Landing at Gravesend without three halfpence in their pockets, and leaving Gravesend in debt to the captain of the vessel that had brought them from Holland, the trio made their way back to London. It was a doleful return for the two girls, neither of whom had courage or inclination to go to the home, from which they had fled so shamefully less than seven weeks since. As though it were a matter about which his readers might be doubtful, Mr. Kegan Paul is at pains to record, that, ‘Godwin’s irritation and displeasure at the step his daughter had taken were extreme.’ ‘Irritation’ and ‘displeasure’ are no terms to describe the veteran’s indignation at the young man who, after eating his bread and salt, and affecting for successive years to sit meekly at his feet, in the character of an idolizing and grateful disciple, had seduced his only daughter. Let there be an end of the dishonest endeavours to gloss the blackest business of Shelley’s life into a venial indiscretion, to colour and tone it into a pretty piece of domestic romance. Truth and morality require that this spade should be called by no other name. It is noteworthy that the persons who have displayed the most zeal and ingenuity in glossing and colouring Shelley’s seduction of Mary Godwin into a romantic and innocent love-passage, are the very persons who have been most ostentatious of their righteous indignation and disgust at Byron’s profligacy. In my _Real Lord Byron_ I gave due prominence (some of my critics thought me guilty of giving excessive prominence) to his successive acts of libertinism. But I know of nothing in the whole record of Byron’s profligacies, that is comparable for deceit and treachery with Shelley’s course of action to his familiar friend’s daughter. Had Byron acted towards the daughter of any one of his intimate friends precisely as Shelley acted to Mary Godwin, what a noise the Shelleyan enthusiasts would have made about his treacherous profligacy!