Hogg and Shelley settled in lodgings at No. 15, Poland Street, soon after their arrival in London.  The name attracted Shelley:  “it reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and of freedom.”  He was further fascinated by a gaudy wall-paper of vine-trellises and grapes, which adorned the parlour; and vowed that he would stay there for ever.  “For ever,” was a word often upon Shelley’s lips in the course of his chequered life; and yet few men have been subject to so many sudden changes through the buffetings of fortune from without and the inconstancy of their own purpose, than he was.  His biographer has no little trouble to trace and note with accuracy his perpetual flittings and the names of his innumerable temporary residences.  A month had not elapsed before Hogg left him in order to begin his own law studies at York; and Shelley abode “alone in the vine-trellised chamber, where he was to remain, a bright-eyed, restless fox amidst sour grapes, not, as his poetic imagination at first suggested, for ever, but a little while longer.”

The records of this first residence in London are meagre, but not unimportant.  We hear of negotiations and interviews with Mr. Timothy Shelley, all of which proved unavailing.  Shelley would not recede from the position he had taken up.  Nothing would induce him to break off his intimacy with Hogg, or to place himself under the tutor selected for him by his father.  For Paley’s, or as Mr. Shelley called him “Palley’s,” Evidences he expressed unbounded contempt.  The breach between them gradually widened.  Mr. Shelley at last determined to try the effect of cutting off supplies; but his son only hardened his heart, and sustained himself by a proud consciousness of martyrdom.  I agree with Shelley’s last and best biographer, Mr. W.M.  Rossetti, in his condemnation of the poet’s behaviour as a son.  Shelley did not treat his father with the common consideration due from youth to age; and the only instances of unpardonable bad taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of his conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who was really more unfortunate than criminal in his relations to this changeling from the realms of faery.  It is not too much to say that his dislike of his father amounted to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated fancy.  How so just and gentle a nature was brought into so false a moral situation, whether by some sudden break-down of confidence in childhood or by a gradually increasing mistrust, is an interesting but perhaps insoluble problem.  We only know that in his early boyhood Shelley loved his father so much as to have shown unusual emotion during his illness on one occasion, but that, while at Eton he had already become possessed by a dark suspicion concerning him.  This is proved by the episode of Dr. Lind’s visit during his fever.  Then and ever afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire.  It has more than once occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection in the process of recovery.  But the theory is too speculative and unsupported by proof to be more than passingly alluded to.