That they may realize the physical condition of the young man who was so easily educated into thinking prodigious evil of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, readers should remember that Shelley was taking laudanum whilst he was at Keswick. The letter which affords evidence of this important fact is believed by Mr. Rossetti to be the earliest of the numerous writings, touching the poet’s use of the tincture of opium; but it may not be inferred that he came to Keswick without having made acquaintance with the drug, of which he was a free consumer in subsequent stages of his life. Making acquaintance with opium at a somewhat earlier time of life than Byron, though probably in the same year of grace as the older poet, Shelley was so liberal an opium-taker that the drug’s influence on the nervous system must be borne in mind by those, who would account for his successive hallucinations, and other exhibitions of nervous disorder. Even by the medical observer, the effects of laudanum are sometimes mistaken for manifestations of lunacy. Mr. Rossetti certainly had good grounds for suggesting that laudanum was at the bottom of the marvellous tale, with which Shelley thrilled the nerves of Eliza and Harriett in the last week of his stay at Keswick. The story, told with every show of sincerity by the victim of hallucination, or perplexing semi-delusion, if he is not to be regarded as the utterer of a deliberate invention, was that on returning from a walk to his home, he had been assailed by a robber, with consequences that might have been tragic, had not the assault been fortunately made under the very eaves of Mr. Calvert’s roof. By falling over his own door-step, Shelley had been so fortunate as to fall out of the bandit’s grasp. Few readers will hesitate in the opinion that if this wondrous tale was not in some degree an affair of hallucination, it was altogether untruth.