Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is easy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or to praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories as a child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct. Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes. "Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said, "He cannot speak." "But surely," exclaimed Shelley, "he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible." The woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "It is not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age." Shelley walked away with his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "How provokingly close are these new-born babes!" One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. But in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the vulgar say, "a little above himself." In any event it almost invariably appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley's life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents. He was habitually "a bit above himself." In the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions were quite as comically extraordinary.