The unhappy wife recklessly broke the
bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would
have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her
passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,--and on him also, by a
Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.[1]
[Footnote 1: Since this article was written, Mr. Peacock, an early
friend of Shelley, has published a very different estimate of the
character of Harriet Shelley. See _Fraser's Magazine_ for March,
1860.]
The subject of Shelley's character is a delicate and a difficult one,
and Mr. Hogg and Mr. Trelawny, especially, show their inability to
understand it, by the way in which they put forward and dwell upon
the poet's peculiarities. Trelawny, a hard-minded, thorough-paced man
of the world, publishing garrulously in his old age what he was
silent about in his better period, talks of the poet's oddity,
awkwardness, and want of punctuality,--as if Percy were some clerkly
man on 'Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so
erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown
in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a
wall,--Mr.
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