Readers need not think so ill of Shelley as Mr. Froude does. It is certain that Shelley did reproach himself bitterly for his conduct towards Harriett. The biographical evidence is superabundant that he endured the keen remorse that is ever attended with self-reproach. How could it be otherwise? When the lifeless body was fished out of the Serpentine, six years had not fully passed since Shelley paid his first visit to Harriett’s home, bearing his sister’s gift for her favourite school-fellow; only five years and two or three months had passed since he carried her off, bright and winsome, in her untarnished virginal loveliness. How could he think of the thing he had made her without torture? He may well have been appalled at the moment, and in the after-time been agonized by the consequences of his boyish heedlessness. That he was capable, not long after her death, of calling her ‘a frantic idiot,’ is no evidence that he escaped the anguish that is the inevitable punishment of wrong done in mere thoughtlessness, no less than of wrong resulting from heartlessness. The bitterness of the indecent speech was the mere mask of decent and keen regret. There is, however, no evidence that he suffered aught more than a man of sensibility would inevitably suffer from so ghastly an incident. The story (believed by the _Quarterly_ Reviewer of October, 1861) that dismay at Harriett’s death and grief for her, whose lot he had taken so peculiarly into his own hands, rendered him ‘actually insane’ for a time, was a pure fiction. During the brief interval between the recovery of Harriett’s corpse from the Serpentine and his marriage to Mary he was in constant correspondence with Peacock through the post; and the letters Peacock received from him and Mary at that time were conclusive proof, that remorse did not so completely overpower him before his second marriage. The first to tell Peacock of Harriett’s death, Shelley at the same time asked his (at that time) closest male friend, whether propriety required him to defer for any considerable period his formal marriage with Mary,--an inquiry that caused Peacock to advise him to marry her promptly. Three full weeks had not passed since Harriett’s corpse was fished out of the water when (on 30th December, 1816) Shelley was married privately to Mary Godwin at St. Mildred’s Church, Bread Street, in the presence of her father and step-mother. On visiting Peacock shortly after the marriage, Shelley (though no doubt suffering secretly from the events so closely preceding his second marriage) showed conclusively by his demeanour, that he was not overpowered by regretful recollections of his first wife. Reasonably incensed at the knavish gardener, who had lopt the fine old wide-spreading holly-tree of the Marlow Garden to a bare pole, Shelley displayed strong emotion at nothing else. ‘Shelley,’ says Peacock, ‘stayed with me two or three days. I never saw him more calm and self-possessed.