Another point to be noticed in this curious epistle is Shelley’s statement, that the futile negotiation, was a ‘negociation, in which private communications from his father first induced him to engage.’ As Shelley knew it to be within the Duke’s knowledge, whether the overtures for the fruitless negotiation came from him to his father, or from his father to him, he may be assumed to have written accurately respecting the preliminary ‘private communications.’ It may therefore be taken for certain that the Squire (acting doubtless at the Duke of Norfolk’s instance) made the overtures to his son for a friendly settlement of their differences;--a fact indicative of a disposition, rather than of an indisposition, on the Squire’s part, to come to friendly terms with his son. None the less certain, however, is it that Shelley himself (acting on Hogg’s advice) was the person, who for purely selfish ends (to get money) wrote the wheedling letter and made the insincere professions, which moved the Duke of Norfolk to advise the Squire to approach his boy with conciliatory overtures. Three weeks after the fruitless negotiation, dating from Cooke’s Hotel (though I have but little doubt that he and Harriett were living in Pimlico, within a stone’s-throw of Maimuna’s drawing-room windows), Shelley, in mid-June, asked Mr. Medwin to be his legal adviser, in respect to the difficulties he would encounter on coming of age. ‘I know,’ he wrote to the Horsham Lawyer, ‘that I am heir to large property. Now, are the papers to be seen? Have you the least doubt that I am the sole heir to a large landed property? Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’