In the interval before his next visit to us, Shelley had passed through the first serious passion of his youth, had married Harriet Westbrooke, had become the father of two children, and had thus to all appearance secured the transmission of the estates strictly entailed with the baronetcy,—­but had also been exiled from his family-home, as well as from college, for his revolutionary and infidel principles, had gone through a course of domestic disappointment, had separated from his wife, and was threatened with the removal of his children, on the ground of the impious and “immoral” training to which they were destined under his guardianship.  He came to our house for support and consolation; he found in it a home for his intellect as well as for his feelings, and he was as strictly a part of the family as any of our blood-relations, for he came and went at pleasure.  I can remember that I performed his bidding equally with that of my father; and as to personal deference or regard, the only distinction which my memory can discover is, that I found in Shelley a companion whom I better understood, and whose country rambles I was more pleased to share.  For this there were many reasons, and amongst them that Shelley entered more unreservedly into the sports and even the thoughts of children.  I had probably awakened interest in him, not only because I was my father’s eldest child, but still more because I had already begun to read with great avidity, and with an especial sense of imaginative wonders and horrors; and, familiarized with the conversation amongst literary men, I had really been able to understand something of his position, insomuch that no doubt he saw the intense interest I took in himself and his sufferings.

The emotions that he underwent were but too manifest in the unconcealed anxiety and the eager recital of newly awakened hopes, with intervals of the deepest depression.  He suffered also from physical causes, which I then only in part understood.  This suffering was traced to the attack made upon him at Tanyralt, in Wales, when, on the night of February the 26th, 1813, some man who had been prowling about the house in which he lived first fired at him through the window, and then entered the room, escaping when the man-servant was called in by the tumult and the screams of Mrs. Shelley.  The whole incident has been doubted,—­why, I can hardly understand, unless the reason is that some of the conjectures in which Mrs. Shelley indulged were over-imaginative.  She mentions by name a political opponent who had said that “he would drive them out of the country.”  My own weak recollections point to reasons more personal.  But what I do know is, that Shelley himself ascribed the injury from which he suffered to a pressure of the assassin’s knee upon him in the struggle.  The complaint was of long standing; the attacks were alarmingly severe, and the seizure very sudden.  I can remember one day at Hampstead:  it was soon after breakfast, and Shelley sat reading, when he suddenly