For any good he could do the projectors of the embankment Shelley might as well have stayed at Tanyrallt. In promising to do much for them he had ‘talked too fast,’--a fault of which youthful and impetuous persons of both sexes are often guilty; and in due course he was punished for his fast _talk_ by the annoyance that came to him from the pressure, put upon him to _do_ something in fulfilment of his brave words. From one of his letters it seems that he made some faint attempts to get subscribers to the embankment fund in Sussex. Possibly he wrote to his uncle Pilfold and Mr. Medwin on the subject; but it is certain he received neither from them nor any one else in the county any assistance for the great scheme. ‘I see,’ he wrote to Mr. Williams of Tremadoc from the St. James’s Coffee-house on 7th November, 1812, ‘no hope of effecting, on my part, any grand or decisive scheme until the expiration of my minority,’--words comically indicative of the grand and decisive things he had promised to do for Tremadoc, as soon as he should come of age. In Sussex he met with no encouragement. The cold and unsympathetic animals of his native shire cared only for eating, drinking, and sleeping. But his fervid hopes, ardent desires, and unremitting personal exertions, were all engaged for the great cause of the Tremadoc embankment, ‘which he would desert but with his life’:--a declaration not unworthy of Mr. Micawber in his happiest moments. At the date of this letter Shelley had not seen, nor does he appear to have written to, his particular friend, the Duke of Norfolk, on the enterprise for benefiting owners of property in and near Tremadoc; for he says in the epistle, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has just returned to London. I shall call upon him this morning, and shall spare no pains in engaging his interest, or perhaps his better feelings, in our and our country’s cause.’ If Shelley talked to the Duke of the Tremadoc embankment in the style in which he wrote about it to the Welsh agent, his Grace of Norfolk must have found it difficult to refrain from laughing outright at the youngster.