The Pimlico drawing-room would have been a bower of delight to the young poet, had he found no other worshipers there; but it was the favourite gathering place of a coterie of sentimentalists and free-thinkers of both sexes, who rendered the salon even more agreeable to the author of _Queen Mab_, by being at much pains to make him see that he was superlatively acceptable to them. Mr. Hogg may, perhaps, have been justified in thinking meanly of Mrs. Boinville’s circle, and in suggesting that before the end of the season Shelley was secretly ashamed of himself for spending so much of his time in it. But the poet, who had long yearned for social recognition, may be pardoned for not being nicely fastidious respecting the quality of the first coterie to welcome and worship him as a man of genius. Moreover, though it may have comprised several arrant charlatans, together with a considerable percentage of individuals to be fairly rated by a humorous annalist as so many sentimental medical students and revolutionary tinkers, the crowd, that thronged Mrs. Boinville’s staircase on her evenings of reception, doubtless held a far larger proportion of well-mannered gentle people, who were all the better company because their social crotchets declared them likely to die in a lunatic asylum. Certainly it contained a fair proportion of clever and lovely girls, whose mental and personal endowments may well have caused the principal poet of the assemblies to recall with a sense of shame, how recently he had hung upon the words of the Hurstpierpoint prophetess. It was at Mrs. Boinville’s house that Shelley met the chosen and especially favoured young ladies, with whom (after the departure of the other visitors) he used to drink strong tea and converse on lofty themes from midnight to early dawn, and sometimes from early dawn to broad daylight. On crossing Piccadilly an hour or so after daybreak, as the market-carts rolled slowly towards Covent Garden, it was natural for Shelley to wish his lodgings were something nearer the house he visited at least once in every twenty-four hours; and so wishing, it was natural for him to think it would be well for his dear Harriett’s sake, that he should take lodgings in Pimlico, so as to be able to drop in at any moment on the dear Boinvilles for a short call, without leaving her for hours together during the illness that would soon be upon her.