herself upon my protection.  We shall have 200 pounds a year; when we find it run short, we must live, I suppose, upon love!  Gratitude and admiration, all demand that I should love her for ever.  We shall see you at York.  I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism, by which I am now almost convinced.  I can get lodgings at York, I suppose.  Direct to me at Graham’s, 18 Sackville Street, Piccadilly.”  From a letter recently published by Mr. W.M.  Rossetti (the University Magazine, February 1878), we further learn that Harriet, having fallen violently in love with her preceptor, had avowed her passion and flung herself into his arms.

It is clear from these documents, first, that Shelley was not deeply in love with Harriet when he eloped with her; secondly, that he was not prepared for the step; thirdly, that she induced him to take it; and fourthly, that he took it under a strong impression of her having been ill-treated.  She had appealed to his most powerful passion, the hatred of tyranny.  She had excited his admiration by setting conventions at defiance, and showing her readiness to be his mistress.  Her confidence called forth his gratitude.  Her choice of him for a protector flattered him:  and, moreover, she had acted on his advice to carry resistance a outrance.  There are many good Shelleyan reasons why he should elope with Harriet; but among them all I do not find that spontaneous and unsophisticated feeling, which is the substance of enduring love.

In the same series of letters, so incoherently jumbled together by Hogg’s carelessness or caprice, Shelley more than once expresses the utmost horror of matrimony.  Yet we now find him upon the verge of contracting marriage with a woman whom he did not passionately love, and who had offered herself unreservedly to him.  It is worth pausing to observe that even Shelley, fearless and uncompromising as he was in conduct, could not at this crisis practise the principles he so eloquently impressed on others.  Yet the point of weakness was honourable.  It lay in his respect for women in general, and in his tender chivalry for the one woman who had cast herself upon his generosity. (See Shelley’s third letter to Godwin (Hogg 2 page 63) for another defence of his conduct.  “We agreed,” etc.)

“My unfortunate friend Harriet,” he writes under date August 15, 1811, from London, whether he had hurried to arrange the affairs of his elopement, “is yet undecided; not with respect to me, but to herself.  How much, my dear friend, have I to tell you.  In my leisure moments for thought, which since I wrote have been few, I have considered the important point on which you reprobated my hasty decision.  The ties of love and honour are doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial souls—­they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force of power; they are delicate and satisfactory.  Yet the arguments of impracticability, and what is even worse, the disproportionate sacrifice which the