of the Jew for publication, that he had previously to knowing him sent it to John Ballantyne & Co., and encloses their letter setting forth the reason that they did not publish it—­namely, that it contained “atheistical opinions.”  The canny Scots are sorry to return it, and do so only “after the most mature deliberation.”  They think that it is better suited, “perhaps,” to the “character and liberal feelings of the English than the bigoted spirit which yet pervades many cultivated minds in this country;” adding, “Even Walter Scott is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual and evangelical magazines and instructors for having promulgated atheistical doctrines in the Lady of the Lake.”

Shelley assures Stockdale he is unconscious of atheism in the Few, and asks him “upon his honor as a gentleman to pay a fair price for the copy-right.”

Stockdale never received the manuscript of the Jew, and Shelley, having submitted a copy in manuscript to Campbell and received an adverse judgment, does not seem to have troubled himself further about it.  So it remained in must and dust until 1831, when somebody of the Stockdale ilk discovered it, and printed parts of it in Frazer’s Magazine.  Judging from these excerpts, the book was entirely worthless, and as for the stories, they were neither better nor worse than other school-boy pieces of those days.

The betrayal of confidence of which Shelley complained as proceeding from Stockdale arose from a letter of the poet’s, in which (November 12, 1810) he asks his friend the publisher to send him a “Hebrew essay demonstrating the falsehood of the Christian religion,” and which the Christian Observer, he says, calls “an unanswerable but sophistical argument.”  Have it he must, be it translated into “Greek, Latin or any of the European languages.”

Pendulous Stockdale—­“long and lank and brown”—­comes from the reek and sin and filth of Harriet Wilson’s Memoirs, his pet publication, and actually trembles with godly fear for the safety of a human soul, and that soul the interior, eternal esse of the son of a baronet; which baronet he hopes to make a good money-friend of by betraying his son’s secrets to him.  Love, of a sort, for Shelley may also have been a constituent of his motive to this treachery, as the poet called it, for there can be no doubt that he did love him in his way, as all the rough fellows—­his Comus crew of the Budget office—­loved him.

Old Sir Timothy is grateful to the bookseller for abusing the trust put in him by his son, and he thanks him for what he calls the “liberal and handsome manner” in which Stockdale has imparted to him his sentiments toward Shelley, and says he shall ever esteem it and hold it in remembrance.