up in the hard towel; and at intervals out came his voice bubbling
and deploring, and was again swallowed up. At breakfast, the child
being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, and was laughing and
sympathizing in perfect good faith, when Mathews came in, and I found
that the little urchin was he.

* * * * *

SHELLEY'S GENEROSITY.--As an instance of Shelley's extraordinary
generosity, a friend of his, a man of letters, enjoyed from him
at that period a pension of a hundred a year, though he had but
a thousand of his own; and he continued to enjoy it till fortune
rendered it superfluous. But the princeliness of his disposition
was seen most in his behavior to another friend, the writer of this
memoir, who is proud to relate that, with money raised with an
effort, Shelley once made him a present of fourteen hundred pounds,
to extricate him from debt. I was not extricated, for I had not yet
learned to be careful; but the shame of not being so, after such
generosity, and the pain which my friend afterward underwent when
I was in trouble and he was helpless, were the first causes of my
thinking of money matters to any purpose. His last sixpence was ever
at my service, had I chosen to share it. In a poetical epistle
written some years after, and published in the volume of "Posthumous
Poems," Shelley, in alluding to his friend's circumstances, which
for the second time were then straitened, only made an affectionate
lamentation that he himself was poor; never once hinting that he had
himself drained his purse for his friend.

* * * * *