Mab was.  Poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good qualities.’  As late as February 1818 He wrote, ’I have not yet read Shelley’s poem.’  On 23rd January of the same year he had written:  ’The fact is, he [Hunt] and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair [Endymion in MS.] officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.’  It was at nearly the same date, 4th February, that Keats, Shelley, and Hunt wrote each a sonnet on The Nile:  in my judgment, Shelley’s is the least successful of the three.

Soon after their marriage, Shelley and his second wife settled at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire.  They were shortly disturbed by a Chancery suit, whereby Mr. Westbrook sought to deprive Shelley of the custody of his two children by Harriet, Ianthe and Charles.  Towards March 1818, Lord Chancellor Eldon pronounced judgment against Shelley, on the ground of his culpable conduct as a husband, carrying out culpable opinions upheld in his writings.  The children were handed over to Dr. Hume, an army-physician named by Shelley:  he had to assign for their support a sum of L120 per annum, brought up to L200 by a supplement from Mr. Westbrook.  About the same date he suffered from an illness which he regarded as a dangerous pulmonary attack, and he made up his mind to quit England for Italy; accompanied by his wife, their two infants William and Clara, Miss Clairmont, and her infant Allegra, who was soon afterwards consigned to Lord Byron in Venice.  Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was Keats’s friend from boyhood, writes:  ’When Shelley left England for Italy, Keats told me that he had received from him an invitation to become his guest, and in short to make one of his household.  It was upon the purest principle that Keats declined his noble proffer, for he entertained an exalted opinion of Shelley’s genius—­in itself an inducement.  He also knew of his deeds of bounty, and from their frequent social intercourse he had full faith in the sincerity of his proposal....  Keats said that, in declining the invitation, his sole motive was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of his being, in its utter extent, not a free agent, even within such a circle as Shelley’s—­he himself nevertheless being the most unrestricted of beings.’  Mr. Clarke seems to mean in this passage that Shelley, before starting for Italy, invited Keats to accompany him thither—­a fact, if such it is, of which I find no trace elsewhere.  It is however just possible that Clarke was only referring to the earlier invitation, previously mentioned, for Keats to visit at Great Marlow; or he may most probably, with some confusion as to dates and details, be thinking of the message which Shelley, when already settled in Italy for a couple of years, addressed to his brother-poet—­of which more anon.