The whole history of Shelley's courtship of Harriet--or of her courtship of him, as many of his friends put it--will probably never be written. It seems to have been promoted by others quite as much as by themselves. That her father was not averse to her marriage with the eldest son of a baronet may be taken for granted, and Shelley was the very man to be duped by designing parties; of this there can be no doubt. He was but nineteen years old, and she but sixteen, when they eloped,--of which proceeding there does not seem to have been any especial need,--and proceeded to Edinburgh, where they were married. By the time they reached Edinburgh their money was gone, and Shelley laid the case before his landlord, and asked him to advance money enough so that they might be married. To this the landlord consented, and the ceremony was performed. But the landlord, it appears, presumed somewhat upon the aid he had rendered, and in the evening, when Shelley and his bride were alone together, he knocked at the door and told them it was customary there for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride with whiskey. "I immediately," says Shelley, "caught up my brace of pistols, and pointing them both at him, said to him, 'I have had enough of your impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains out;' on which he ran or rather tumbled downstairs, and I bolted the doors." Even before the honeymoon was over, Harriet's sister Eliza, the evil genius of the pair, appeared upon the scene. The friend who was with them at the time thus describes her advent:-- "The house lay, as it were, under an interdict; all our accustomed occupations were suspended; study was forbidden; reading was injurious; to read aloud might terminate fatally. To go abroad was death; to stay at home the grave. Bysshe became nothing; I of course much less than nothing,--a negative quantity of a very high figure." That Harriet already had peculiar notions of her own was soon evident. The same friend writes:-- "'What do you think of suicide?' said Harriet one day. 'Did you ever think of destroying yourself?' It was a puzzling question, for indeed the thought had never entered my head. 'What do you think of matricide, of high treason, of rick-burning? Did you ever think of killing any one? of murdering your mother? or setting rick-yards on fire?' I replied." But Harriet often discoursed at great length, in a calm, resolute manner, of her purpose of killing herself some day or other. Of their after-housekeeping in London lodgings Hogg writes:--