obloquy, to make every sacrifice for its accomplishment: and would,’ such is the Captain’s English, ‘if necessary, have died in the cause.’ It does not appear, however, that disappointed love took solely the very unusual form of philanthropy. By chance, whether with or without leave does not appear, he went to see his second sister, who was at school at a place called Balham Hill, near London; and, while walking in the garden with her, ‘a Miss Westbrook passed them.’ She was a ‘handsome blonde young lady, nearly sixteen;’ and Shelley was much struck. He found out that her name was ‘Harriett,’—as he, after his marriage, anxiously expresses it, with two t’s, ‘Harriett;’ and he fell in love at once. She had the name of his first love; ‘fairer, though yet the same.’ After his manner, he wrote to her immediately. He was in the habit of doing this to people who interested him, either in his own or under an assumed name: and once, Captain Medwin says, carried on a long correspondence with Mrs. Hemans, then Miss Browne, under his (the captain’s) name; but which he, the deponent, was not permitted to peruse. In Miss Westbrook’s case the correspondence had a more serious consequence. Of her character we can only guess a little. She was, we think, an ordinary blooming young lady of sixteen. Shelley was an extraordinary young man of nineteen, rather handsome, very animated, and expressing his admiration a little intensely. He was doubtless much the most aristocratic person she had ever spoken to; for her father was a retired innkeeper, and Shelley had always the air of a man of birth. There is a vision, too, of an elder sister, who made ‘Harriett dear’ very uncomfortable. On the whole, the result may be guessed. At the end of August 1811, we do not know the precise day, they were married at Gretna Green. Jests may be made on it; but it was no laughing matter in the life of the wife or the husband. Of the lady’s disposition and mind we know nothing, except from Shelley; a medium which must, under the circumstances, be thought a distorting one. We should conclude that she was capable of making many people happy, though not of making Shelley happy. There is an ordinance of nature at which men of genius are perpetually fretting, but which does more good than many laws of the universe which they praise: it is, that ordinary women ordinarily prefer ordinary men. ‘Genius,’ as Hazlitt would have said, ‘puts them out.’ It is so strange; it does not come into the room as usual; it says ‘such things:’ once it forgot to brush its hair. The common female mind prefers usual tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and practical pursuits. And it is a great good that it should be so. Nature has no wiser instinct. The average woman suits the average man; good health, easy cheerfulness, common charms, suffice. If Miss Westbrook had married an every-day person—a gentleman, suppose, in the tallow line—she would have been happy, and have made him happy.