Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  To HARRIET —

  Whose is the love that, gleaming thro’ the world,

  Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?

  Whose is the warm and partial praise,

  Virtue’s most sweet reward?

  Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul

  Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?

  Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,

  And loved mankind the more?

  Harriet! on thine: — thou wert my purer mind,

  Thou wert the inspiration of my song;

  Thine are these early wilding flowers,

  Though garlanded by me.

  Then press into thy breast this pledge of love,

  And know, though time may change and years may roll

  Each flowret gathered in my heart It consecrates to thine.

  Next the verses on F. G.: —

  Her voice did quiver as we parted,

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From which it came, and I departed,

  Heeding not the words then spoken.

  Misery — oh, Misery!

  This world is all too wide for thee!

  Can anything be more preposterously inappropriate to his parting with Harriet Grove? These verses relate to a far more interesting person and a deeply tragic event; but they belong, as I have said, to the year 1817, a later period than this article embraces.’

  From Oxford the two friends proceeded to London, where they took a joint lodging, in which, after a time, Shelley was left alone, living uncomfortably on precarious resources. It was here that the second Harriet consoled him for the loss of the first, who, I feel thoroughly convinced, never more troubled his repose.

  To the circumstances of Shelley’s first marriage I find no evidence but in my own recollection of what he told me respecting it. He often spoke to me of it; and with all allowance for the degree in which his imagination coloured events, I see no improbability in the narration.

  Harriet Westbrook, he said, was a schoolfellow of one of his sisters; and when, after his expulsion from Oxford, he was in London, without money, his father having refused him all assistance, this sister had requested her fair schoolfellow to be the medium of conveying to him such small sums as she and her sisters could afford to send, and other little presents which they thought would be acceptable. Under these circumstances the ministry of the young and beautiful girl presented itself like that of a guardian angel, and there was a charm about their intercourse which he readily persuaded himself could not be exhausted in the duration of life. The result was that in August, 1811, they eloped to Scotland, and were married in Edinburgh. Their journey had absorbed their stock of money. They took a lodging, and Shelley immediately told the landlord who they were, what they had come for, and the exhaustion of their resources, and asked him if he would take them in, and advance them money to get married and to carry them on till they could get a remittance. This the man agreed to do, on condition that Shelley would treat him and his friends to a supper in honour of the occasion. It was arranged accordingly; but the man was more obtrusive and officious than Shelley was disposed to tolerate. The marriage was concluded, and in the evening Shelley and his bride were alone together, when the man tapped at their door. Shelley opened it, and the landlord said to him—’ It is customary here at weddings for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride with whisky.’

  ‘I immediately,’ said Shelley, ‘caught up my brace of pistols, and pointing them both at him, said to him, — I have had enough of your impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains out; on which he ran or rather tumbled down stairs, and I bolted the doors.’

  The custom of washing the bride with whisky is more likely to have been so made known to him than to have been imagined by him.

  Leaving Edinburgh, the young couple led for some time a wandering life. At the lakes they were kindly received by the Duke of Norfolk, and by others through his influence. They then went to Ireland, landed at Cork, visited the lakes of Killarney, and stayed some time in Dublin, where Shelley became a warm repealer and emancipator. They then went to the Isle of Man, then to Nant Gwillt in Radnorshire, then to Lymouth near Barnstaple,’ then came for a short time to London; then went to reside in a furnished house belonging to Mr. Maddocks at Tanyrallt, near Tremadoc, in Caernarvonshire. Their residence at this place was made chiefly remarkable by an imaginary attack on his life, which was followed by their immediately leaving Wales.

  Mr. Hogg inserts several letters relative to this romance of a night: the following extract from one of Harriet Shelley’s, dated from Dublin, March 12th, 1813, will give a sufficient idea of it: —

  Mr. Shelley promised you a recital of the horrible events that caused us to leave Wales. I have undertaken the task, as I wish to spare him, in the present nervous state of his health, everything that can recall to his mind the horrors of that night, which I will relate.

  On the night of the 26th February we retired to bed between ten and eleven o’clock. We had been in bed about half an hour, when Mr. S — heard a noise proceeding from one of the parlours. He immediately went down stairs with two pistols which he had loaded that night, expecting to have occasion for them. He went into the billiard-room, when he heard footsteps retreating; he followed into another little room, which was called an office. He there saw a man in the act of quitting the room through a glass window which opened into the shrubbery; the man fired at Mr. S — , which he avoided: — Bysshe then fired, but it flashed in the pan. The man then knocked Bysshe down, and they struggled on the ground. Bysshe then fired his second pistol, which he thought wounded him in the shoulder, as he uttered a shriek and got up, when he said these words— ‘By God, I will be revenged. I will murder your wife, and will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’ He then fled, as we hoped for the night. Our servants were not gone to bed, but were just going when this horrible affair happened. This was about eleven o’clock. We all assembled in the parlour, where we remained for two hours. Mr. S — then advised us to retire, thinking it was impossible he would make a second attack. We left Bysshe and our man-servant — who had only arrived that day, and who knew nothing of the house — to sit up. I had been in bed three hours when I heard a pistol go off. I immediately ran down stairs, when I perceived that Bysshe’s flannel gown had been shot through, and the window-curtain. Bysshe had sent Daniel to see what hour it was, when he heard a noise at the window; he went there, and a man thrust his arm though the glass and fired at him. Thank heaven! the ball went through his gown and he remained unhurt. Mr. S — happened to stand sideways; had he stood fronting, the ball must have killed him. Bysshe fired his pistol, but it would not go off; he then aimed a blow at him with an old sword which we found in the house. The assassin attempted to get the sword from him, and just as he was pulling it away Dan rushed into the room, when he made his escape. This was at four in the morning. It had been a most dreadful night; the wind was as loud as thunder, and the rain descended in torrents. Nothing has been heard of him, and we have every reason to believe it was no stranger, as there is a man.... who, the next morning,’ went and told the shopkeepers that it was a tale of Mr. Shelley’s to impose upon them, that he might leave the country without paying his bills. This they believed, and none of them attempted to do anything towards his discovery. We left Tanyrallt on Sunday.

  Mr. Hogg subjoins: —

  Persons acquainted with the localities and with the circumstances, and who had carefully investigated the matter, were unanimous in the opinion that no such attack was ever made.

  I may state more particularly the result of the investigation to which Mr. Hogg alludes. I was in North Wales in the summer of 1813, and heard the matter much talked of. Persons who had examined the premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window; and the imp
ression of the ball on the wainscot showed that the pistol had been fired towards the window, and not from it. This appeared conclusive as to the whole series of operations having taken place from within. The mental phenomena in which this sort of semi-delusion originated will be better illustrated by one which occurred at a later period, and which, though less tragical in its appearances, was more circumstantial in its development, and more perseveringly adhered to. It will not come within the scope of this article.

  I saw Shelley for the first time in 1812, just before he went to Tanyrallt. I saw him again once or twice before I went to North Wales in 1813. On my return he was residing at Bracknell, and invited me to visit him there. This I did, and found him with his wife Harriet, her sister Eliza, and his newly-born daughter Ianthe.

  Mr. Hogg says: —

  This accession to his family did not appear to afford him any gratification, or to create an interest. He never spoke of this child to me, and to this hour I never set eyes on her.’

  Mr. Hogg is mistaken about Shelley’s feelings as to his first child. He was extremely fond of it, and would walk up and down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a monotonous melody of his own making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his own making. His song was ‘Yâhmani, Yâhmani, Yâhmani, Yâhmani.’ It did not please me, but, what was more important, it pleased the child, and lulled it when it was fretful. Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an affectionate father. But to this first-born there were accompaniments which did not please him. The child had a wet-nurse whom he did not like, and was much looked after by his wife’s sister, whom he intensely disliked. I have often thought that if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married love would not have been so readily broken. But of this hereafter, when we come to speak of the separation.

  At Bracknell, Shelley was surrounded by a numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinions in relation to religion and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet. But they wore their rue with a difference. Every one of them adopting some of the articles of the faith of their general church, had each nevertheless some predominant crotchet of his or her own, which left a number of open questions for earnest and not always temperate discussion. I was sometimes irreverent enough to laugh at the fervour with which opinions utterly unconducive to any practical result were battled for as matters of the highest importance to the well-being of mankind; Harriet Shelley was always ready to laugh with me, and we thereby both lost caste with some of the more hot-headed of the party. Mr. Hogg was not there during my visit, but he knew the whole of the persons there assembled, and has given some account of them under their initials, which for all public purposes are as well as their names.

  The person among them best worth remembering was the gentleman whom Mr. Hogg calls J. F. N.,’ of whom he relates some anecdotes.

  I will add one or two from my own experience. He was an estimable man and an agreeable companion, and he was not the less amusing that he was the absolute impersonation of a single theory, or rather of two single theories rolled into one. He held that all diseases and all aberrations, moral and physical, had their origin in the use of animal food and of fermented and spirituous liquors; that the universal adoption of a diet of roots, fruits, and distilled water, would restore the golden age of universal health, purity, and peace; that this most ancient and sublime morality was mystically inculcated in the most ancient Zodiac, which was that of Dendera; that this Zodiac was divided into two hemispheres, the upper hemisphere being the realm of Oromazes or the principle of good, the lower that of Ahrimanes or the principle of evil; that each of these hemispheres was again divided into two compartments, and that the four lines of division radiating from the centre were the prototype of the Christian cross. The two compartments of Oromazes were those of Uranus or Brahma the Creator, and of Saturn or Veishnu the Preserver. The two compartments of Ahrimanes were those of Jupiter or Seva the Destroyer, and of Apollo or Krishna the Restorer. The great moral doctrine was thus symbolized in the Zodiacal signs: — In the first compartment, Taurus the Bull, having in the ancient Zodiac a torch in his mouth, was the type of eternal light. Cancer the Crab was the type of celestial matter, sleeping under the all-covering water, on which Brahma floated in a lotus-flower for millions of ages. From the union, typified by Gemini, of light and celestial matter, issued in the second compartment Leo, Primogenial Love, mounted on the back of a Lion, who produced the pure and perfect nature of things in Virgo, and Libra the Balance denoted the coincidence of the ecliptic with the equator, and the equality of man’s happy existence. In the third compartment, the first entrance of evil into the system was typified by the change of celestial into terrestrial matter — Cancer into Scorpio. Under this evil influence man became a hunter, Sagittarius the Archer, and pursued the wild animals, typified by Capricorn. Then, with animal food and cookery, came death into the world, and all our woe. But in the fourth compartment, Dhanwantari or Æsculapius, Aquarius the Waterman, arose from the sea, typified by Pisces the Fish, with a jug of pure water and a bunch of fruit, and brought back the period of universal happiness under Aries the Ram, whose benignant ascendancy was the golden fleece of the Argonauts, and the true talisman of Oromazes.

  He saw the Zodiac in everything. I was walking with him one day on a common near Bracknell, when we came on a public-house which had the sign of the Horse-shoes. They were four on the sign, and he immediately determined that this number had been handed down from remote antiquity as representative of the compartments of the, Zodiac. He stepped into the public-house, and said to the landlord, ‘Your sign is the Horse-shoes?’ —

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This sign has always four Horse-shoes?’— ‘Why mostly, sir.’

  ‘Not always?’— ‘I think I have seen three.” I cannot divide the Zodiac into three. But it is mostly four. Do you know why it is mostly four?’— ‘Why, sir, I suppose because a horse has four legs.’ He bounced out in great indignation, and as soon as I joined him, he said to me, ‘Did you ever see such a fool?’

  I have also very agreeable reminiscences of Mrs. B. and her daughter Cornelia.’ Of these ladies Shelley says (Hogg, ii. 515): —

  I have begun to learn Italian again. Cornelia assists me in this language. Did I not once tell you that I thought her cold and reserved? She is the reverse of this, as she is the reverse of everything bad. She inherits all the divinity of her mother.

  Mr. Hogg ‘could never learn why Shelley called Mrs. B. Meimouné.’ In fact he called her, not Meimouné, but Maimuna, from Southey’s Thalaba: —

  Her face was as a damsel’s face,

  And yet her hair was grey.

  She was a young-looking woman for her age, and her hair was as white as snow.

  About the end of 1813, Shelley was troubled by one of his most extraordinary delusions. He fancied that a fat old woman who sat opposite to him in a mail coach was afflicted with elephantiasis, that the disease was infectious and incurable, and that he had caught it from her. He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant’s, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands, arms, and neck very tight, and if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him, and endeavour by a corresponding pressure to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. His friends took various methods of dispelling the delusion. I quoted to him the words of Lucretius: —

  Est elephas morbus, qui propter flumina Nili

  Gignitur Aegypto in media, ncque praelcrea usquam.

  He said these verses were the greatest comfort he had. When he found that, as the days rolled on, his legs retained their proportion, and his skin its smoothness, the delusion died away.

&nb
sp; I have something more to say belonging to this year 1813, but it will come better in connexion with the events of the succeeding year. In the meantime I will mention one or two traits of character in which chronology is unimportant.

  It is to be remarked that, with the exception of the clergyman from whom he received his first instructions, the Reverend Mr. Edwards, of Horsham, Shelley never came, directly or indirectly, under any authority, public or private, for which he entertained, or had much cause to entertain, any degree of respect. His own father, the Brentford schoolmaster, the head master of Eton, the Master and Fellows of his college at Oxford, the Lord Chancellor Eldon, all successively presented themselves to him in the light of tyrants and oppressors. It was perhaps from the recollection of his early preceptor that he felt a sort of poetical regard for country clergymen, and was always pleased when he fell in with one who had a sympathy with him in classical literature, and was willing to pass sub silentio the debateable ground between them. But such an one was of rare occurrence. This recollection may also have influenced his feeling under the following transitory impulse.

  He had many schemes of life. Amongst them all, the most singular that ever crossed his mind was that of entering the church. Whether he had ever thought of it before, or whether it only arose on the moment, I cannot say: the latter is most probable; but I well remember the occasion. We were walking in the early summer through a village where there was a good vicarage house, with a nice garden, and the front wall of the vicarage was covered with corchorus in full flower, a plant less common then than it has since become. He stood some time admiring the vicarage wall. The extreme quietness of the scene, the pleasant pathway through the village churchyard, and the brightness of the summer morning, apparently concurred to produce the impression under which he suddenly said to me, ‘I feel strongly inclined to enter the church.’ ‘What,’ I said, ‘to become a clergyman, with your ideas of the faith?’ ‘Assent to the supernatural part of it,’ he said, ’is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines of Christianity I am a more decided disciple than many of its more ostentatious professors. And consider for a moment how much good a good clergyman may do. In his teaching as a scholar and a moralist; in his example as a gentleman and a man of regular life; in the consolation of his personal intercourse and of his charity among the poor, to whom he may often prove a most beneficent friend when they have no other to comfort them. It is an admirable institution that admits the possibility of diffusing such men over the surface of the land. And am I to deprive myself of the advantages of this admirable institution because there are certain technicalities to which I cannot give my adhesion, but which I need not bring prominently forward?’ I told him I thought he would find more restraint in the office than would suit his aspirations. He walked on some time thoughtfully, then started another subject, and never returned to that of entering the church.