Shelley had previously published a romance called _Zastrozzi_, and his first kitten-love, Harriet Grove, is said to have helped both in this performance and the poems. But Harriet was not mindful of the commandment against stealing, and when Stockdale came to examine the poems he found that she had taken one entire poem by Monk Lewis and put it in among the "original" poetry. Shelley ordered the edition to be "squelched," but nearly a hundred copies had already been issued; and this fact, so maddening to the poet, may yet rejoice the collector of rare books. These poems, the _Wandering Jew_, an epic, the joint production of himself and Captain Medwin, a school-boy production, _St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian_, and his first story, _Zastrozzi_, are the first books of the poet; and their history is detailed with more or less interest in the letters which passed between Shelley and Stockdale respecting them. The poet tells Stockdale, in offering him the manuscript of the _Jew_ for publication, that he had previously to knowing him sent it to John Ballantyne & Co., and encloses their letter setting forth the reason that they did not publish it--namely, that it contained "atheistical opinions." The canny Scots are sorry to return it, and do so only "after the most mature deliberation." They think that it is better suited, "perhaps," to the "character and liberal feelings of the English than the bigoted spirit which yet pervades many cultivated minds in this country;" adding, "Even Walter Scott is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual and evangelical magazines and instructors for having promulgated atheistical doctrines in the _Lady of the Lake_." Shelley assures Stockdale he is unconscious of atheism in the _Few_, and asks him "upon his honor as a gentleman to pay a fair price for the copy-right." Stockdale never received the manuscript of the _Jew_, and Shelley, having submitted a copy in manuscript to Campbell and received an adverse judgment, does not seem to have troubled himself further about it. So it remained in must and dust until 1831, when somebody of the Stockdale ilk discovered it, and printed parts of it in _Frazer's Magazine_. Judging from these excerpts, the book was entirely worthless, and as for the stories, they were neither better nor worse than other school-boy pieces of those days. The betrayal of confidence of which Shelley complained as proceeding from Stockdale arose from a letter of the poet's, in which (November 12, 1810) he asks his friend the publisher to send him a "Hebrew essay demonstrating the falsehood of the Christian religion," and which the _Christian Observer_, he says, calls "an unanswerable but sophistical argument." Have it he must, be it translated into "Greek, Latin or any of the European languages."