calculation Shelley found himself in urgent need of the money he had so recklessly given away, just twenty-four hours after the note or notes for the money came to the hands of the Bond-Street bookseller. There are differences between Hogg’s transcript of the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham and Lady Shelley’s transcript of the same note. One of the discrepancies is that Lady Shelley gives us ‘Oh! send me 20_l._, if you have it,’ whereas Hogg gives us ‘O send the twenty pounds, if you have it.’ Whichever of the two versions is taken, it is clear that ‘if you have it’ signifies ‘if you have not parted with it to the Hunt Fund Committee,’ and that Shelley was asking for the return of his own money. As he had no reason to suppose the prosperous bookseller might be without twenty pounds either in his till or at the bank, by ‘if you have it’ Shelley cannot have meant ‘if you are the possessor of so much money.’ Affording no indication that Shelley felt he was putting himself under a pecuniary obligation to the man of business, the language of the note precludes the assumption that he was asking outright for a loan of money. Though he may have felt, and probably did feel, that his note would move Mr. Hookham to lend him 20_l._ if he had parted with the subscribed 20_l._, Shelley asked for the restoration of his own 20_l._ Much the same may be said of Mrs. Shelley and her postscript. Instead of writing as though she and her husband were asking Mr. Hookham to do them a considerable kindness, she wrote as though she were merely asking for their own money. When the assassination-note came to Mr. Hookham’s hands on the morning of Tuesday, 3rd March, he had passed Shelley’s gift on to the Hunt Fund. In his inability to return the subscribed money, the bookseller sent him 20_l._ as a loan; a loan which Shelley acknowledged from Bangor Ferry, on 6th March, 1813, in terms affording proof that the present writer has not misconstrued the assassination-note. Lady Shelley’s printed transcript of the letter from Bangor Ferry, makes Shelley write thus,-- ‘From the tenor of your letter I augur’ (_argue_ ?) ‘that you have applied the 20_l._ I sent to the benefit of the Hunts.... By your kindness and generosity we are perfectly relieved from all pecuniary difficulties. We only wanted a little breathing time, which the rapidity of our persecutions was unwilling to allow us. We shall readily repay the 20_l._ when I hear from my correspondent in London; but when can I repay the friendship, the disinterestedness, and the zeal of your confidence?’ Mr. Hookham having sent Shelley 20_l._ as a loan, instead of returning the subscribed money, the poet argues from the bookseller’s action and epistle, that the latter has ‘applied the 20_l._’ (sent for that purpose) ‘to the benefit of the Hunts.’