There are other reasons for being lenient and pitiful to this poor child, reared though she was in honest principles and absolute ignorance of her mother’s perverse views. Who seduced her? She was not led astray by an ordinary tempter, but by a young man of singular comeliness, a poet who clothed his prayers with the images of speech most likely to render them irresistible. She had done nothing in the hope of winning his love, said nothing by lip or look to lure him from loyalty to Harriett, when he came quickly upon her and said ‘You shall be mine!’ She was wooed and won by Shelley! Remember how (_though_ he was Shelley) she contended with him, fought him, prayed to him for mercy; how passionately she declared to him, in spoken words and written words, that, though she loved him wholly, and would never give herself to any other man, she would not, could not, dared not, give herself to him till he could marry her. Could nothing be urged in palliation of her misconduct, but that she was young and enthusiastic, I should plead less earnestly in her behalf. I cannot concur with Mr. Froude in holding that youth and enthusiasm should of themselves be pronounced considerable extenuations of wrongful action, of which the young and enthusiastic are more likely than other persons to be guilty. On the contrary, Mr. Froude must pardon a white-headed writer for telling him frankly, it is ill for a man of his still greater age to teach (however lightly and elegantly) in a popular magazine, that to act as Shelley and Mary acted in their elopement, is sometimes to be guilty of nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’ Moreover, I decline to regard Shelley’s youth in 1814 as a matter to be urged strongly in mitigation of the sentence to be passed upon him. His youth unquestionably may be pleaded _in misericordiam_ when he is under trial for running away with John Westbrook’s daughter. But the offence he committed in 1814 was no mere elopement, and he had long since ceased to be a child. When he posted seaward along the Dover Road, with Mary Godwin by his side, he was within a week of his twenty-third year. Age by the calendar is not the only thing to be considered in estimating a man’s moral responsibility. Regard should also be had to the discipline of circumstances. It wanted now only a month of three years since Shelley ran off with John Westbrook’s lovely child. A man who is a father, and has been a husband for nearly three years, is not to be judged as a mere stripling. He was five years older than Mary. Those five years spent in the world gave him greatly the advantage over Mary, and he had used the advantage mercilessly against her. On the threshold of his twenty-third year a young man has lived quite long enough to know that he should not seduce his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.