It may not be inferred from the words 'She is married,' that the gentlewoman had already become a wife, or that Shelley meant to do more than announce her engagement to Mr. William Helyar, of Coker Court, Co. Somerset, whose wife she became in November, 1811, two months after the future poet's Scotch marriage to Harriett Westbrook. Bearing in mind the old distinction between marriage and its celebration, and remembering, at the same time, the ancient doctrine of the Church, that a mere matrimonial contract was wedlock--though not yet celebrated and sanctified into _holy_ wedlock--readers must take the words as a mere declaration that Miss Grove had plighted her troth to her future husband. The old ecclesiastical law, which made matrimonial pre-contract a sufficient ground for nullification of marriage, was based on the doctrine that an interchange of nuptial promises was, in itself, marriage. In his 'anti-matrimonialism'--a sentiment growing more and more powerful in the author of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_--Shelley, disdainful of the ecclesiastical celebration, looked upon the interchange of promises ('the engagement' of ordinary parlance) as the real marriage; and in doing so he was (strange to say) in accord with the canonists, and with the old matrimonial law that, surviving in North its extinction in South Britain, was, even to yesterday, generally known as 'the Scotch marriage-law.' The clod of earth had a good many acres of land in Wiltshire, Somerset, and Devonshire, and instead of being the senseless and soulless wretch it pleased Mr. Bysshe Shelley to imagine him, was a gentleman of good repute in the three shires, for each of which he was a magistrate. Heir to an ample estate, he married Miss Harriett Grove in November 1811, and living with her till death divided them, was never moved to transfer his affections to another lady. Would life have gone thus pleasantly with the gentlewoman, who became the mother of children fair and gracious as herself, had she yielded to the suit of her scatter-brain cousin? Whilst he was fuming over his sentimental misadventure, and writing extravagant nonsense about the 'altar of perjured love,' not so much because he felt his cousin's unkindness acutely, as from a notion that the poetical proprieties required him to use the language of indignation and wretchedness, Mr. Bysshe Shelley made frequent mention of his sister Elizabeth in the letters he sent in steady stream to the young gentleman, who had been entreated to fall in love with her.