advocate universal suffrage, but urged the adoption of annual Parliaments; while, Republican though he was, he pointed out that the abolition of royalty and aristocracy must be gradual. Of less importance is his second Marlow pamphlet, "An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte."

When Shelley left Marlow he must have been sorely missed. He was ever wont to practise as well as preach the Christian ideal. Not only did he give largely of his means to all whom he considered had any public or private claim upon him, and expend much upon the necessitous in his neighbourhood, but he also devoted many hours weekly to visiting the sick and infirm. At all times his heart went out towards the poor. He would even, on occasion, give needy wayfarers articles of his own apparel. One day he returned home shoeless, having met some weary vagrant whose wants he could not alleviate, having no money with him, and to whom he had given his boots, so that the toil of the journey might be mitigated. It was not his habit to carry money about with him, but this was no bar to his ever ready charity. If he met some one whom he desired to help, he would tear out a leaf from a book or a blank page from a letter and write upon it a succinct cash order to be discharged by Mary on presentation. During part of the stay at Marlow there was great distress among the lace-workers who then congregated in the old river-town, and during his visitations to those in dire need Shelley caught a bad attack of ophthalmia.

When Shelley left Marlow for London, preliminary to the journey to Italy, it was with poor and failing health.

133

LIFE OF SHELLEY.

His irregularity in his hours of eating, his inadequate diet, his prolonged fasts, the fire of his mind for ever consuming his excitable body, his swift and ardent emotions, his over-keen susceptibilities, all combined to increase the frailty of his physical health. It was with little belief in ultimate recovery, and with but a dubious hope in any prolonged postponement of the end, that he made the final arrangements for leaving England.

Shortly before the travellers left, their two children were duly christened at St. Giles'-in-the-Fields with the names of William and Clara Everina. On the same occasion Miss Clairmont had little Alba baptized by the name Allegra (Clara Allegra), the father's name being duly entered in the register as Lord Byron. It had been decided that Claire was to be of their party. The Shelleys had not yet lost faith in Byron, and believed that he would act honourably by the mother of his child if the twain could be brought together once more.

On the 11th of March, 1818, Shelley saw the English cliffs fade slowly from his view. He did not surmise that their familiar aspect would never more attract his homeward-yearning gaze, nor did Mary dream that when she should recross these narrow seas it would be in bitter and lonely sorrow.

THE

CHAPTER VI.

HE travellers made direct for Milan, through Southeastern France and Switzerland. It had been Shelley's great wish to settle somewhere on the shores of Como, that loveliest of Italian lakes, but to his chagrin he could nowhere find suitable accommodation. Visits were then paid to Pisa and Leghorn, where the Shelleys became intimately acquainted with the Gisbornes. Mrs. Gisborne had led an eventful and romantic life, was a beautiful and cultivated woman, and in every way one to attract her new friends. The summer was spent at the Bagni di Lucca, high up among the Tuscan forests. Shelley, still far from robust, felt himself unable for the excitement of prolonged poetical composition, though more than one great idea for future development began to germinate in his ever active mind. "Rosalind and Helen," however, was finished, not at all to Shelley's regret, as he valued it little. The weeks passed delightfully. In the early mornings and in the starlit evenings the young people would ride through the alleys of chestnut and beech, but while others drowsed in the heats of the day, Shelley would steal out and disappear to a loved haunt in the forest, where a

mountain torrent precipitated itself into a basin. In one of his letters the poet affords a delightful picture of himself in this lovely spot. Beyond the vast screen of chestnut leaves the sun fiercely flared, but underneath were currents of cool air and perpetual freshness from the spray of rushing water; so translucent was the water in the rocky basin, that the sand and stones at its bottom trembled as in the light of noonday. "My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading 'Herodotus,' until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain. .. The torrent is composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body whilst I clamber up the moist crags with difficulty." Ere the great heat of summer had abated, Shelley, however, had accomplished at least one delightful task. Plato's "Symposium" had been the fountainhead of his inspiration on the subject of Love, and to introduce Mary to this charmed world was his aim. To this affectionate desire we owe his admirable and beautiful, if not very literal, abridged version of the "Symposium."

Before this, Claire Clairmont-against Shelley's advice -had, at Byron's demand, sent Allegra to her father at Venice. As the weeks elapsed, and as strange and painful rumours came to her ears, her anxiety overbore all other considerations, and she determined to set out at once to see Byron. Shelley foresaw probable failure in any case, and certain failure if Claire went alone, so, with his usual unselfishness he agreed to accompany her. From the Bagni di Lucca the two travellers journeyed to

Florence, thence to Padua, and thence by water to Venice, which they reached on the 22nd of August. They were fortunate in at once encountering kind friends in the persons of Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul-General, and his wife, an amiable lady to whose charge Byron had temporarily surrendered Allegra. In the afternoon of the day of their arrival, Shelley went alone to see Byron. The elder poet took his friend's pleadings and remonstrances in good part, though it is clear that Shelley spoke with much restraint, not considering the moment a suitable one for speaking too plainly or requesting overmuch. Allegra's father, then living a life of reckless debauchery, half scornfully agreed that Claire might have her child again if she wished, but dropped a vague hint that if she thus acted she might find herself absolutely and entirely discarded by the father of her child. From this time forth Shelley could no longer esteem or even care for the man whom, with justice, he then and always so much admired as a poet. But he believed that Byron's actions to a great extent belied him; that he lived his dissolute and degraded life out of mere weariness and disgust, and that he had in him all the possibilities of a worthier life.

When the long-anticipated and, doubtless, painful interview was over, Byron took Shelley in his gondola across the lagoons to the wave-washed Lido-the long, narrow, sandy island which acts as a barrier to Venice against the stress of the Adriatic. There the former's horses were in waiting, and, to Shelley's delight, he found himself riding along that magic strand which he afterwards immortalized in song. There was one direct and