On his return to York, Shelley found a new inmate established in their lodgings.  The incomparable Eliza, who was henceforth doomed to guide his destinies to an obscure catastrophe, had arrived from London.  Harriet believed her sister to be a paragon of beauty, good sense, and propriety.  She obeyed her elder sister like a mother; never questioned her wisdom; and foolishly allowed her to interpose between herself and her husband.  Hogg had been told before her first appearance in the friendly circle that Eliza was “beautiful, exquisitely beautiful; an elegant figure, full of grace; her face was lovely,—­dark, bright eyes; jet-black hair, glossy; a crop upon which she bestowed the care it merited,—­almost all her time; and she was so sensible, so amiable, so good!” Now let us listen to the account he has himself transmitted of this woman, whom certainly he did not love, and to whom poor Shelley had afterwards but little reason to feel gratitude.  “She was older than I had expected, and she looked much older than she was.  The lovely face was seamed with the smallpox, and of a dead white, as faces so much marked and scarred commonly are; as white indeed as a mass of boiled rice, but of a dingy hue, like rice boiled in dirty water.  The eyes were dark, but dull, and without meaning; the hair was black and glossy, but coarse; and there was the admired crop—­a long crop, much like the tail of a horse—­a switch tail.  The fine figure was meagre, prim, and constrained.  The beauty, the grace, and the elegance existed, no doubt, in their utmost perfection, but only in the imagination of her partial young sister.  Her father, as Harriet told me, was familiarly called ’Jew Westbrook,’ and Eliza greatly resembled one of the dark-eyed daughters of Judah.”

This portrait is drawn, no doubt, with an unfriendly hand; and, in Hogg’s biography, each of its sarcastic touches is sustained with merciless reiteration, whenever the mention of Eliza’s name is necessary.  We hear, moreover, how she taught the blooming Harriet to fancy that she was a victim of her nerves, how she checked her favourite studies, and how she ruled the household by continual reference to a Mrs. Grundy of her earlier experience.  “What would Miss Warne say?” was as often on her lips, if we may credit Hogg, as the brush and comb were in her hands.

The intrusion of Eliza disturbed the harmony of Shelley’s circle; but it is possible that there were deeper reasons for the abrupt departure which he made from York with his wife and her sister in November, 1811.  One of his biographers asserts with categorical precision that Shelley had good cause to resent Hogg’s undue familiarity with Harriet, and refers to a curious composition, published by Hogg as a continuation of Goethe’s “Werther”, but believed by Mr. McCarthy to have been a letter from the poet to his friend, in confirmation of his opinion. (McCarthy’s Shelley’s Early Life, page 117.) However this may be, the precipitation with which the Shelleys quitted York, scarcely giving Hogg notice of their resolution, is insufficiently accounted for in his biography.