As Miss Harriett Grove had never promised to be his wife, but had on the contrary persisted in assuring her cousin Elizabeth that she might not anticipate a successful issue to her brother's suit, this talk about 'perjured love' was very much out of place. Still it did no harm; and as the young gentleman felt it needful to swear on something, and was precluded by the exigencies of the case from swearing 'on the book,' he, perhaps, exercised a wise discretion when he elected to 'swear on the altar of perjured love.' To swear what? That, because he was very much annoyed at being sent about his business by Miss Harriett Grove, and at being otherwise reprimanded for troubling her mind with sceptical sentiments, he would make war upon Intolerance, would fight Intolerance to the bitter end, would be the death of Intolerance, would 'stab the wretch in secret.' This was the oath sworn on the altar of perjured love! Having suffered, more in self-love than in any other of his affections, from a young lady's disapproval of his religious opinions, and from her parents' no less cordial repugnance to those opinions, Mr. Bysshe Shelley regarded himself as a victim of religious intolerance. Yet further,--seeing that Christians, intolerant of opinions antagonistic to their religious tenets, would not be intolerant Christians were it not for their Christianity, he determined to render them tolerant by slaying the religion which he regarded as the source of their intolerance. 'Indeed, I think it,' he wrote, 'to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which annihilate the dearest of its ties,'--_i.e._ the ties uniting such lovers as Mr. Bysshe Shelley and Miss Harriett Grove were, before religion separated them. As the war against Christianity had begun long before the poet's severance from his cousin, which was, indeed, one of the consequences of the war, it would, of course, be absurd to attribute the poet's hatred of the religion to the anger begotten of his dismissal by Miss Grove. But in accounting for the vehemence with which Shelley pushed the war, and the spirit in which he extended the field of his operations, and from being the enemy of a single faith became the foe of all religions, readers must make allowance for the sense of personal injury which animated him to swear he would slay Religious Intolerance. In the letters which Shelley poured upon Hogg, from the 20th of December, till the end of the academic vacation, one comes upon much more about Harriett Grove, and his correspondence with her. To skim these flighty and rhapsodical letters is to miss the information that may be extracted from them. But to study them carefully is to take the present writer's view of Shelley's regard for his cousin, from the summer of 1810.