of July, 1814, Harriet wrote to a mutual friend, still living, a letter in which "she expressed a confident belief that he must know where Shelley was, and entreating his assistance to induce him to return home." She was not even then aware that Shelley had finally left her. On the 28th of the same month, Shelley and Miss Godwin left England for Switzerland. The interval between the Scotch and English marriages was two years and seven months. The interval between the second marriage and the departure for Switzerland, was four months and four days. In the estimate of probabilities, the space for voluntary separation is reduced by Mrs. B.'s letter of April 18, to three months and thirteen days; and by Harriet's letter of July 7, to twenty-one days. If, therefore, Shelley's family have any document which demonstrates Harriet's consent to the separation, it must prove the consent to have been given on one of these twenty-one days. I know, by my subsequent conversation with Harriet, of which the substance was given in my article of January, 1860, that she was not a consenting party; but as I have only my own evidence to that conversation, Mr. Garnett may choose not to believe me. Still, on other evidence than mine, there remain no more than three weeks within which, if at all, the "amicable agreement" must have been concluded. But again, if Shelley's family had any conclusive evidence on the subject, they must have had some clear idea of the date of the separation, and of the circumstances preceding it. That they had not, is manifest from Lady Shelley's statement, that "towards the close of 1813, estrangements, which for some time had been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis: separation ensued, and she returned to her father's house." 1* Lady Shelley could not have written thus if she had known the date of the second marriage, or had even adverted to the letter of the 18th of April, 1814, which had been published by Mr. Hogg long before the production of her own volume. A few facts in the order of time will show, I will not say the extreme improbability, but the absolute impossibility, of Shelley's family being in possession of any such documents. as are here alleged to exist. In August, 1811, Shelley married Harriet Westbrook in Scotland. On the 24th of March, 1814, he married her a second time in the Church of England, according to the marriage certificate printed in my article of January, 1860. This second marriage could scarcely have formed an incident in a series of "long-continued unhappiness." In the beginning of April, 1814, Shelley and Harriet were together on a visit to Mrs. B., at Bracknell. This lady and her family were of the few who constituted Shelley's most intimate friends. On the 18th of April, she wrote to Mr. Hogg:-"Shelley is again a widower. His beauteous half went to town on Thursday with Miss Westbrook, who is gone to live, I believe, at Southampton."* Up to this time, therefore, at least, Shelley and Harriet were together; and Mrs. B.'s letter shows that she had no idea of estrangement between them, still less of permanent separation. I said in my article of January, 1860: "There was no estrangement, no shadow of a thought of separation, till Shelley became acquainted, not long after the second marriage, with the lady who was subsequently his second wife." When Shelley first saw this lady, she had just returned from a visit to some friends in Scotland; and when Mr. Hogg first saw her, she wore a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time."* She could not have been long returned. Mr. Hogg saw Mary Godwin for the first time on the first day of Lord Cochrane's trial. This was the 8th of June, 1814. He went with Shelley to Mr. Godwin's. "We entered a room on the first floor. . . . William Godwin was not at home. . . . The door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called 'Shelley! A thrilling voice answered 'Mary! And he darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king."+ *Hogg's Life of Shelley, vol. ii. p. 533. Shelley's acquaintance with Miss Godwin must, therefore, have begun between the 18th of April and the 8th of June; much nearer, I apprehend, to the latter than the former, but I cannot verify the precise date. On the 7th of July, 1814, Harriet wrote to a mutual friend, still living, a letter in which" she expressed a confident belief that he must know where Shelley was, and entreating his assistance to induce him to return home." She was not even then aware that Shelley had finally left her. On the 28th of the same month, Shelley and Miss Godwin left England for Switzerland. The interval between the Scotch and English marriages was two years and seven months. The interval between the second marriage and the departure for Switzerland, was four months and four days. In the estimate of probabilities, the space for voluntary separation is reduced by Mrs. B.'s letter of April 18, to three months and thirteen days; and by Harriet's letter of July 7, to twenty-one days. If, therefore, Shelley's family have any document which demonstrates Harriet's consent to the separation, it must prove the consent to have been given on one of these twenty-one days. I know, by my subsequent conversation with Harriet, of which the substance was given in my article of January, 1860, that she was not a consenting party; but as I have only my own evidence to that conversation, Mr. Garnett may choose not to believe me. Still, on other evidence than mine, there remain no more than three weeks within which, if at all, the "amicable agreement" must have been concluded. But again, if Shelley's family had any conclusive evidence on the subject, they must have had some clear idea of the date of the separation, and of the circumstances preceding it. That they had not, is manifest from Lady Shelley's statement, that "towards the close of 1813, estrangements, which for some time had been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis: separation ensued, and she returned to her father's house.'* Lady Shelley could not have written thus if she had known the date of the second marriage, or had even adverted to the letter of the 18th of April, 1814, which had been published by Mr. Hogg long before the production of her own volume. Shelley Memorials, pp. 64-65. I wrote the preceding note immediately after the appearance of Mr. Garnett's article; but I postponed its publication, in the hope of obtaining copies of the letters which were laid before Lord Eldon in 1817. These were nine letters from Shelley to Harriet, and one from Shelley to Miss Westbrook after Harriet's death. These letters were not filed; but they are thus alluded to in Miss Westbrook's affidavit, dated 10th January, 1817, of which I have procured a copy from the Record Office : Elizabeth Westbrook, of Chapel-street, Grosvenor-square, in the parish of Saint George, Hanover-square, in the county of Middlesex, spinster, maketh oath and saith, that she knows and is well acquainted with the handwriting of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, one of the defendants in this cause, having frequently seen him write; and this deponent saith that she hath looked upon certain paper writings now produced, and shown to her at the time of swearing this her affidavit, and marked respectively 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; and this deponent saith that the female mentioned or referred to in the said letters, marked respectively 2, 4, 6, 9, under the name or designation of "Mary," and in the said other letters by the character or description of the person with whom the said defendant had connected or associated himself, is Mary Godwin, in the pleadings of this cause named, whom the said defendant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the lifetime of his said wife, and in or about the middle of the year 1814, took to cohabit with him, and hath ever since continued to cohabit, and still doth cohabit with; and this deponent saith that she hath looked upon a certain other paper writing, produced and shown to this deponent now at the time of swearing this her affidavit, and marked 10; and this deponent saith that the same paper writing is of the handwriting of the said defendant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and was addressed by him to this deponent, since the decease of her said sister, the late wife of the said Percy Bysshe Shelley. And this deponent saith that the person referred to in the said last mentioned letter as "the Lady whose union with the said defendant this deponent might excusably regard as the cause of her Sister's Ruin," is also the said Mary Godwin. The rest of the affidavit relates to "Queen Mab." The words marked in italics could not possibly have been written by Shelley, if his connection with Miss Godwin had not been formed till after a separation from Harriet by mutual consent. In a second affidavit, dated 13th January, 1817, Miss Westbrook stated in substance the circumstances of the marriage, and that two children were the issue of it: that after the birth of the first child, Eliza Ianthe, and while her sister was pregnant with the second, Charles Bysshe, Percy Bysshe Shelley deserted his said wife, and cohabited with Mary Godwin; and thereupon Harriet returned to the house of her father, with her eldest child, and soon afterwards the youngest child was born there; that the children had always remained under the protection of Harriet's father, and that Harriet herself had resided under the same protection until a short time previous to her death in December, 1816. It must be obvious that this statement could not have been made if the letters previously referred to had not borne it out; if, in short, they had not demonstrated, first, that the separation was not by mutual consent; and secondly, that it followed, not preceded, Shelley's first acquaintance with Mary Godwin. The rest of the affidavit related to the provision which Mr. Westbrook had made for the children. Harriet suffered enough in her life to deserve that her memory should be respected. I have always said to all whom it might concern, that I would defend her, to the best of my ability, against all misrepresentations. Such are not necessary to Shelley's vindication. That is best permitted to rest, as I have already observed, on the grounds on which it was placed by himself.* The Quarterly Review for October, 1861, has an article on Shelley's life and character, written in a tone of great fairness and impartiality, with an evident painstaking to weigh evidence and ascertain truth. There are two passages in the article, on which I wish to offer remarks, with reference solely to matters of fact. Shelley's hallucinations, though not to be confounded with what is usually called insanity, are certainly not compatible with perfect soundness of mind. They were the result of an excessive sensibility, which, only a little more severely strained, would have overturned reason altogether. It has been said that the horror of his wife's death produced some such effect, and that for a time at least he was actually insane. Lady Shelley says nothing about this, and we have no explicit statement of the fact by any authoritative biographer. But it is not in itself improbable.-P. 323. It was not so, however. He had at that time taken his house at Marlow, where I was then living. He was residing in Bath, and I was looking after the fitting-up of the house * Fraser's Magazine, January, 1860, p. 102. [See p. 430 of this volume.] |