In other words, according to Peacock’s view, Shelley was in these affairs a victim of delusion at bottom, and a wilful utterer of untruths on the surface. What does the reader think? There is no question that the statements made by Shelley were untrue. His father and uncle were not plotting to put him in a lunatic asylum; Mr. Williams, of Tremadoc, had not been to call on him; Mr. Williams had not given him intelligence of a plot for locking him up; Mr. Williams had not sent him a diamond necklace. Let it be remembered that Shelley was a young man capable of stating on paper his intention to have recourse to deception and then deliberately acting on the intention. He was a writer of wheedling letters to get money. Of all his many spoken or written misstatements, only three or four are misstatements without an apparent object. All the other misstatements had a manifest motive and object, sufficient to account for the employment of untruth. In the present affair his object was to get out of England without letting people know, or giving them occasion to suspect the real purpose of the Continental trip. His motive in saying he must go abroad to escape from his father and uncle, was to hide the fact that he was going to take Claire out to Byron. What does the reader think? My own mind is quite clear. My readers are free to think him in this business the victim of delusions; but I cannot take that view of the case. Anyhow, whether he was insane or untruthful, or (as Peacock insists) semi-mad and semi-false, readers must allow he was a gentleman whose letters and other written statements are not worthy of the credit, to be accorded to the letters and other written statements of persons of average mental sobriety and exactness; that he was a gentleman whose diaries may be suspected of containing a good many inaccuracies and a few wild fictions; that his bare statement is no sufficient reason for believing that his most intimate friend was a villain, or that his first wife was a superlatively wicked woman. Another thing to be observed is that, as she was cognizant of Peacock’s disbelief of Shelley’s statement respecting Mr. Williams’s alleged visit and news, and was in some degree a witness of the curious conflict of the two friends, Mary Godwin was aware of her husband’s peculiar mental or moral infirmity, at least as early as April, 1816. From the spring of 1816, she knew he sometimes uttered statements too marvellous for one of his closest friends to be capable of believing them. Of course, no woman could live in conjugal confidence with a man occasionally suffering in so remarkable a manner from hallucination or deceptive propensity, and be for any long period unobservant of the peculiarity. It is, however, well to remember from how early a date of their association she was cognizant of the fact that, either from delusion or wilful untruthfulness, he was likely to utter statements at variance with fact.