precarious 400_l._, may be fairly called a droll extravagance. 9.--BRACKNELL. Under the circumstances, no reader will suspect Lady Shelley of wanting evidence to support her statement that, in the summer of 1813, ‘Shelley was in severe pecuniary distress.’ However successful they may be in getting credit and staving off their creditors, people who live showily on just nothing a-year are usually in severe pecuniary distress. What with the cost of producing 250 copies of _Queen Mab_ on fine paper, the cost of lodgings in so fashionable a thoroughfare as Half-Moon Street, the expenses of Harriett’s carriage, the fees to the taciturn Quaker physician who attended her, and now the wages of Ianthe’s wet-nurse, Shelley certainly lived in London from April to mid-July as extravagantly as he had lived at Tanyrallt. It is, therefore, conceivable that, before ‘going out of town,’ Shelley often found himself sorely in want of a five-pound note, a sovereign, ay, even of half-a-crown. Conceivable also is it that Shelley imagined he could retrench his expenses at Bracknell, and that therefore Lady Shelley may be in possession of documentary evidence that he spoke of his migration to Bracknell as an economical movement. But writing ‘from authentic sources’ of information, Lady Shelley can scarcely have been justified in writing of her husband’s father that, ‘for the purpose of economy, he retired to a small cottage in Berkshire,’ as though he went to Bracknell solely for cheap rural existence. Shelley went to Bracknell in order to be near Maimuna, who had her country-house there. Lady Shelley, with her ‘authentic sources,’ cannot have been unaware that the youthful poet moved to Bracknell for the enjoyment of gentle and soothing intercourse with Maimuna. It is inconceivable that Lady Shelley never heard of Maimuna, her home at Bracknell, and Shelley’s passion for her. Yet she represents that Shelley’s motive for going to Bracknell was purely economical. There is no reference to Maimuna in the whole of Lady Shelley’s book. It is thus that Shelley’s extravagant admirers produce biography of him from ‘authentic sources.’