Though I cannot speak positively on the point, I have little doubt that Mrs. Boinville’s was the house where Shelley, during this same London season of 1813, caused much commotion by passing down a line of charming young ladies (who were ranged on one side of the drawing-room for the country dance), and closely examining the skin of each of the astonished but unresisting damsels. It was not enough for Shelley to put his eyes within a few inches of each young lady’s unconcealed developments, so as to get the closest and clearest view of her neck, shoulders, and bosom. To effect his purpose it was requisite to examine the parts, in which he was greatly interested, by touch as well as by sight. It was not till, with the look and air of a concern no less reverential than pitiful, he had pressed and otherwise felt the skin of several necks, bosoms, and pairs of shoulders, that the hostess, on seeing what he was about, caused him to desist from his too intrusive observations, by assuring him with proper earnestness and gravity, that no one of the lovely damsels standing before him was suffering from elephantiasis. For some days Shelley had been afflicted by a fancy that he had caught that rare and terrible disease from an old woman, whom he had met in a stage-coach, and for the preposterous magnitude of whose ankles he could account only by assuming that she was afflicted with elephantiasis in the legs. In vain was he assured by the doctors, whom he consulted on the subject, that he had not caught elephantiasis, and that, had the old woman been a sufferer from the disease in the degree he imagined, she could not have endured the motion of the stage-coach. No doctor, no number of conspiring doctors, could persuade him he had not caught elephantiasis, or make him believe the signs of disease, so easily caught, could not be detected in the skin of persons unaware of their deplorable condition. To prove himself right on the first point, he was ever and again scrutinizing his own skin. To show he was right on the second point, he seized every opportunity of examining the skin of other people. Hence the extraordinary examination of the young ladies, who, in their confidence in the rectitude and innocency of his purpose, were willing to allow him any license requisite for the completion of his inquiries. Apocryphal biography requires us to believe that Shelley met another disagreeable old woman in a stage-coach,--the old lady whom he at the same time drove out of the carriage and her wits, by seating himself on the floor of the vehicle, and ejaculating with passionate pathos-- ‘For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings! How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed; All murdered.’