and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms.  He seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes.  “Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look.  She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said, “He cannot speak.”  “But surely,” exclaimed Shelley, “he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old!  He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible.”  The woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly:  “It is not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age.”  Shelley walked away with his friend, observing, with a deep sigh:  “How provokingly close are these new-born babes!” One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius.  But in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the vulgar say, “a little above himself.”  In any event it almost invariably appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man.  Shelley’s life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents.  He was habitually “a bit above himself.”  In the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically.  But many of his serious actions were quite as comically extraordinary.

Godwin is related to have said that “Shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked.”  I doubt if there is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the word “wicked” to Shelley.  It is said that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of Harriet Westbrook and her suicide.  But Browning did not know the full story.  No one of us knows the full story.  On the face of it, it looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother.  It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of L1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only L200 to a deserted wife and her two children.  Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love.  A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father.  At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him.  Besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated.  Harriet’s sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting Shelley’s exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind.  “Harriet,” says Mr. Ingpen in Shelley in England, “foolishly