“I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both
          Shelley and his wife—­Hookham, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the
          Godwins—­that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence.”

What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl’s head?  Her very defencelessness should have been her protection.  The fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband’s side had been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought to trial.  Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned in her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury.

Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July.  On the 28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to the Continent.  He deserted his wife when her confinement was approaching.  She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress bore him another one something over two months later.  The truants were back in London before either of these events occurred.

On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his that was in her hands—­twenty pounds.  Yet the mistress was not moved to gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements, the mistress makes this entry in her diary: 

          “Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman.  Now we shall
          have to change our lodgings.”

The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obloquy of her situation two years and a quarter; then she gave up, and drowned herself.  A month afterwards the body was found in the water.  Three weeks later Shelley married his mistress.

I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer’s concerning Harriet Shelley: 

          “That no act of Shelley’s during the two years which
          immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act
          which brought her life to its close seems certain.”

Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a concubine all that time!  Why should a person attempt to write biography when the simplest facts have no meaning to him?  This book is littered with as crass stupidities as that one—­deductions by the page which bear no discoverable kinship to their premises.