Towards the close of 1809, and throughout the earlier months of 1810, Shelley was 'at home,' writing briskly for fame, and with a keen appetite for 'publisher's money,' which Byron, at the outset of his literary career, was of opinion no nobleman or other gentleman of high degree could accept, without sullying his honour. In his nonage, the author of _Zastrozzi_ asked publishers for their money with a steadiness, that would probably have been less unwavering, had it been old Sir Bysshe's practice to tip his grandson bountifully. Not that the desire for payment was wholly due to the need of it. In taking wages for the work of his pen, he would have regarded them as no less honourable than convenient. The Etonian, whose friends seem to have thought, that he entertained them with his literary earnings, was no youth to feel shame in taking publisher's money, or to miss it for want of asking for it. On the contrary, at the outset of a literary career (that from the commercial point of view, was worse than absolutely profitless) he liked to be credited with winning what he never won, and could ask for payment, though he had only the faintest hope of getting it. Throughout his time at Eton, Shelley saw much of Tom Medwin during vacations. During the winter of 1809-10, the cousin, who would soon go to Oxford, and the cousin, who would soon leave it for the army, were inseparable companions. During their long walks through the leafless glades of St. Leonard's Forest--in the clear frosty air and under the bright skies, that had a most exhilarating effect on their spirits--these two young men of common blood and kindred tastes discoursed with more enjoyment than discretion on the principles of poetry and romantic prose, of ancient science and modern culture. This was the winter, when they set to work on the production of a wild story (with a hideous witch for its principal character), that seems to have justified its title of _Nightmare_, before they ceased writing alternate chapters of the morbid tale, and threw themselves with greater enthusiasm into the much higher and more arduous enterprise of a grand 'metrical romance on the subject of the _Wandering Jew_,'--an enterprise in which the two cousins were encouraged and influenced (though not actuated from the commencement) by one of those accidents, which so often influence, and sometimes determine, the course of human genius. On his way through Lincoln's Inn Fields, Tom Medwin picked up at a bookstall the following passage, from a free English rendering and adaptation (with variations from the original) of Christian D. F. Schubart's rhapsodical poem _Der Ewige Jude_.