end of the lawn slightly inclosing the view.  Behind the mound there was a kitchen-garden, not unintermixed with flowers and ornamental vegetation; and farther still was a piece of ground traversed by a lane deeply excavated in the chalk soil.  At that time Shelley had a thousand a year allowed to him by his father; but although he was in no respect the unreckoning, wasteful person that many have represented him to be, such a sum must have been insufficient for the mode in which he lived.  His family comprised himself, Mary, William their eldest son, and Claire Claremont,—­the daughter of Godwin’s second wife, and therefore the half-sister of Mary Shelley,—­a girl of great ability, strong feelings, lively temper, and, though not regularly handsome, of brilliant appearance.  They kept three servants, if not a fourth assistant:  a cook; Elise, a Swiss gouvernante for the child; and Harry, a man who did the work of gardener and man-servant in general.  He kept something like open house; for while I was there with my father and mother, there also came, for a short time, several other friends, some of whom stopped for more than a passing visit.  He played the Lord Bountiful among his humbler neighbors, not only helping them with money or money’s-worth, but also advising them in sickness; for he had made some study of medicine, in part, I suspect, to be the more useful.

I have already intimated that he had assisted certain of his companions; and I am convinced that these circumstances contributed to the resolution which Shelley formed to leave England for Italy in the year 1818, although he then ascribed his doing so to the score of health,—­or rather, as he said, of life.  He then believed himself to be laboring under a tendency to consumption, not without medical warnings to that effect, although there were strong reasons for doubting the validity of the belief, which was based upon less precise grounds before the introduction of auscultation and the careful examinations of our day.  It was, however, characteristic of Shelley to rest his actions upon the dominant motive; so that, if several inducements operated to the same end, he absolutely discarded the minor considerations, and acted solely upon the grand one.  I can well remember, that, when other persons urged upon him cumulative reasons for any course of action, whether in politics, or morality, or trifling personal matters of the day, he indignantly cast aside all such makeweights, and insisted upon the one sufficient motive.  I mention this the more explicitly because the opposite course is the most common, and some who did not sympathize with his concentration of purpose afterwards imputed the suppression of all but one, out of several apparent motives, to reserve, or even to a want of candor.  The accusation was first made by some of Shelley’s false friends,—­creatures who gathered round him to get what they could, and afterwards made a market of their connection, to his disadvantage.