But of all the ladies who thronged about Shelley in Half-Moon Street (to Harriett’s perplexity and Eliza Westbrook’s secret wrath), even as women of higher quality crowded round and ‘suffocated’ Byron in the salons of lordly houses, none had more influence over the author of _Queen Mab_ from the spring of 1813, to the end of the spring of 1814, than Mrs. Boinville--an Englishwoman by birth and education, who was indebted to a French husband for her style and tastes, as well as for the name which gives her peculiar distinctiveness in the Shelleyan annals. The mother-in-law of Mr. Newton (the vegetarian enthusiast, who, after living in affectionate intimacy with Shelley during the greater part of 1813, quarrelled with him in an early month of the following year), Mrs. Boinville, at the time of making Shelley’s acquaintance, was through her daughter, Cornelia (Mr. Newton’s wife), the grandmother of a brood of handsome children. Nor were these children the only evidence that Mrs. Boinville had come to an age when it is unusual for an Englishwoman to conceive a sentimental fondness for a youngster in his nonage. The whiteness of her abundant tresses proclaimed her old enough for grand-maternal dignity. She was, however, a young-looking woman for her age; the contrast of her snow-white hair and comparatively girlish face causing Shelley to name her Maimuna, after the poetical creation of whom it is written in Southey’s _Thalaba_: ‘Her face was as a damsel’s face, And yet her hair was grey.’ Doting on her in 1813, for the perfection of her manners and character, Shelley some five years later remembered Maimuna as a person ‘whose extreme subtlety and delicacy of understanding’ were incompatible with perfect guilelessness and constancy. And coming to think less favourably of his whilom spiritual mate, it was natural for the poet to tell others of her insincerity and fickleness.