Observe how Shelley in a confidential letter to one of his closest friends declares that he is not keeping a journal, and that the letters he is sending his friend will be the only record of the part of his career to which the letters refer. If Shelley’s statements about his personal affairs could be relied upon, the words would be sufficient evidence that he was not then keeping a journal, that his letters to Peacock were the only authoritative record of his doings at this particular point of his career, and that, therefore, to the best of his knowledge and belief, his wife was not then keeping a record of his doings. If he was at that time keeping a journal, he wrote to Peacock what was untrue. Unless he had reason for thinking that no record of his life was being kept at that time either by his wife or any other person, he was less than truthful. If Mr. Garnett was right in saying Shelley began a diary in 1814, which accounts for every day of his life, Shelley was wrong in saying he was keeping no record of his life in January, 1819. Mr. Rossetti suggests that the inconsistency between Shelley’s words and Mr. Garnett’s words may be only apparent, as Shelley may ‘sometimes have intermitted his journalizing, and then his wife kept it up.’ But this reasonable suggestion does not dispose of the difficulty. If the suggestion is correct, Mrs. Shelley must have filled in and kept up the journal with her husband’s knowledge, or without it. If she kept the diary with his knowledge and sanction, the journal remained a thing for which he was so far responsible, that it should have precluded him from saying he kept no journal. If he knew Mrs. Shelley was keeping a daily record of his doings, he was untruthful in saying the letters would be the only record of those doings. On the other hand, if Mrs. Shelley kept the journal without his knowledge, the diary during the times of its being so kept was not his journal, but simply Mrs. Shelley’s journal, and Mr. Garnett erred in writing of it as a record for which Shelley was responsible from first to last.