It is in the reader’s memory that Hogg promised to visit the Shelleys in Carnarvonshire, and pass a few days with them at Tanyrallt, in March, 1813,--an arrangement that could not be carried out, when the poet, with his wife and sister-in-law, had left Wales for Ireland. To spare him the annoyance (similar to the annoyance Godwin endured half-a-year earlier) of journeying to Tanyrallt, only to find they had departed, Mrs. Shelley had given Hogg timely information of the circumstances which had determined her and her husband to fly to Ireland. As the letter, which afforded him this information, was ‘written from Tanyrallt, a day or two after the catastrophe,’ Hogg was guilty of a curious slip when (writing from memory of the lost epistle) he declared that, to the best of his recollection, apart from the different date, it was ‘precisely similar, word for word,’ indeed, to the letter Harriett wrote to Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street, from Dublin on the 12th (Lady Shelley says 11th) of March, giving the details of the alleged attacks. As Harriett’s later letter to Mr. Hookham began with the words, ‘My Dear Sir, We arrived here last Tuesday, after a most tedious passage, during the whole of which time we were dreadfully ill,’ it cannot have corresponded so precisely, as Hogg represents, with her earlier letter from Tanyrallt. Had the Shelleyan enthusiasts noticed this droll slip, they would have discovered in it yet another proof of Hogg’s incomparable villany, instead of attributing the excessive statement to the writer’s honest purpose of saying emphatically that, in so far as it related to the alleged attempts at assassination, the later epistle to Mr. Hookham seemed like a copy of the earlier letter to him. It appeared also that Harriett (_not_ Shelley) wrote similar accounts of the assassination-incidents either from Tanyrallt or Ireland, to other persons, besides Mr. Hookham and Hogg. ‘I have been informed,’ says the biographer, ‘that she also sent to other persons a narrative of the nightly fears in the same terms, writing descriptive circulars, and dispatching them in different directions.’ Why were these letters of intelligence written by Harriett instead of her husband, who certainly was the natural and fittest person to put on record the matters, so closely touching his honour? Though she made it to one of her correspondents, readers may smile at the statement, that Harriett wrote the letters, in order to spare her husband the pain of recalling again and again the horrors of that awful night.