Personally, we know nothing of the Budget, but an English bookworm sets it down as “a sort of appendix to the more celebrated Memoirs of Harriet Wilson", which Stockdale had himself published a few years before.  This was so boldly licentious, and so reckless in its attacks upon the private characters of the Upper Ten, that the publisher was prosecuted with merciless persistency until his business gave up the ghost.  To convince the public that he was a martyr he started the Budget in 1827, and still appears to have kept his poets and dramatic satellites around him, and to have been a man of some repute for good-nature to young authors.  Indeed, it is but fair to say that from the first moment of Shelley’s introduction to him until we find him betraying Shelley’s confidence in him to his father, to save him, if possible, from the publication of an atheistic theorem, he seems to have been fascinated by the young poet’s character, and has testified under his own name that he had the highest confidence in his integrity, although it seems he lost a round sum by him in the end; and he adds that, in his belief, Shelley would “vegetate rather than live, in order to pay any honest debt.”

It was in 1810 that Shelley, impressed somehow or other with the belief that Stockdale was the poet’s friend, rushed pell-mell into the publisher’s Pall Mall shop, and besought him to do the friendly thing by him, and help him out of a scrape he had got into with his printer by ordering him to print fourteen hundred and eighty copies of a volume of poems, without having the money at hand to pay him.  “Aldus of Horsham, the mute and the inglorious,” was finally, appeased, although not by Stockdale’s money, and the edition of the poems passed into Stockdale’s hands for sale.  The book was entitled Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire, and we are informed that an advertisement of the same appeared in the Morning Chronicle, September 18, 1810.

Shelley had previously published a romance called Zastrozzi, and his first kitten-love, Harriet Grove, is said to have helped both in this performance and the poems.  But Harriet was not mindful of the commandment against stealing, and when Stockdale came to examine the poems he found that she had taken one entire poem by Monk Lewis and put it in among the “original” poetry.  Shelley ordered the edition to be “squelched,” but nearly a hundred copies had already been issued; and this fact, so maddening to the poet, may yet rejoice the collector of rare books.

These poems, the Wandering Jew, an epic, the joint production of himself and Captain Medwin, a school-boy production, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, and his first story, Zastrozzi, are the first books of the poet; and their history is detailed with more or less interest in the letters which passed between Shelley and Stockdale respecting them.  The poet tells Stockdale, in offering him the manuscript