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Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly because of his complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what he had made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had sent his younger daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's sisters studied.
Harriet's jealousy was assuredly voicing itself now, Shelley's conscience was assuredly nagging him, pestering him, persecuting him. Shelley needed excuses for his altered attitude towards his wife; Providence pitied him and sent the wet-nurse. If Providence had sent him a cotton doughnut it would have answered just as well; all he wanted was something to find fault with.
The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the White Mass, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence. Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is more than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it.
When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story. Shelley's imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy.
Both may be read in cheap editions. William Godwin, a more powerful intellect, and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, or remembered only because he was the father of Shelley's wife. Yet he blazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has told us, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation."
Whatever peculiarity there might have been in Shelley's religious faith, I have the best authority for believing that it was confined to the early period of his life. The practical result of its course of action, I am sure, had its source from the "Sermon on the Mount."
It was on the 11th of March that the Shelleys took their departure with Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra. They went straight to Milan, and after visiting the Lake of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and Rome, they settled early in the following December at Naples. Shelley's letters to Peacock form the invaluable record of this period of his existence.
So we may say, I think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it "Must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble, And build themselves again impregnably In a diviner clime, To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime Which frowns above the idle foam of time."
Shelley's house lay between Sloane Square and the river; and Eric arrived punctually to find her insipidly grateful to him for coming.
Summoned before the council to say whether he was the author, Shelley very properly refused to answer, and was peremptorily expelled, together with Hogg, who had intervened in his behalf. The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a house where a wall-paper with a vine-trellis pattern caught Shelley's fancy. Mr.
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