There can be no doubt that he had profited greatly in his moral condition, as well as in his bodily health, by the greater tranquillity which he enjoyed in the society of Mary, and also by the sympathy which gave full play to his ideas, instead of diverting and disappointing them.  She was, indeed, herself a woman of extraordinary power, of heart as well as head.  Many circumstances conspired to conceal some of her natural faculties.  She lost her mother very young; her father—­speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and imperfect knowledge—­appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man.  She inherited from him her thin voice, but not the steel-edged sharpness of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her mind.  She had a masculine capacity for study; for, though I suspect her early schooling was irregular, she remained a student all her life, and by painstaking industry made herself acquainted with any subject that she had to handle.  Her command of history and her imaginative power are shown in such books as “Valperga” and “Castruccio”; but the daring originality of her mind comes out most distinctly in her earliest published work, “Frankenstein.”  Its leading idea has been ascribed to her husband, but, I am sure, unduly; and the vividness with which she has brought out the monstrous tale in all its horror, but without coarse or revolting incidents, is a proof of the genius which she inherited alike from both her parents.  It is clear, also, that the society of Shelley was to her a great school, which she did not appreciate to the full until most calamitously it was taken away; and yet, of course, she could not fail to learn the greater part of what it had become to her.  This again showed itself even in her appearance, after she had spent some years in Italy; for, while she had grown far more comely than she was in her mere youth, she had acquired a deeper insight into many subjects that interested Shelley, and some others; and she had learned to express the force of natural affection, which she was born to feel, but which had somehow been stunted and suppressed in her youth.  In the preface to the collected edition of his works, she says:  “I have the liveliest recollection of all that was done and said during the period of my knowing him.  Every impression is as clear as if stamped yesterday, and I have no apprehension of any mistake in my statements, as far as they go.  In other respects I am, indeed, incompetent; but I feel the importance of the task, and regard it as my most sacred duty.  I endeavor to fulfil it in a manner he would himself approve; and hope in this publication to lay the first stone of a monument due to Shelley’s genius, his sufferings, and his virtues.”  And in the postscript, written in November, 1839, she says:  “At my request, the publisher has restored the omitted passages of ‘Queen Mab.’  I now present this edition