Chapter XIV: From Marlow to Italy (1)

The Hunts and the Shelleys--Their Intimacy--Pecuniary
Difficulties--Dealings with Money-lenders--Leigh Hunt relieves Shelley
of £1400--His Testimony to Shelley’s virtuous Manners--Shelley’s
Benevolence at Marlow--At the Opera--Departure for Italy--The fated
Children--Shelley’s literary Work and studious Life in
Italy--Milan--Allegra sent to her Father--Elise the Swiss Nurse--Her
Knowledge and Suspicions--Claire and her ‘Sister’--Their Affectionate
Intercourse and Occasional Quarrels--Shelley’s Affection for
Claire--Vagrants in Italy--Pisa--Leghorn--Maria Gisborne--Her Husband
and Son--Claire and Shelley at Venice--Trick played on Byron--His
Civilities to the Shelleys--Little Clara’s Death--Paolo the Knave--He
falls in Love with Elise--Their Marriage--Paolo’s Wrath and
Vengeance--Emilia Viviani--Shelley’s Adoration of Her--The
three-cornered Flirtation--Mrs. Shelley’s Attitude and
Action--Shelley’s Fault in the Affair--His subsequent Shame at the
Business--The imaginary Assault at the Pisan Post Office.

It has been already noticed how the Shelleyan apologists deal with the evidence that, in December, 1816, when Harriett’s suicide held the attention of the literary coteries, Shelley’s conduct towards her had the approval of his friend Leigh Hunt and two other unbiased judges,--his bookseller and his attorney (the same attorney who treated the poet so scurvily in the spring of 1821). Whilst using Leigh Hunt as a witness to the excellence of Shelley’s conduct to his wife, the Shelleyan apologists imply that, in the December of 1816, the two poets had long been intimate friends. It is, however, certain that, till the end of the autumn of 1816, the two ‘friends’ knew so little of one another that they were nothing more than slight acquaintances. How little Hunt cared about the author of _Alastor_ at any time prior to Harriett’s suicide, appears from his confession that, on receiving certain sets of verses from the still youthful literary aspirant, he neither printed them in the _Examiner_ nor returned them to their author, but after ‘unfortunately mislaying them,’ forgot all about them,--_i.e._ tossed them disdainfully to the waste-paper basket. Something (weeks or months) later, on seeing reason to render the _amende honorable_ to the young author whom he had treated so contemptuously, Hunt put in the _Examiner_ (December, 1816) an article that, referring to Shelley as one of ‘three young writers, who appeared to promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school,’ and also spoke of him as ‘the author of a poetical work entitled _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_;’ no line of which poem had been seen by the poetical editor, when he alluded to it thus cautiously in the apologetic note. ‘We shall,’ Hunt says of the poet, of whose writings he had seen nothing but the ‘one or two specimens,’ so lightly pitched into the wicker-basket, after a hasty glance at their contents, ‘procure what he has published, and if the rest answer to what we have seen, we shall have no hesitation in announcing him for a very striking and original thinker.’ That these words of Hunt’s pen appeared in the _Examiner_, so late as 1st December, 1816, is conclusive evidence of how little he cared _for_, and knew _of_, Shelley up to the very moment of Harriett’s death. Yet in these latest years of grace, we have been required to believe there can have been nothing very reprehensible in Shelley’s conduct to his wife, since it had the approval of so precise a moralist as Leigh Hunt, who, by reason of his long-standing intimacy with Shelley, must have known all about it.[4]

But if Hunt was tardy in responding to Shelley’s repeated overtures for friendship, he atoned for previous negligence by his subsequent pains to plant himself in the affection of the young man, whom he had treated with scant courtesy. The editor of the _Examiner_ was too sincere a man to admire aught till he had found it admirable. But on seeing Shelley’s titles to his homage, he promptly acknowledged them, and on discovering his virtues, declared his generous admiration of them in no uncertain voice. The Hermit of Marlow and the poet of Hampstead’s ‘Vale of Health’ became close friends. Whilst Marianne (Mrs. Hunt) discovered her dearest and ever-loving familiar in Mrs. Shelley, their husbands had all thoughts and things (money not excluded) in common. Admiring one another’s writings, the poets backed each other’s bills. Circumstances constraining him to fly from Lisson Grove, or the ‘Vale of Health,’ and seek a place of retirement from creditors, Hunt found the needful seclusion at Marlow, where he stayed, on one occasion, for nearly three months. On the other hand, towards the close of 1817, when tradesmen were troubling him sorely to pay certain bills for necessaries, supplied to the late Mrs. Shelley, the author of _Alastor_ made quick march from Bisham Wood to Hampstead Heath, and found hospitality with concealment in the ‘Vale of Health,’ where he delighted his host’s children by playing with them in an equally amiable and frolicsome manner.

It was during this sojourn with the Hunts that Shelley came, one winterly afternoon, on the poor woman, lying in a fit upon the heath, with a little boy by her side, and was so greatly incensed by the reluctance of the nearest householders to open their doors and arms to her. Why Shelley, who eventually carried the sufferer to Hunt’s quarters (which were near at hand), did not carry her there in the first instance, does not appear. It is, however, on the record that, he deferred taking so obvious and reasonable a course till he had vainly tried to get her admitted to nearer houses, whose occupants declined to act charitably in the matter,--possibly, because they thought he might as well take his _protégée_ to the place where he was himself staying. One of the individuals, to whose benevolence he vainly appealed in this emergency, being a gentleman who was stepping out of his carriage at the door of his own goodly mansion, the indignant poet is said to have told the selfish householder roundly, that he might expect to have his house burnt over his head in the quickly-coming revolution, when the poor would settle accounts summarily with the rich. As it is told, the story redounds to Shelley’s honour and the rich householder’s shame. But as some of the story’s truth may be on its unrecorded side, judicious readers will decline to condemn the householder. It is, however, to the poet’s credit that, seeing a poor woman in need of help, he eventually helped her in the best way, by taking her to his own place of abode, and sending for the nearest doctor.

Fruitful of the pleasures, that usually result from the close and affectionate intercourse of congenial friends, the intimacy of the two poets was fruitful also to the elder poet of advantages which he may not have been base enough to compass deliberately, but was unquestionably base enough to accept. Towards the close of 1817, Shelley was raising money, in some cases, by post-obits, and, in other cases, by loans charged on his eventual estate. How much he raised by these processes in the later months of 1817 and the earlier months of 1818, does not appear; but probably the greater part of the heavy debt he put on his estate, between his coming of age and his death, was created by pecuniary transactions of this particular period. Of the terms at which he procured ready money, enough for the reader’s purpose appears from a letter, in which he is seen raising money at the rate of 2000_l._ in future repayment, for every 1000_l._ put into his hands. At a rough computation from this transaction, he may be presumed to have received a clear sum of 11,000_l._ for the 22,000_l._, with which he charged his estate before his death. In addition to the money raised by loans charged on the estate, he also borrowed largely on post-obits, that were, of course, never paid, as he pre-deceased his father. Whether they passed through his hands to tradesmen for value received, or to needy friends, the sums so raised were paid to, and spent by, him; and it is obvious from what has been said of the estates to which he was entitled in remainder, that, had Shelley survived his father (who died 1844), and continued to live as prodigally from 1822 to 1844, he would have found himself, on the cessation of his allowance of 1000_l._ a-year, a quite poor, if not an absolutely penniless, man at his father’s death.

Raising money on these ruinous terms, towards the end of 1817, and in the opening weeks of the following year, Shelley raised it with the cognizance of Leigh Hunt. The money came to the younger poet’s hands whilst he was living in closest intimacy with the gentleman who, whenever money was passing about, never failed to see why he should not have some of it, without working for it. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that, whilst arranging his own affairs, Shelley was induced to think he might as well arrange Hunt’s affairs also. Nor is it surprising that Hunt took the same view of the case. The entire amount sucked from Shelley by Hunt at this period may have been exaggerated. Miss Mitford may have been repeating an inaccurate story, when she wrote how the brokers swept off the younger poet’s chairs, tables, and bedding for the satisfaction of one of Hunt’s numerous creditors. But it is certain that Shelley (_ætat._ 25) gave Hunt (_ætat._ 33) 1400_l._ in one gift, and that this was not the only sum of money to pass in some way or other from the younger poet to the man of letters who, besides being eight years Shelley’s senior, was editor and joint-proprietor of a flourishing newspaper. Hunt himself confesses to have taken this 1400_l._ in one lump from his young friend. In judging this affair, readers should not lose sight of the difference of the two men in respect to age,--Shelley being only twenty-five years old, and much younger than his years in character and worldly experience, whilst Hunt was a man of middle-age, who had been trained in poverty to be keenly mindful of his own interest, though affecting to be wholly regardless of it. Familiar with all the particulars of Shelley’s by no means prosperous circumstances, cognizant of the means by which Shelley had obtained the money, aware that the gift of 1400_l._ signified a withdrawal of twice as much from the not ample estate, which would be Shelley’s only provision for himself and family after his father’s death, this mature man of the world took this young man’s money,--not in payment for work done, but as a gift. The affair is all the more discreditable to Hunt, because he was the editor of a powerful journal, whilst Shelley was a literary aspirant, who, in making his senior so enormous a gift, may be supposed to have been actuated, in some degree, by regard for the editor’s power to serve him or injure him on the press. To think of Shelley pressing the notes for 1400_l._ on his friend, and of Hunt taking them with much effusion after a graceful show of reluctance, is to remember how Shelley, in his Oxford days, wrote about ‘pouching the villains,’ who had it in their power to praise his novel.

Some two years after his sojourn of many weeks at Marlow, Hunt, to clear his friend’s reputation from some of the charges poured upon him by the _Quarterly_ Reviewer, produced in the _Examiner_ (10th October, 1819) a vindicatory article, that contains the following account of Shelley’s manner of living at Marlow:--

The _Reviewer_, says Hunt in this article, ‘asserts that he’ [_i.e._
Shelley] ‘is shamefully dissolute in his conduct! We heard of similar
assertions when we resided in the same house with Mr. Shelley for
nearly three months; and how was he living all that time? As much like
Plato himself, as all his theories resemble Plato--or rather, still
more like a Pythagorean. This was the round of his daily life,--he was
up early; breakfasted sparingly; wrote this _Revolt of Islam_ all the
morning; went out in his boat, or into the woods with some Greek
author or the Bible in his hands; came home to a dinner of vegetables
(for he took neither meat nor wine); visited, if necessary, the sick
and fatherless, whom others gave Bibles to and no help; wrote or
studied again, or read to his wife and friends the whole evening; took
a crust of bread, or a glass of whey, for his supper; and went early
to bed. This is literally the whole of the life he led, or that we
believe he now leads in Italy; nor have we ever known him, in spite of
the malignant and ludicrous exaggerations on this point, deviate,
notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those
who differ with him might think blameable. We do not say that he would
always square his conduct by their opinions as a matter of principle;
we only say that he acted just as if he did so square it. We forbear,
out of regard for the very bloom of their beauty, to touch upon
numberless other charities and generosities which we have known him
exercise; but this we must say, in general, that we never lived with a
man who gave so complete an idea of an ardent and principled aspirant
in Philosophy as Percy Shelley, and that we believe him, from the
bottom of our hearts, to be one of the noblest hearts as well as heads
which the world has seen for a long time. We never met, in short, with
a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to that height of humanity
mentioned in the conclusion of an essay of Lord Bacon’s, where he
speaks of excess of charity, and of its not being in the power of “man
or angel to come in danger by it.”’

This evidence from a witness who had received 1400_l._ in a lump from the subject of his eulogy, might be dismissed with a smile, were it not that it has recently been produced as a valid and conclusive testimony to Shelley’s moral worth, by a writer who knew everything about him. The defence having been so dealt with, it is well for readers to recall the character of the eulogist, and the circumstances of his brief, though close, association with the man, of whose life he wrote so authoritatively. It should be remembered that the witness, affecting to have formed his opinion of Shelley’s character from a long acquaintance, was the editor who, at the beginning of December, 1816, had not read a line of _Alastor_, and in his unconcern for the young poet, had recently ‘chucked’ his verses into the waste-paper basket. In writing that, to his knowledge, Shelley had never committed a single action to be reprehended by moralists differing from him on matters of opinion, Leigh Hunt showed either how little he knew of Shelley, or how little he cared for the truth or falsehood of what he wrote in his friend’s behalf. If Hunt really believed that Shelley’s conduct towards William Godwin covered no single blameworthy action, he had been strangely misinformed respecting a chief and recent episode of his friend’s story. On the other hand, if he wrote the vindicatory article with a sufficient knowledge of that passage of Shelley’s career, he wrote it mendaciously. It is not surprising that, after gushing over Shelley’s goodness to the poor at Marlow, the vindicator of slandered virtue forbore, ‘out of regard for the very bloom of their beauty,’ to touch upon ‘the poet’s numberless other charities and generosities.’ The moral effect of the vindication would not have been heightened by either a precise declaration or a general acknowledgment of the extent to which the writer had himself profited by such exhibitions of virtue.

But though the testimony to character is necessarily affected by our knowledge of the witness’s peculiar obligations to the giver of great gifts, it is only fair to Hunt to record that the truthfulness of his viewy account of Shelley’s manner of living at Marlow is placed beyond question by the evidence of contemporary letters, and the more precise statements of witnesses in no degree open to suspicion. Without adhering rigidly to the diet, which writers imperfectly acquainted with the philosopher’s doctrine and discipline are wont to style Pythagorean, Shelley refrained from meat and wine during the greater part of his Marlow time. Once and again during that period he lapsed suddenly or by degrees from the rules of the vegetarians, but only to return to them with a stronger opinion that his health required him to abstain from flesh and fermented drinks. It was not possible for a man so sympathetic and observant of human life about him to live anywhere without compassionating the unfortunate of his own species; and there is a superabundance of evidence that, living at Marlow during a season of insufficient employment and keen distress for struggling people, he did all and more than he could afford for the relief of the poor of his immediate neighbourhood. Giving money to several families, whom he placed on the list of his regular weekly pensioners, he visited the recipients of his bounty in their comfortless cottages, and in other ways showed himself mindful of the first duty of the rich to their extremely indigent neighbours. Ministering to the necessities of the poor in this deliberate manner, he at the same time relieved them fitfully, in obedience to sudden impulses of pity and benevolence. On the other hand, whilst acting towards the poor of Marlow precisely as he had acted towards the poor of Tremadoc, he was in some instances less than duly mindful of another, and no less sacred, obligation. It would be more pleasant to remember how the Hermit of Marlow entered a neighbour’s garden without the shoes, which a minute earlier he had taken from his feet and given to a poor beggar-woman, were not the story of this rather fantastic act of benevolence associated with less agreeable stories of unpaid bills. The poet, who gave Leigh Hunt 1400_l._ in a single donation, should not have cleared away from Marlow without paying his doctor’s charges for medical service.

Shelley’s last evening in London (the evening of 10th March, 1818) he passed pleasantly at the Opera-house, on the occasion of the first performance in England of Rossini’s _Barbiere di Siviglia_, the part of Count Almaviva being performed by Garcia, who on the same occasion made his first appearance in an English house. The first night of the new opera and the new singer--a singer of Garcia’s celebrity, and an opera of the _Barber’s_ enduring popularity--still remains a memorable night of our operatic annals; and it is pleasant to remember that Peacock (a fine connoisseur of music), Shelley (ever sensitive to music, without being a nice or scientific critic of its composers), Claire (a musical enthusiast), and Mrs. Shelley, were at the opera on so interesting an occasion, and after the performance supped together, after the wont of play-goers seventy years since.

Early the next morning, Shelley’s carriage (possibly the same carriage in which poor Harriett paid visits something less than four years since) rolled slowly from the capital, to which he never returned. Stacked high and freighted heavily with luggage, the carriage held a numerous family-party,--Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, Claire, and their Swiss maid, Elise, besides the three children, _viz._, (1) Willie, two years and a few weeks of age, (2) Allegra, just a year and two months old, and (3) little six-months-old Clara. Two of the children, Willie and the wee Clara (named after her aunt Claire) had been christened on the previous Monday (9th March, 1816), when Allegra was probably also admitted to the Church militant here on earth. What a group of babes, journeying, each and all, to early death in the land of the foreigner! Baby Clara went out of England to die a few months later at Venice; Willie found his last bed at Rome in the following year; Allegra perished of fever at the Bagna Cavallo convent in the April of 1822, only a few months before the poet, who had nursed her in her earliest infancy, was swept from life by the wild hurricane. To think of the early deaths of these children, followed thus speedily by the poet, who took them out with him to Italy, is to imagine Fate and Death attending the heavily-laden coach as it moved slowly seaward along the Dover Road,--the same road along which Claire and Mary had sped with Harriett’s husband, on quicker wheels, little more than three years and six months since.

Starting for Italy on 11th March, 1818, Shelley was within four years and four months of his death when he left the country of his birth for ever:--the four years and four months during which he wrote _Julian and Maddalo_ (1818), _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_ (1818), _Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples_ (1818), _Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-19), _The Cenci_ (1819), _Ode to Heaven_ (1819), _An Exhortation_ (1819), _Ode to the West Wind_ (1819), _An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty_ (1819), _The Mask of Anarchy_ (1819), _Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), _The Sensitive Plant_ (1820), _A Vision of the Sea_ (1820), _The Cloud_ (1820), _To a Skylark_ (1820), _Ode to Liberty_ (1820), _Œdipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant_ (1820), _Letter to Maria Gisborne_ (1820), _The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1820-21), _Autumn: A Dirge_ (1820), _Adonais_ (1821), _Hellas_ (1821), the unfinished _Charles the First_ (1821-22), and the commencement of _The Triumph of Life_ (1822). To take a general view of Shelley’s industry during this closing and brightest term of a genius that, after moving slowly to perfect development, was still in the fulness of its power and promise when it passed abruptly from the world, readers must recall the strong stream of minor poems that flowed from his pen during these latest years of his existence. Remembrance must also be had of the Translations (from Homer, Euripides, Plato, Bion, Moschus, Virgil, Dante, Calderon), the Notes on the Roman and Florentine sculptures, the perfect part of the unfinished _Defence of Poetry_, the _Essay on Christianity_, and the other multifarious prose writings, including the Italian letters, whose publication would by themselves have made a reputation for an ordinary _littérateur_. Such exuberant productiveness in different departments of the higher literature is comparable only with the profuse and versatile fecundity of Byron’s genius during the same period. To suggest any other comparison of the work accomplished by Byron and Shelley, during their concurrent years of voluntary exile, would be foreign to the purpose of the present writer, who, in dealing successively with the lives of the two poets, has studiously and jealously resisted every temptation to be the critic of either.

It lies, however, well within his province to remark that in the comparison of their lives in Italy, Shelley, from one point of view, has greatly the advantage of the poet with whom he will ever be associated. Perhaps no modern English poet of the highest class (pardon me, Mr. Swinburne) was ever more devoid than Byron of scholarly enthusiasm. Relying in his earlier time on Hobhouse for archæology and history, the author of _Childe Harold_ never made a nearer approach to severe study than when he helped the Venetian monks of St. Lazarus to produce their English-Armenian grammar. Denied his poetical genius, he would have thought a daily newspaper and the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ sufficient literature for any reasonable English peer. With it, he was usually content with the intellectual food and excitement, afforded by good magazines and the best of the current _belles lettres_. Shelley, on the other hand, had a natural taste and turn for scholarly labour. Under no conceivable circumstances could he have justified Mr. Buxton Forman’s high opinion, and become the Saviour of the World; but stript of his faculty of song, he might, under several different sets of conceivable conditions, have developed into a great and famous scholar. Never a severe student (in the severest and technical sense of the term) he was from his boyhood a fitful, and sometimes a no less laborious than curious, reader of literature, seldom attractive to those who lack the studious disposition. Delighting in old Greek authors at Bishopgate, he became in Italy a strenuous, habitual, and sympathetic reader of authors, who are mere names to the semi-educated rabble. Rising with the bird he glorified, whilst Byron was turning from his first into his second sleep, he went to books for happiness. To show he caught the spirit of the authors he perused, one needs only to point to the series of his free-handed and sympathetic Translations. Reading indoors in foul weather, he read in the sunshine when the skies were cloudless. If he was not thinking or writing, he was poring over printed or written pages. On starting for walk or ride, his last thought on crossing the threshold was to make sure he had the book of the moment in his pocket; and, so wide was the range of his studious interests, the book might be Greek or Latin, German or Spanish, or an Arabic manuscript which he was tackling with Medwin’s scarcely adequate assistance. Whilst Byron was a superb poet and mere man of the world, Shelley was a keen student as well as a superb poet. These are matters to be remembered by those who would know the Real Shelley, as he lived out the latest of his few years in Italy.

Taking his carriage, together with his women, babes, and baggage, across the Channel, Shelley travelled leisurely from Calais through France, by the way of Rheims, Langres, and Lyons (whence he wrote to Leigh Hunt on 22nd March, 1818), Les Echelles, and crossing the Alps, entered Milan on an early day in April, 1818, from which last-named city Allegra was sent to Byron (at Venice), who, whilst expressing his readiness and wish to have care of the child, declined to receive the child’s mother. Baby Allegra was therefore sent to her father’s palazzo on the Grand Canal under the charge of the female servant, described by Moore in his _Life of Byron_ as ‘a Swiss nurse, a young girl not above nineteen or twenty years of age, and in every respect unfit to have the charge of such an infant, without the superintendence of some more experienced person.’ The nurse, described thus slightingly by Moore, was Elise, who, on receiving instructions to convey the child to the palazzo, understood that she would return to her mistress at Milan, after seeing Allegra settled in her new home. As Mrs. Shelley had no wish to part with the girl, who, under maternal surveillance, had proved a sufficient nurse for Willie and Clara, she had no intention to be without Elise’s services for many days. In the absence, however, of a nurse, suitable or otherwise, for Allegra at Byron’s palazzo, Mrs. Shelley consented that Elise should remain in charge of Claire’s child at Venice, till another arrangement could be made for her care. Hence it came to pass that Mrs. Shelley was deprived of her proper nurse till the following August, when Elise returned to her mistress at Este.

It would be unreasonable to assume that the nurse who brought the child to the Palazzo Moçenijo had grounds for regarding Byron as the child’s father. Servants are required all the world over to do what they are told, without asking why or wherefore. Moreover, it is usual with employers to be at some pains to prevent their servants from discovering the why and wherefore of orders they are told to execute, for the furtherance of affairs of secresy. Some twenty months before Elise took Allegra to Venice, she (a young Swiss girl) had been hired at Geneva by Mrs. Shelley to act as her little boy’s nurse. Living with the Shelleys at Geneva, whilst the city was bubbling with hideous scandal about them, it is not to be imagined that Elise went to England without having heard something of the Genevese gossip to her employers’ discredit. Who was more likely to be waylaid and questioned by the scores of Genevese tattlers, bent on gathering evidence to the truth of stories, that had already passed from Switzerland to England? Coming to the girl’s ears, the gossip could not fail to make her suspicious respecting her master’s intimacy with the young lady, whom he styled his sister. If she had heard nothing of the gossip, she, anyhow, soon became an observer of facts that must have awakened her curiosity and suspicion.

Accompanying the Shelleys and Claire to England, she served them as nursemaid at Bath and Marlow. At Bath the quick-witted girl observed signs that Claire would soon be a mother. Soon it devolved on her to look after Claire’s infant as well as Mrs. Shelley’s little boy. Elise must have known that Allegra was Claire’s offspring; but the facts coming under the servant’s observation afforded her no information respecting the child’s paternity. On that point she was doubtless left to inference and conjecture. Though they could not help taking her in some degree into their confidence--at least, could not prevent her from seeing what went on under her own eyes, and drawing her own inferences from what she saw--it is not likely that Mary and Claire told their Swiss maid who was Allegra’s father. Several considerations must have disposed them to be silent to her on that point. Honour and prudence forbade them to confide so delicate a secret to the young nurse, who would be almost sure to let it out to her fellow-servants and the Marlow gossip-mongers, and write about it in her next letter to her friends at Geneva,--a secret which, if it were blabbed at Marlow, would soon be talked about in London, and travel to the ears of William Godwin and Mrs. Godwin, from whom both sisters were especially desirous to withhold the fact of Allegra’s birth. Moreover, whilst keenly alive to the reasons for withholding the secret from Elise, the sisters must have felt they could gain nothing by confiding it to her. Knowing that Elise would naturally receive with suspicion any story they might tell her about Allegra’s paternity, they knew that of all stories the truth was the story she was least likely to believe. The natural course for two ladies in so embarassing a position to take towards their young female servant, would be to tell her a more or less romantic fib, that would not greatly aggravate their trouble if she blabbed it to her familiars.

Probably Elise was told that her mistress’s sister was married under circumstances, that compelled her for the present to keep her marriage a profound secret. At the same time Elise was entreated, with tears and pathetic assurances of eternal gratitude for her fidelity, to guard the secret thus confided to her honour. Claire (a clever hand at fibbing, when fibs might serve her purpose) was just the girl to trick out such a story in the prettiest style, and Elise was just the quick-witted damsel to receive the confidence with a proper show of credulity, and laugh in her sleeve at it as mere fiction.

In the meantime Elise saw what she saw, and (though only a poor Swiss nursemaid) had a right to draw inferences from what she saw. It did not escape the smart girl’s notice that, whilst living affectionately with Claire, Shelley seemed to care for her little girl, quite as much as he cared for Mrs. Shelley’s little boy,--that he nursed little Allegra, and sung to her, for the half-hour at a time, just as though she were his own infant. Is it not told in _Julian and Maddalo_ by Shelley himself, how he delighted in his sister Claire’s babe, and

‘nursed
Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
To this bleak world;’

and in the ‘lovely toy’s’ infancy made himself ‘her antient play-fellow?’ Under these circumstances, Elise may well have come to the conclusion that Allegra’s ‘antient play-fellow’ was also her young father. Elise’s disposition to take this view of the case would not have been less strong, had she known how Shelley had provided for Claire and her child by his will. Though I am dealing conjecturally with mere inferences from admitted facts, I have little doubt that Elise took this view of Allegra’s paternity at Marlow, that she went with the child to Italy under the same impression, and that she held to the same opinion on delivering the little girl into Byron’s custody at Venice. To show by documentary evidence that, before starting from Milan with Allegra in her charge, Elise had been expressly informed of the child’s relation to Byron, would take nothing from the strength of my suspicion that, in conveying Allegra to her father, Elise imagined herself to be conveying Shelley’s child to the famous Lord Byron, in order that he should make arrangements for the child’s future education:--it having been determined (for reasons obvious to Elise’s imagination) that her master had better not figure as principal in arrangements, so likely to fix the little girl’s paternity on him. Readers who concur with the present writer in this suspicion (which, in the absence of evidence sufficient for transmuting suspicion to conviction, is offered as nothing more than a reasonable hypothesis), will concur with him also in regarding Elise’s misconception and the circumstances of Allegra’s transference from the Shelleys’ care to her father’s keeping, as the source of the subsequent story (believed by the Hoppners, who had it in some shape or other from Elise and her husband) that Claire had given birth to a child by Shelley, which he had sent to a Foundling Hospital.

Of one thing there must now be an end in Shelleyan biography,--the practice of writing about Claire, as though she were a sort of fallen woman, to whom the Shelleys in their magnanimity showed great kindness, though she had scarcely any claim upon them for protection. As the family coach (so heavily laden with babies, and baggage, and womankind) rolled through France, Claire (so recently acknowledged as their sister by Shelley and Mary in their _Six Weeks’ Tour_)--Claire, to whom Shelley had assigned in his will no less than 12,000_l._ of his scarcely ample estate--never thought of herself as aught else than Mrs. Shelley’s sister. On the other hand, though these children of the same home were only sisters-by-affinity, Mary Shelley had no disposition to think herself anything else than Shelley’s wife and Claire’s sister. If blood is thicker than water, habit is stronger than either; and the two girls (still only quite young girls) had been habituated from childhood to think of one another as sisters. Taught from the same books and by the same governess, playing with the same toys, placed for punishment in opposite corners of the same room, whipt with the same rod, kissed every night by the same ‘papa,’ these children of different parents, but the same home, had been trained to think of one another as sisters, and nothing else than sisters. Of course they had their tiffs and quarrels. Without blood, they were far more sisters to one another, than those sisters of the whole blood, Eliza and Harriett Westbrook. Nor may Claire be regarded as a sister who, like the too vehemently maligned Eliza, fixed herself on a younger sister and her husband, and would not allow them to throw her off. Claire and Mary (as Mr. Kegan Paul shows by the evidences which he contradicts in his text) were girls of about the same age, though Claire was probably some months older. Shelley never came to dislike Claire. There were moments when he admired her, delighted in her, loved her; but never an hour in which he regarded her with aversion, though the vivacious girl was given to rally, flout, mock, cross him till he fairly lost his temper. In the last month of his life (18th June, 1822), Shelley (_vide_ Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Prose Works_) wrote from Lerici of this wayward, piquant, charming creature, ‘She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her.’ How greatly he cared for her is shown by the munificence with which he provided for her and her child by his will.

Going with them to Italy as their sister, Claire (one or two flying trips excepted) was incessantly with Shelley and her sister for the first twenty months of their life in Italy. During the last two years and a half of the term,--when she had taken to giving music and language lessons in Florence, and was in that capital the animating spirit of the little circle of admirers whom she drew about her by her riant beauty and brilliant style, her wit and accomplishments, her gaiety and irresistible sprightliness,--she looked to ‘the Shelleys’ (whether they were living in a villa or on a flat) as her home. No doubt she received great kindness from the Shelleys; but no less certain is it that she repaid them in kind. If she was unhappy, raging against Byron, dismally wretched (as the too vehemently happy often are in the intervals between periods of elation), she made a rush for ‘home,’ On the other hand, when the Shelleys were languishing and in trouble, their first thought was to signal for Claire, to fly over to them and brighten them. When Mary was sickening for the illness, that resulted, at the Casa Magni, in her miscarriage shortly before the fatal boat accident, Claire was by her side. It was ill for Mary Godwin’s fame, when Mr. Froude the other day published a few scraps of ineffectual writing, in evidence that she cordially disliked the sister, with whom she was merely having a tiff. Far worse will it be for Mary Shelley’s reputation for sincerity and feminine loyalty, should it ever appear from scraps of her writing that, whilst living with every show of affection for her sister, she was thinking unamiably of her, and putting notes to her discredit in a secret record.

Of course, on leaving England for the last time, Mrs. Shelley had no wish to have Claire perpetually with her, nor any expectation that she and her husband would have Allegra’s mother on their hands, in a certain sense, for more than four years. On the failure of the negotiations with Byron, it was, of course, Mrs. Shelley’s hope that her lovely sister, after reconciling herself to Byron’s aversion of her, would win the love of some more stedfast admirer, and pass from girlish lightness to matronly honour. In case Claire should not marry, it was doubtless hoped alike by Shelley and his wife that, after seeing the world for awhile under their protection, and completing her education, she would strike out a career for herself. That the two young (_quite_ young) women had their disagreements of opinion and conflicts of temper in Italy, even as they had bickered and clashed (whilst loving one another abundantly) in former time, was a matter of course with two girls, so self-dependent and fervid, so sensitive and quick-tempered. But one needs only to look at published letters for a superabundance of evidence that Claire’s intercourse with the Shelleys from the spring of 1818 to the Midsummer of 1822, though ruffled now and again by gusts of impetuosity and passages of superficial discord, was the intercourse of near relations, held together by the usual forces of mutual liking and genuine attachment.

Writing from Bagni di Lucca on 17th August, 1818, to Mrs. Gisborne, immediately after Shelley and Claire had started for Venice to see Byron, Mrs. Shelley (_vide_ _Shelley Memorials_) says, ‘Shelley and C[laire] are gone; they went to-day to Venice on important business’ (how cautiously the writer refers to the business!); ‘and I am left to take care of the house. Now, if all of you, or any of you, would come and cheer my solitude, it would be exceedingly kind.’ At the Bagni di Lucca, Shelley and his wife had taken horse-exercise almost every evening, having Claire for their companion in their rides, till she hurt her knee in falling from her horse:--an accident that for a time incapacitated her for exercise in the saddle.

Mrs. Shelley and Claire went together to the _conversazione_, where they were so vastly amused by the whimsical braggart,--an Englishman who, speaking Italian fluently with his national accent and intonation, told the sisters how at Lisbon he, fighting on foot with the brace of pistols, that never missed fire or aim, put to flight thirty well-armed and well-mounted robbers. Whilst Mrs. Shelley was listening with outward civility and secret amusement to this man of valour and brave speech, Claire’s dark eyes overflowed with fun and piquant gaiety, as she whispered a saucy speech in her sister’s ear.

In November and December, 1819, Shelley and the sisters were staying at Florence in the _pension_, whence Mrs. Shelley wrote one of her most amusing letters to Mrs. Gisborne.

In the letter she wrote for Mrs. Hoppner’s eyes (the letter, some of whose passages were copied and dressed not long since by Mr. Froude for the readers of the _Nineteenth Century_) for the exculpation of Shelley and Claire, from the revolting charge that came to his ears at Ravenna in the August of 1821, Mrs. Shelley blazed into sisterly wrath at the suggestion that Claire was capable of the wickedness with which she was charged:--

‘I will add,’ writes the indignant sister to Mrs. Hoppner, from Pisa,
on 10th August, 1821, ‘that Claire has been separated from us for
about a year. She lives with a respectable German family at Florence.
The reasons for this were obvious. Her connexion with us made her
manifest as the Miss _Clermont_’ (_sic_ in Froude’s transcript; but
Mr. Froude is proverbially inaccurate in handling manuscripts) ‘the
mother of Allegra. Besides, we live much alone. She enters much into
society there; and, solely occupied with the idea of the welfare of
her child, she wished to appear such that she may not be thought in
after times to be unworthy of fulfilling the maternal duties. You
ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her
child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and
knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the
ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have
occasioned her!’

It is of the woman, who writes in this strain of Claire’s devotion to her child, and strenuous efforts to qualify herself to be a good mother to her offspring, that Mr. Kegan Paul makes the staggering, though possibly correct, announcement that she thought her sister unfit to have the charge of Allegra.

It has been already told how Claire was by her sick sister’s side, when the latter was dropping into the ill-health, which preceded her miscarriage at San Terenzo. In the well-known letter to Mrs. Gisborne from Pisa (dated 15th August, 1822,--five weeks and three days after Shelley’s death), Mrs. Shelley makes repeated mention of her sister and nurse. Claire was the sedulous and loving nurse, who administered the brandy and eau-de-Cologne, and applied the vinegar, that kept her sister from fatal fainting, during the seven long hours of her most imminent danger. It was from anxiety for the patient, no less than from ignorance of the way in which it should be used, that Claire (in the doctor’s absence) lacked the courage to use the ice, which at the close of those hours Shelley himself applied so freely and effectually. The helpful, bright, sweet-voiced, tender-handed Claire remained at the Casa Magni, when Shelley had gone off to Leghorn and Pisa, leaving his wife in her weakness, to brood with unutterable melancholy over her previsions of approaching calamity. The saddest hours Mary spent in that season of deepening gloom, were the hours when Claire was not by her side, to divert her thoughts, and cheer her spirits. As soon as Claire and Jane Williams had started for their evening walk, Shelley’s wife was revisited by the feeling that disaster would speedily befall her only remaining child. Possessed by wretchedness, whilst gazing on one of the fairest scenes of all Italy, Mary used to pace slowly up and down the seaward terrace, sinking momentarily from deep to deeper dejection, during the needful absence of the sister and friend, whose society just enabled her to endure the growing burden of grief and care, that without their sympathy would have been unendurable. Such was the service of love Claire is known, by the evidence of letters, to have rendered her sister.

Figuring thus pleasantly in Mrs. Shelley’s letters, Claire shows forth no less agreeably in the series of Shelley’s letters, that appear in Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose writings. At the Bagni di Lucca, in July and August, 1818, Claire and Mary are regular attendants of the Sunday _conversazioni_, though they refrain from dancing for reasons known doubtless to themselves, whilst Shelley is uncertain whether they decline to dance from philosophy or Protestantism. Leaving Mary and her babes at the Bagni in August, Shelley and Claire go off to Venice, performing part of the journey in the almost springless one-horse cabriolet, that causing Shelley much discomfort fatigues Claire exceedingly. Falling in with a German, who has just recovered from an attack of malarial fever caught in the Pontine Marshes, Shelley is disposed to travel in his company to Padua, when Claire, by her entreaties, prevails on him to avoid the stranger from whom he may catch the fever, dreaded by tourists in Italy. At Venice, where she is received cordially by the Hoppners, and avoided by Allegra’s father, Claire is seen flitting hither and thither, on foot or by gondola, under Shelley’s brotherly escort. By-and-by, when Mary has come with her babes to Este, the sisters are with Shelley at the villa Byron has lent them;--the house where Mary’s little Clara sickens of the illness, so soon to end in death at Venice. When the Shelleys move southward, Claire has her seat in the heavily laden coach, travelling with them to Rome, and in their company taking her first cursory view of the manifold attractions of the Holy City. Shelley having preceded them by a few days, the sisters journey together to Naples with little Willie and his nurse, and with Paolo for the charioteer of their private carriage. At Resina, when Shelley and Mary mount mules for the ascent, Claire seats herself in the chair in which she is carried up Vesuvius ‘on the shoulders of four men, much like a member of Parliament after he has gained his election, and looking’ (says Shelley in his letter of 22nd December, 1818, to Peacock) ‘with less reason, quite as frightened.’ At Rome with the Shelleys, when their boy’s death plunges them in wretchedness, Claire is their companion and comforter in the ensuing months of despair. In the autumn of 1819 she is with them at Florence, where it amuses Shelley to observe how Lady Mountcashel’s daughter, fickle as the breeze, is alternately in love and out of humour with Claire, who is in the highest and brightest of her changeful spirits at the delightful prospect of setting off in a day or two for Vienna.

Whether this trip was made for business as well as for pleasure does not appear; but whilst fruitful of delightful anticipations, the run to the Austrian capital may have had a graver purpose. For, set on being a self-dependent and self-sustaining young woman, Claire is seldom without a new scheme for the achievement of her purpose. She means to establish herself as a teacher of languages and music. She will sing herself into universal fame as an operatic _prima donna_. She will condescend for a while to be the resident governess of a family of the highest quality. Writing and talking of her as _la fille aux mille projêts_, Shelley is ready at all times to aid her with sympathy, counsel, and money, in furtherance of each and all of her various schemes for finding suitable employment. Participating in her hopes, he shares her disappointments. Words cannot express his disdain for the mental narrowness, and moral debasement, and perverse wickedness of the gentlewoman who, after arranging to take Claire for her governess, avoided the compact, on being told of Miss Clairmont’s recent entanglement with Lord Byron, and of the relation in which she stood to Byron’s illegitimate daughter.

Shelley’s attachment to Claire is the more remarkable, because the same fervour and capriciousness, that so often set her at discord with Mary, rendered her at times alike unruly and unreasonable to him. Alternating between the highest of high spirits and the most dismal moods of despondency, Claire suffered also from a temper, whose freakish vehemence might well have made Shelley despair of keeping on good terms with her. But though she often hurt and incensed him, she never extinguished his fondness for her. Probably Shelley liked her all the better for being as quick to twit and flout him into a pet, as clever in rallying and coaxing him back into good temper. Possibly the wayward Claire saw she confirmed him in his attachment to her, by whipping him every now and then into transient mutiny against her influence. In moments of resentment Shelley could write angrily and disparagingly of Claire. But all the same it stands out clear upon the record that in eight long years he never revolted steadily against the charming girl and brilliant woman, of whom Byron wearied in much less than the same number of months. ‘Claire is with us,’ Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, from the Casa Magni, on 18th June, 1822, ‘and the death of her child seems to have restored her to tranquillity. Her character is somewhat altered. She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her,’

It was thus that Shelley and Mary wrote of their ‘sister’ Claire,--the sister in whose society Mrs. Shelley seemed to delight, and Shelley certainly delighted; the sister for whose future he had provided by the two legacies of 6000_l._ each. At the same time the letters, written to the poet and his wife, overflow with evidence that their correspondents regarded Claire as a young gentlewoman, to be rated as a member of Shelley’s domestic circle, and treated with the respect due to his wife’s sister. Yet Lady Shelley would push Claire from the position thus assigned to her by Shelley and his wife, and recognized by all their friends. There must be an end to writing about Claire, as though she were aught else than Mrs. Shelley’s sister. There must be an end of referring to her as a sort of fallen woman, to whom Shelley and his wife were magnanimously beneficent.

In one notable respect Shelley’s life with his second wife in Italy resembled his life with his first wife in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. It was a restless and vagrant existence. Students and men of letters are usually restful and home-loving creatures. But, though something less of a rover towards the end of his Italian time, than he was during his first marriage, Shelley never stayed long in the same place. In 1818 he passed about a month at Milan, three or four days at Pisa, a month or so at Leghorn, between eleven and twelve weeks at Bagni di Lucca, something more than ten weeks at Venice and Este, three weeks at Rome. Passing from Rome to Naples in the later part of December, 1818, he returned to Rome after spending eight or ten weeks in the more southern capital. From Rome he went again (in the summer of 1819) to the neighbourhood of Leghorn, where he rested for something over three months, before migrating to Florence for the winter of 1819-20. In the February of 1820 he was at Pisa, where he remained (now in the city and now at the neighbouring baths) for a longer time than at any of the other places he visited; but even at Pisa, the place in which his roots (to use his own expression) struck deeper than anywhere else in Italy, he was a mere settler for the season. Of the twenty-six months (from the earlier time of February, 1820, to April, 1822), he spent nineteen months at or near Pisa, including the time passed in the trip to Ravenna and other excursions; but he never planted himself there so as to touch the soil beneath the surface. Moving in April, 1822, to Lerici, where he lived less on land than water, he perished three months later.

At Venice, through his intimacy with such Italian ladies as the Countess Albrizzi and the Countess Benzoni (countesses with crowded salons, albeit Shelley may have been justified in saying they smelt of garlic), and his unedifying familiarity with such women as Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni,--and in later Italian time through his close association with Teresa Guiccioli, the Gambas, and the Romagnese revolutionists,--Byron knew the Italians and studied them closely, though doubtless under conditions that disposed him in the end to think too lowly of them. But to the last Shelley’s knowledge of modern Italy and the modern Italians was no deeper or more accurate than the knowledge to be picked up by an observant holiday-maker in a six weeks’ tour.