such an extent, that even during the last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to.  It may be added that mental application increased the mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt that the composition of “The Cenci” had cost him a fresh seizure.  Yet though his sufferings were indubitably real, the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic disease; and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when he attributed Shelley’s spasms to insufficient and irregular diet, and to a continual over-taxing of his nervous system.

Mrs. Shelley states that the change from England to Italy was in all respects beneficial to her husband.  She was inclined to refer the depression from which he occasionally suffered, to his solitary habits; and there are several passages in his own letters which connect his melancholy with solitude.  It is obvious that when he found himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom.  On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his “Homeric laughter,” his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven.  Byron, who had some right to express a judgment in such a matter, described him as the most companionable man under the age of thirty he had ever met with.  Shelley rode and practised pistol-shooting with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes, and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.  All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution, remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic persons to invest the poet.  Society of the ordinary kind he hated.  The voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with Shelley’s almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on his mistaking his wife’s mention of the Aziola, a little owl common enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor.  This dislike for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some disagreement between him and Mrs. Shelley, and kept him further apart from Byron than he might otherwise have been.  In a valuable letter recently published by Mr. Garnett, he writes:—­“I detest all society—­almost all, at least—­and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome in it.”  And again, speaking about his wife to Trelawny, he said:—­“She can’t bear solitude, nor I society—­the quick coupled with the dead.”