(7) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have suggested that, after returning from London to Tanyrallt in November 1812, Shelley had no opportunity of holding personal intercourse with Mary Godwin, till the 18th May, in 1814, when he ought to have known that, during the season of 1813, Shelley was a frequent visitor at the Skinner-Street house. (8) Mr. Kegan Paul would not have written of Mary Godwin as a ‘woman of nearly seventeen summers’ in May 1814 when on the 1st morning of that month she was only sixteen years and eight months of age, had he not wished to make her seem as old as possible. (9) As Mr. Kegan Paul’s book affords evidence that Mary and Claire were of about the same age he should not have suggested (what elsewhere in his book he says outright) that Jane Clairmont was considerably Mary’s senior, and should therefore be held accountable for her sister’s misconduct. It is needless to say that Shelley’s reputation gains nothing from such misrepresentations, which are calculated to make readers suspect that the poet’s intercourse with Mary in the spring and summer of 1813 was attended with incidents, creditable to neither of them. Differences, each of which was fruitful of estrangement, having arisen between them in the later months of 1813, it was not to be expected that Shelley and Harriett would return to their former harmony. Like other husbands and wives who take to bickering, they contended about little things which they magnified into great ones. To Shelley, who had argued himself into believing that all the evils of human nature and society were referable to the diet denounced by vegetarians, it was a serious grievance that his wife enjoyed a mutton-chop and a glass of ale; that instead of being ‘slightly animal,’ as she was at Tanyrallt, she ridiculed the Newtons and their crotchets, and insisted on eating and drinking like most other young women. It has been suggested that before Shelley ceased to live with her, she sometimes took too much wine, and in other ways displayed a disposition, which a year or two later developed into intemperance. But though her subsequent career accorded with the imputation, readers of this page will decline to attach much weight to a charge, resting wholly on the evidence of the poet, who, while drinking laudanum with an easy conscience, remembered with remorseful shame that at Oxford he had enjoyed a tumbler of stiff white-wine negus. Differing on questions of diet, Percy and Harriett bickered on other matters. Whilst she resented his devotion to Maimuna, he resented her jealousy of the lady, whom he worshipt for the subtlety and delicacy of her understanding and affections. Ceasing to delight in Harriett’s beauty, though he could still speak of her as ‘a noble animal,’ Shelley ceased to direct the studies of the young woman, who could ‘neither feel poetry nor understand philosophy.’ On the other hand, there were signs of deterioration of the