It is not surprising that these negotiations were fruitless of better feeling between the father and the son. Since his elopement with Harriett to Edinburgh, Shelley had certainly done nothing to appease his father’s wrath. How far the Squire of Field Place had been kept _au courant_ with his son’s doings in Dublin, at Lynton and Tanyrallt, does not appear; but several circumstances countenance the opinion that of Shelley’s doings in those places enough must have come to the Squire’s ears to confirm him in his unfavourable opinion of his heir. As Shelley instructed Miss Hitchener to send particulars of his doings in Dublin to the Sussex papers; as he sent the same lady copies of his revolutionary broadside (the _Declaration of Rights_) in order that they should be pasted on the walls of Sussex farmers; as during his first sojourn in Ireland he was incessantly writing to the lady letters, that may be presumed to have afforded much piquant gossip to her Hurstpierpoint acquaintance; as Shelley was at other pains to advertise his friends in Sussex of his Irish doings, the Squire of Field Place must have heard enough of those doings, to be acutely annoyed by them. It cannot have pleased him to hear in the summer of 1812, that the young schoolmistress had deserted her employment, and gone off to live with his son. Something had probably come to the Squire about that ugly business in Lynton. As Shelley asked the Duke of Norfolk to provide money for the Tremadoc Embankment, and seems to have sought in Sussex for other subscribers to the fund, it must have come to the Squire’s knowledge, that his son was busying himself with land-speculators in North Wales;--information which could not fail to confirm the Squire in his opinion, that old Sir Bysshe had done well to require by the codicil to his will, that Percy should resettle the estates A and B, under pain of forfeiting for himself and issue all the interest assigned to him and his issue by the testament. What wonder that the negotiations came to nothing? That they came to nothing before the end of May, 1813, we know from a letter dated on the 26th day of that month by the Squire of Field Place to his son:--The letter (to be found in _Notes and Queries_: Second Series, vol. vi., p. 405) in which, after declining to have further communication with his son, till the latter should show signs of a change for the better, in respect ‘to some of the most unfavourable traits of his character,’ the Squire of Field Place remarked that, had he not imagined the change for the better to have already taken place, he should have persisted in his resolution to receive no communication from his dear boy, ‘but through His Grace the Duke of Norfolk.’ Thus closing the correspondence in terms less lucid than firm; the Member for New Shoreham still declared himself to be his dear boy’s ‘affectionate father.’