afterwards could undo; for while Shelley was bent on proselytising
Harriet Westbrook, not less for his sisters' sake than for his own,
Harriet, in a school-girl fashion, encouraged by her sister and not
discouraged by her father, was falling in love with Shelley. How were
the _bourgeois_ father and sister to comprehend such a character
as Shelley's, when his own parents and all the College authorities
failed to do so? If Shelley were not in love he must have appeared so,
and Harriet's family did their best by encouraging and countenancing
the intimacy to lead to a marriage, they naturally having Harriet's
interests more at heart than Shelley's.

However, the fact remains that Shelley was a most extraordinary being,
an embryo poet, with all a poet's possible inconsistencies, the very
brilliancy of the intellectual spark in one direction apparently
quelling it for a time in another. In most countries and ages a poet
seems to have been accepted as a heaven-sent gift to his nation; his
very crimes (and surely Shelley did not surpass King David in
misdoing?) have been the _lacrymae rerum_ giving terrible vitality
to his thoughts, and so reclaiming many others ere some fatal deed is
done; but in England the convention of at least making a show of
virtues which do not exist (perhaps a sorry legacy from Puritanism)
will not allow the poet to be accepted for what he really is, nor his
poetry to appeal, on its own showing, to the human heart. He must be
analysed, and vilified, or whitewashed in turn.

At any rate Shelley was superior to some of the respectable vices of
his class, and one alleged concession of his father was fortunately
loathsome to him, viz.--that he (Sir Timothy) would provide for as
many illegitimate children as Percy chose to have, but he would not
tolerate a _mesalliance_. To what a revolt of ideas must such a