Had he written in this strain of the failure of the negotiation to William Godwin or Hogg, or indeed to almost any one but the Duke of Norfolk, cautious readers would hesitate to infer from the epistle that the Member for New Shoreham had made any demand, so extreme as to justify in any degree the poet’s way of referring to it. But in writing to the Duke whom he knew to be cognizant of the terms offered to him by his father, it is scarcely conceivable that Shelley permitted himself to speak of them in a style, that was without even the faintest colour of justification. It does not, however, follow that the Squire had any desire to reduce his son to the position of a ‘degraded and miserable slave,’ or made any demand to which no young man of honour and sensibility could assent, without losing his self-respect. In the absence of the evidence, which would alone qualify the reader to take a judicial view of the Squire’s requirements, it may be assumed that they comprised some stipulation which, having reference to his son’s religious and political sentiments, and going further than the former request for mere abstinence from public controversy, demanded some action which Percy could regard as public recantation of his published opinions. Possibly the unreasonable requirement was that, recalling to his hands every recoverable copy of _Queen Mab_, he should destroy all copies of the book within his reach, and promise never again to put the work, or any similar work, in circulation. Shelley would not have failed to regard any such condition, as a demand for his ‘sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up.’ The Shelleyan enthusiasts of course take the expressions of the epistle literally, and argue from them that the proposals he declined with so much spirit and generous resoluteness involved some extravagant and humiliating concession, which should not have been demanded of him. One of the strongest reasons for thinking the zealots err on this point, is the certainty that no such extreme and insolent demand would have been sanctioned by the Duke of Norfolk, whose ‘exalted mind’ determined the course taken by Mr. Timothy Shelley in the business. I am prepared for evidence that the terms, so warmly rejected by Shelley, were hard terms. But should sufficient evidence ever appear that, in his growing irritation with a singularly exasperating son, the Squire insisted on terms, that besides being hard were cruel and unreasonable, it would still remain for readers to smile contemptuously at the Pecksniffian style in which Shelley (the writer of wheedling letters, who did not blush to declare to his familiar friend his deliberate intention of having recourse to deception) wrote of himself in this particular epistle, as though he were incapable of deviating by a hair’s breadth from the straight path of truth.