The Shelleys were suddenly driven away from Tanyrallt by a mysterious occurrence, of which no satisfactory explanation has yet been given.  According to letters written by himself and Harriet soon after the event, and confirmed by the testimony of Eliza, Shelley was twice attacked upon the night of February 24 by an armed ruffian, with whom he struggled in hand-to-hand combat.  Pistols were fired and windows broken, and Shelley’s nightgown was shot through:  but the assassin made his escape from the house without being recognized.  His motive and his personality still remain matters of conjecture.  Whether the whole affair was a figment of Shelley’s brain, rendered more than usually susceptible by laudanum taken to assuage intense physical pain; whether it was a perilous hoax played upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill; or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say.  Strange adventures of this kind, blending fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of no unfrequent occurrence in Shelley’s biography.  In estimating the relative proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be borne in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, who was alone in the parlour, and who for some unexplained reason had loaded his pistols on the evening before the alleged assault, professed to have seen the villain; and, on the other, that the details furnished by Harriet, and confirmed at a subsequent period by so hostile a witness as Eliza, are too circumstantial to be lightly set aside.

On the whole it appears most probable that Shelley on this night was the subject of a powerful hallucination.  The theory of his enemies at Tanyrallt, that the story had been invented to facilitate his escape from the neighbourhood without paying his bills, may be dismissed.  But no investigation on the spot could throw any clear light on the circumstance, and Shelley’s friends, Hogg, Peacock, and Mr. Madocks, concurred in regarding the affair as a delusion.

There was no money in the common purse of the Shelleys at this moment.  In their distress they applied to Mr. T. Hookham, a London publisher, who sent them enough to carry them across the Irish channel.  After a short residence in 35, Cuffe Street, Dublin, and a flying visit to Killarney, they returned to London.  Eliza, for some reason as unexplained as the whole episode of this second visit to Ireland, was left behind for a short season.  The flight from Tanyrallt closes the first important period of Shelley’s life; and his settlement in London marks the beginning of another, fruitful of the gravest consequences and decisive of his future.

CHAPTER 4.

Second residence in London, and separation from Harriet.