The same reflections are applicable to Stockdale's vivid recollections of the Oxonian Shelley, and to Mr. Garnett's reliance on the accuracy of those recollections. Though they exchanged letters in January, 1811, and had some disagreeable correspondence in later months of the same year, it does not appear that Shelley ever set eyes on the Pall-Mall publisher after December, 1810. The whole period of their personal intercourse cannot have exceeded four months:--months spent chiefly by Shelley at Oxford or in Sussex, whilst the publisher was attending to his affairs in London? To assume that during these four months they had a dozen meetings is to assume too much. It is more probable that they talked with one another on seven or eight several occasions. What opportunities could such an acquaintanceship afford the publisher for knowing his young client in such a way, that sixteen years later he could recall him clearly? Is it reasonable to suppose that the publisher during these interviews (and from several letters in no degree calculated to fill their receiver's breast with tender emotion) conceived a strong affection--or any affection whatever--for the boy out of whom, or rather out of whose father, he meant to 'make a bill?' One might as reasonably imagine a money-lender overflowing with love for any young gentleman 'in his teens,' to whom he lends 50_l._ on the usual terms. Are London publishers so very different from other men of business, that they do business with youthful poets and novelists from impulses of affection, altogether pure of self-interest? I know something of London publishers: few men have better reason to think and speak well of them; to my last hour of consciousness I shall never recall a particular London publisher, without remembering him as one of the trustiest and dearest of the many friends who have contributed to my happiness; but still my impression is, and my experience has been, that a publisher's regard for a young author has a tendency to rise and fall with the sale of the young author's works. _St. Irvyne_ having fallen dead from the press, even as Mr. Stockdale expected it to do, I have no doubt that Mr. Stockdale merely regarded his young author as a simpleton, whom he would not trust on any future occasion (during his minority) to pay the printer's bill. To do Stockdale justice (and even to such a worm I would not be less than just) it should be remarked that he is no such preposterous 'humbug' as Mr. Garnett's words imply. Though he whines hypocritically about 'his too conscientious friendship' for Mr. Bysshe Shelley, of University College, Oxford, the professional libeller does not profess to have loved the youth, with whom he was doing 'risky business.' In 1827, the disposition to think tenderly of Shelley had not gone so far as to produce a crop of 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' capable of believing that the publisher loved the author of _St. Irvyne_. Had Stockdale claimed credit for loving the dear