he discharged debts of Godwin, amounting, it is said, to about 6000 pounds.  In his pamphlet on “Putting Reform to the Vote”, he offered to subscribe 100 pounds for the purpose of founding an association; and we have already seen that he headed the Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 500 pounds.  These instances of his generosity might be easily multiplied; and when we remember that his present income was 1000 pounds, out of which 200 pounds went to the support of his children, it will be understood not only that he could not live luxuriously, but also that he was in frequent money difficulties through the necessity of raising funds upon his expectations.  His self-denial in all minor matters of expenditure was conspicuous.  Without a murmur, without ostentation, this heir of the richest baronet in Sussex illustrated by his own conduct those principles of democratic simplicity and of fraternal charity which formed his political and social creed.

A glimpse into the cottage at Great Marlow is afforded by a careless sentence of Leigh Hunt’s.  “He used to sit in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus.”  Fancy Shelley with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a tiny, low-roofed room, correcting proofs of “Laon and Cythna”, between the Apollo of the Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici, life-sized, and as crude as casts by Shout could make them!  In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother and Allegra, lived as Shelley’s guests; and here Clara Shelley was born on the 3rd of September, 1817.  In the same autumn, Shelley suffered from a severe pulmonary attack.  The critical state of his health, and the apprehension, vouched for by Mrs. Shelley, that the Chancellor might lay his vulture’s talons on the children of his second marriage, were the motives which induced him to leave England for Italy in the spring of 1818. (See Note on Poems of 1819, and compare the lyric “The billows on the beach.”) He never returned.  Four years only of life were left to him—­years filled with music that will sound as long as English lasts.

It was on the 11th of March that the Shelleys took their departure with Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra.  They went straight to Milan, and after visiting the Lake of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and Rome, they settled early in the following December at Naples.  Shelley’s letters to Peacock form the invaluable record of this period of his existence.  Taken altogether, they are the most perfect specimens of descriptive prose in the English language; never over-charged with colour, vibrating with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of Italy, frank in their criticism, and exquisitely delicate in observation.  Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace, combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a style at once familiar and elevated.  That Shelley’s sensibility to art was not so highly cultivated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough in many passages: