The fact, however, still remains that for some months before her death she had passed from his sight. He had promised solemnly to cherish her (a promise certainly within his power of accomplishing in some degree); and it remains a fact that, instead of keeping his eye on her (as he intended for a time to do) he suffered her to slip from his cognizance. Regard being had to her age and the way in which he had uprooted her moral and religious principles, few persons will hesitate in saying, that he was under peculiar obligations to ‘look after her,’ and be ready at any moment to come to her aid, however bad her conduct either before or after their separation. He is not to be judged in this business as one would judge an ordinary man, whose wife plunges into immorality of her own free will, and in obedience to influences and circumstances in no degree referable to his action. Shelley’s exceptional treatment of his wife placed him under exceptional obligations to stand by her and befriend her throughout life. Had he been the superlatively chivalrous and virtuous man his eulogists declare him, he would have felt this and acted steadily in accordance with the feeling. Though most of the ascertained facts touching Mrs. Shelley’s suicide have been withheld from the public, we are assured by Shelleyan apologists that the fatal incident was not directly consequent on any action by the husband, who had for some months lost sight of her. But to relieve Shelley of the obloquy of being the immediate, is not to relieve him of the shame of being the indirect, cause of his wife’s death. Following in the steps of previous writers, Mr. Froude does Shelley the disservice of insisting that he did not blame himself for his wife’s death. ‘Nor,’ Mr. Froude adds, ‘did the family lawyers blame him, who knew the facts of the story;’ ‘the family lawyers,’ thus produced as witnesses to character, being the one lawyer Longdill (Shelley’s attorney, _not_ the attorney of the family). By the _Edinburgh_ ‘Shelley-and-Mary’ reviewer, attention is called to the fact, that at this dismal moment of his story, Shelley’s ‘friends, Hookham, Longdill, and Leigh Hunt supported him by their approval.’ What supporters, at such a crisis, for the author of _Alastor_, the man of superb genius, soon to be the author of _Prometheus Unbound_!--a bookseller, an attorney, and a parasite!--the bookseller, who was making much, and hoped to make more money out of him; the attorney, who knew nothing of the matter but what his not invariably accurate client had been pleased to tell him; and the parasite, who, after sucking thousands from Shelley during his life, sponged on his representatives after his death! What witnesses and what testimony!