The most interesting of the “new facts and letters” in Mr. Ingpen’s book relate to Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with Harriet, and to his father’s attitude on both these occasions.  Shelley’s father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the story.  He is simply the conventional grieved parent.  He made no effort to understand his son.  The most he did was to try to save his respectability.  He objected to Shelley’s studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him a member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant “at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke.”  How unpromising as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in 1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a satire on the Regent a propos of a Carlton House fete, but “amused himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to Carlton House after the fete.”  Shelley’s methods of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes.  His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet.  Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville Street, and threw copies to the passers-by.  “I stand,” he wrote at the time, “at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man who looks likely; I throw a book to him.”  Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the comic side of the adventure.  Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener—­“the Brown Demon,” as Shelley called her when he came to hate her—­she said: 

I’m sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets.  We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets.  For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave.  Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood and cloak.  She knew nothing of it, and we passed her.  I could hardly get on:  my muscles were so irritated.

Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in his Address when he described the Act of Union as “the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.”  Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple’s reckless daring.  “Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!” he wrote to him in his anxiety.  It is evidence of the extent of Godwin’s influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the Irish people.