Nut-brown Maid,” she must have hated that wandering about from, place to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar.  She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her “attacking Latin” for the purpose of construing the poet Horace.  How she must have hated all poets!  She had other ideas,—­ideas of ease, respectability, baronetcy; and her disappointment was greater than she could bear.  Mr. Hogg says, she had a propensity to strong courses, and would talk of suicide in a speculative way.  It is not difficult to discover the truth of that unfortunate union and disunion.  Shelley, betrayed by the impulses of his enthusiast nature and the ignorant and deplorable credulity of a bookworm, allowed himself to be imposed upon by a designing boarding-school girl and her relatives, and everything followed as a matter of course.  The unhappy wife recklessly broke the bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,—­and on him also, by a Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Since this article was written, Mr. Peacock, an early friend of Shelley, has published a very different estimate of the character of Harriet Shelley.  See Fraser’s Magazine for March, 1860.]

The subject of Shelley’s character is a delicate and a difficult one, and Mr. Hogg and Mr. Trelawny, especially, show their inability to understand it, by the way in which they put forward and dwell upon the poet’s peculiarities.  Trelawny, a hard-minded, thorough-paced man of the world, publishing garrulously in his old age what he was silent about in his better period, talks of the poet’s oddity, awkwardness, and want of punctuality,—­as if Percy were some clerkly man on ’Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a wall,—­Mr. Hogg’s own style of description being the wall,—­“O wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall!” He also tells us, to instance the poet’s familiarity with the sex, a story of Shelley sitting with one of his lady friends and being plied with cups of tea by that fair sympathizer,—­the poet talking and letting his saucer fall, and the lady wiping his perspiring face with a pocket-handkerchief.  Such scraps of silly gossip are not biography; they may do for tea-table chit-chat, but show very feebly in the place where one looks for something like a philosophical criticism on the mind of so extraordinary a man as Shelley.