John Cordy Jeaffreson

“ Having no wish to see the Lady Olympia die in so unsuitable a place, Wolfstein, instead of calling for Megalena, replies, ‘Dearest Lady Olympia, compose yourself, I beseech you. What, what agitates you?’
‘Oh! pardon me, pardon me,’ exclaims the Lady Olympia, with ‘maniac wildness,’ ‘pardon a wretched female who knows not what she does! Oh! resistlessly am I impelled to this avowal; resistlessly am I impelled to declare to you, that I love you! adore you to distraction!—Will you return my affection? ”

“ It was by such doctrine that Mary Wollstonecraft hoped to raise her sex from slavery and debasement to freedom and dignity. Such was the teacher of whom Mrs. Shelley wrote, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud.’ It must be remembered that The Rights of Woman is the only important original work by her pen that deserves serious consideration,—the solitary work in which she made a strenuous effort to influence the life and future of humanity. ”

“ Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley’s never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. ”

“ Not the creator, the soul, the preserver of this world alone—or of any of those which we have seen roll with uninterrupted harmony for so many thousands of years!—not the God of the millions of myriads of worlds, of systems, and of various ranks and orders of beings and intelligences which probably compose the aggregate of the grand, the vast, the incomprehensible system of the universe!—but the eternal, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful, infinitely good God of the whole—the Great Sun of the Universe! ”

“ In his doubt and curiosity he may also be conceived to have hoped that, should death prove the gateway to another life for him, it would be a life, in which the ways of duty and righteousness are more clearly marked and more easily discovered, than the ways of righteousness and duty in this darksome, and troublous, and perplexing existence. Thus, as he sate a-thinking in the foundering boat, Shelley sunk beneath the turbulent and cruel waves, so remorseless for the woe they work, so heedless of the lives they devour. ”

“ In speaking to his dear and incomparable Hogg of Miss Harriett Grove’s beauty and accomplishments, her irresistible voice and richly radiant tresses, her composure that too nearly resembled coldness, and the circumspection that might not be imputed to her for unkindness, young Bysshe Shelley only did as most youngsters would have done under similar circumstances,—as most youngsters under similar circumstances will do, to the end of Time and Love. ”

“ It is not once in awhile, but daily, that a physician of any large charitable institution of London reads a pathetic tale of struggle and defeat, of honest effort and bitter failure, of slow descent from grade to grade of misfortune—in the tranquil dignity, the mild enduring quiet, and noiseless gratitude of poor sufferers—gentle once in fortune, gentle still in nature. ”

“ A mirth-loving judge, Justice Powell, could be as thoroughly humorous in private life as he was fearless and just upon the bench. Swift describes him as a surpassingly merry old gentleman, laughing heartily at all comic things, and his own droll stories more than aught else. In court he could not always refrain from jocularity. For instance, when he tried Jane Wenham for witch-craft, and she assured him that she could fly, his eye twinkled as he answered, "Well, then you may; there is no law against flying." ”

“ For never more was she to press her lips against the slight sun-burnt visage, see herself in those deep-blue eyes, pass her hand over the flowing brown curls, hear the voice which, harsh though it might be to others,—shrill, sharp, strident under impulses of anger, as she knew it to be,—was life’s and love’s own music to her ear and heart. ”

“ I said to Muley Ismail, Thou art a bloodhound!—The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill me.—Ha! not to be able to die—not to be able to die—not to be permitted to rest after the toils of life—to be doomed to be imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon—to be for ever clogged with this worthless body, its load of diseases and infirmities—to be condemned to hold for millenniums that yawning monster Sameness, and Time, that hungry hyæna, ever bearing children, and ever devouring again her offspring!—Ha! not to be permitted to die! ”

“ What an indignant oath and scream of ridicule didst thou give, when an attorney (Sir Oracle of "the board") endeavoured to instil into thy mind the first principles of supply and demand, and that grandest law of political economy—to wit, if there are too many poor people in a neighbourhood, they must be starved out of it into one where they will not be in the way; and if there are too many poor people in the entire world, they must be starved out of that also into another, where there'll be more room for them! ”

“ To Claire he had said, ‘Our felicity having perished, in obedience to the forces that cause human beings to love and cease from loving one another, you go your way, whilst I go mine. Leaving me to select another object of affection, do you give your heart to some one who wishes for it. We have been happy together; the time has come for us to seek happiness apart from one another,’ At the same time, still speaking like an honourable Lawless Lover, Byron said, ‘But I cannot allow you to suffer in your purse for your goodness to me. ”

“ One may well smile at such egregious ignorance of law and affairs in the self-confident youth, who was preparing to visit Ireland in order to Emancipate the Catholics, Repeal the Union, and instruct the whole Irish people in political science. It is, however, no matter for smiling that this young scatterbrain, whom his adulators compare with the Saviour of the World, penned these egregious inventions to his father’s discredit in a letter to a person, with whom he had no domestic connexion,—to a stranger, of whom he knew nothing, save that he was a writer of entertaining and clever books. ”

“ You who was born to represent me living, when I shall cease to be—born to pursue that most excellent and important profession to which I have for so many years labored to be useful—born to defend my cause and support my fame—may I not presume, my son, that you will defend your father's cause? May I not affirm that you, my son, will support your father's fame? After having this said, need I add more than remind you—that, to a father, nothing can be so dear as a deserving son—nor state so desirable as that of the man who holds his successor, and knows him to be worthy. ”

“ Foolish people, and by no means altogether foolish people, when they sink into sorrow, are apt to drink for the sake of drowning care, and Heaven knows that poor Harriett (only twenty-one years old) had care enough to excuse her for trying to drown it—even in so futile and disgusting a manner. If Harriett drowned her pain of body and mind with wine and brandy, Shelley drowned his pain of body and mind with laudanum. ”

“ Dryden wrote,
"The first physicians by debauch were made.
Excess began, and sloth sustained the trade;
By chase our long-liv'd fathers earned their food,
Toil strung their nerves and purified their blood;
But we, their sons, a pamper'd race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught;
The wise for cure on exercise depend,
God never made his work for man to mend." ”

“ Addressing the great without sycophancy, he lived in good-fellowship with all men. Instead of trying to force his son’s affections, he would have been content to see him marry Harriett Grove,—a girl of no fortune, and of a family something nearer doubtless, but only something nearer, the aristocracy than the small squireens and gentle yeomanry from whom he was himself descended. All he had asked of the boy, who with good conduct would succeed to a noble fortune, was to marry a gentlewoman, fit to be his mother’s daughter and the sister of his sisters. ”

“ But it is rare, and because rare it is amusing and piquant, to find a man chiefly desirous of persuading his neighbours that he is a very much worse man than he really is. England will hold her own amongst the nations of the earth for several centuries, without producing another great poet so enamoured and ambitious as Byron was of evil fame; but every generation of her past or future story has produced, or will produce, a poet with Shelley’s disposition to think and speak too well of himself. ”

“ Who is the young lady? Who the young gentleman who has gone off to London? Are they really husband and wife? If so, why has the young gentleman gone off without her? Why has he left her under the care of the sprightly Mr. Hogg, of all people in the world? Can it be that the Scotch marriage, instead of making her the very young gentleman’s wife, made her the sprightly Mr. Hogg’s wife? The austere and suspicious milliners may well have asked themselves these and half-a-hundred other questions.
Whilst Shelley was away, Harriett spent lonely days at York. ”

“ I asked immediately, 'What young heir, or lover, owned that glittering equipage!' But my companion interrupted, 'Do not you see there the mourning Æsculapius?' 'The mourning!' said I. 'Yes, Isaac,' said Pacolet, 'he is in deep mourning, and is the languishing, hopeless lover of the divine Hebe, the emblem of Youth and Beauty. That excellent and learned sage you behold in that furniture is the strongest instance imaginable that love is the most powerful of all things. ”

“ If it was wrong on the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. ”

“ It is not wonderful that the self-sufficient, critical, humorous Hogg’s interest in his young friend was composed equally of amusement and admiration, cynical curiosity and amiable contempt; a disposition to love him, and an even stronger disposition to laugh at him. There was so much to admire and love in the eccentric boy, who overflowed with pity for the miseries of mankind, and prattled with almost childish communicativeness about his cousin Harriett’s beauty and his sister Elizabeth’s perfections ”

“ Those who know me will believe my simple word. It is not long ago that my father said, in a letter to me, that he had never known me utter a falsehood; but you—easy as you have been to credit evil, you may be more deaf to truth—to you I swear by all that I hold sacred in Heaven and Earth, by a vow which I should die to write if I affirmed a falsehood,—I swear by the life of my child—my blessed, beloved child—that I know the accusation to be false.’
Addressed to Mrs. Hoppner, this letter was sent to Shelley at Ravenna, for him to forward it to the lady at Venice ”

“ What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar, and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long, slender neck. [Pg 40] The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl’s face is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is perfect—too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. ”

“ Instead of running after him for sweet converse touching the perfectibility of the species, they spoke of him as a very bad young man, who had treated his charming little wife most cruelly and shamefully, and in other ways proved himself a monster. Because it amuses gentlewomen to listen in a drawing-room to a young poet’s eloquent exhibitions of his daring and delightful and original views about society, and the affections, and ‘all that sort of thing,’ it does not follow that they will care to flutter about him and smile upon him, when he has acted on his startling and charming theories. ”

“ Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they don’t wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful. ”

“ What, thought Shelley, could be more agreeable to him than to turn farmer? With a bailiff at his elbow to look after matters of vulgar business, he could farm to a profit. The holding comprised a hundred and thirty acres of land under cultivation, and seventy acres of wood, scrub, briery, and mountain; woods in which he and Harriett and Eliza could saunter with their friends, when the summer’s sun should be oppressive; hills they could climb in the colder seasons for the enjoyment of the invigorating breeze. ”

“ My conception of the Oxonian Shelley is that he was an impetuous, unruly, combative young scatterbrain; disloyal and deceitful to his parents; certainly capable of falsehood in comparatively small matters to other people; but I cannot believe he could have been so false to his own soul, so prodigiously false to his own convictions on the most awful of all solemn subjects, as to write and seek a publisher for a serious argument against the belief in God, whilst he himself believed in the Deity. ”

“ Seventeen months since, he had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an estate of 6000l. per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find himself heir to nothing,—the fool of a fool’s paradise,—the dupe of a long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn of penury. ”

“ Dull in moments of contemplation, the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny’s stag-eyed Shelley were comparable with Byron’s grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron’s feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron’s mouth in power, Shelley’s mouth—the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical countenance—was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of sensibility and refinement. ”

“ In her later time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? ”

“ Harriett’s temper was by no means faultless, but as she was the only serious sufferer from her propensity to imagine herself an ill-used damsel, it did not lessen the natural influence of her personal attractiveness.
Fretful towards herself, she was never peevish or wilfully unkind to others. Her prevailing mood was tranquil melancholy; and there were times when she played the rebel with a serene sullenness that made worthy Mrs. Fenning wonder what would be the end of so perplexing a young lady. ”

“ Godwin was by no means so violent and outrageous in wrath as Mary Wollstonecraft. In other respects Mary Jane had the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft. In social reputation she was far superior to Mary Godwin’s mother. Having never produced so scandalous a book as the Rights of Women, she had not lived in Free Love with two men or any man; she had never given birth to an illegitimate child; her name had never been discreditably associated with another woman’s husband; nor had she ever thrown herself in a fit of white rage off Putney Bridge. ”

“ The man who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human nature. ”

“ It is not surprising that for some time he refused to speak with Shelley, or to correspond with him, except through a solicitor. The worm turns when it is trodden upon. Even a philosopher may be excused for showing he participates in the infirmities of ‘the slavish multitude,’ when the young man he has cherished affectionately repays his kindness by bringing his only daughter to shame. It is not surprising that, to the hour of the poet’s death, Godwin thought of him bitterly and resentfully as an evil man. ”

“ When ‘society’ is invited to consider and pass judgment on a new mésalliance, it is in the nature of things for the unpleasant and reprehensible features of the affair to be magnified and multiplied by social sentiment. On hearing that young Shelley of Field Place had surpassed all his previous offences by running off to Scotland with an innkeeper’s daughter, to his father’s unutterable wrath and his mother’s grief and dismay, the Sussex families imagined something far more shocking than the actual incident. ”

“ From the August of 1817, even to this year of grace, Lord Eldon has been written of bitterly for depriving so bright a genius and so virtuous a citizen as Shelley of the care of his own offspring; and so long as organs of social opinion, so powerful as the Edinburgh Review, continue to misstate the grounds of the Lord Chancellor’s decree, he will continue to be denounced as a prodigy of intolerance. ”

“ The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not long after the poet’s death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the engraver’s art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley’s personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver’s art, gazed on the face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? ”