The authorities have blundered curiously about this affair of the two cousins. Mr. Thomas Love Peacock makes a great slip, where he says that 'Shelley's expulsion from Oxford brought to a summary conclusion his boyish passion for Miss Harriett Grove.' Letters published in Hogg's first volume put it beyond question that, whilst the brief familiar intercourse was an affair of the latter half of 1810, it was all over by the end of that year, or at latest before the end of the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. Shelley had ceased to sigh for Harriett Grove, some weeks before the expulsion. In the note, which reveals his disposition to think the dedicatory verses of _Queen Mab_ may after all have been addressed by the poet in the first instance to Harriett Grove, Mr. Forman does an injustice (for which he has, however, a sufficient excuse) to Mr. Thomas Medwin, in representing him as giving the summer of 1809 as the summer in which the young lady and the poet 'met for the first time, since they had been children, at Field Place.' An inexact author must be read with proper regard for his besetting infirmity, even as an unsound horse must be handled with due regard for his particular unsoundness. Half-a-score facts show that in speaking of the winter of 1809 (the winter next after Shelley's withdrawal from Eton), Medwin was speaking of the winter of 1809-10. From that date on p. 53, vol. I., of the _Life of Shelley_, the narrative is carried on throughout the winter and ensuing spring into the summer, when, on p. 66 of the same volume, the biographer says, 'It was in the summer of this year that he became acquainted with our cousin, Harriet Grove;'--obviously meaning the summer of 1810. Lady Shelley, who makes free use of Medwin's book (blunders and all), probably made her mistake of the year by reading Medwin, even as Mr. Forman in later time read him, without sufficient care. What does Mr. Charles Henry Grove (Harriett's brother) say about the matter in a very interesting letter? Writing from Torquay on 16th February, 1857, when still only in his 63rd year, this gentleman (after mentioning the Brentford schoolboy's visit to Fern for the Easter holidays), remarks:--