(9) In 1810 and 1811, during his residence at Oxford, Shelley was a wholesale fabricator of mendacious letters; the letters being written under false pretences of motive and mental temper to the persons whom he lured, or tried to lure, into religious controversy, some of the epistles being signed with a false name, and dated from a false address, and one of them at least representing the writer of it to be a young woman troubled with religious doubts. For the countless falsehoods of these letters, written thus deceptively for purposes of concealment and security, the force and liveliness of the writer’s imagination cannot be held accountable. It is not to be supposed that whilst writing to the Bishop of the Church of England in a feminine style and under a feminine signature, Shelley imagined he was a woman.
(10) In 1811, whilst still at Oxford, Shelley produced The Necessity of Atheism, with a preface made up of untruths, for which the force of his imagination cannot be held in any degree accountable.
(11) In 1811, after leaving Oxford, Shelley, from complaisance or in mere levity, took the sacrament with Miss Westbrook when he deemed Christianity a delusion, regarded the sacred rite as a piece of mummery, and was (according to his statement to Southey at Keswick) busying himself in making proselytes to Atheism in the Clapham boarding-school, where Harriett Westbrook was a pupil. Participation in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper being an act of solemn declaration that the participator is a believer in Christianity and in communion with the Church, I think few readers will question that in thus taking the sacrament Shelley was guilty of an act of untruth.
(12) In October, 1811, he wrote words for the purpose of inducing people to imagine that, instead of having left Harriett with Hogg at York, he had taken her with him to London and Sussex.
(13) In a letter dated to Mr. Medwin, the Elder, on 26th November, 1811, there is evidence, under Shelley’s own hand, that shortly before that date, he wrote to his mother and sisters respecting some ‘affair’ which, on coming to the ears of some of his old neighbours at Horsham, was regarded by them as no true affair, but a thing of his invention.
(14) During his stay at Keswick (1811-12), Shelley (speaking, as I conceive, under delusion) told Southey that Hogg had attempted to seduce Harriett during the journey back from Scotland to York. That, in thus speaking of his familiar friend to a slight acquaintance, he spoke under misconception, we have Shelley’s assurance in eloquent words and still more impressive acts. Should additional evidence ever show that Hogg really made the attempt, and that Shelley had good grounds for what he said and wrote on that matter to his friend’s infamy, he must be adjudged to have written and acted deceitfully or under egregious misconception, in respect to what he did and wrote in later times for Hogg’s exculpation.
(15) In 1812 Shelley wrote William Godwin a series of letters teeming with inaccuracies, some of which were slanderous statements respecting his father.
(16) In the same year, towards the close of his stay at Greta Bank, Shelley imagined himself to have been assaulted by a robber under the very eaves of Mr. Calvert’s house; an hallucination productive of statements contrary to fact.
(17) In the same year (1812), whilst at Tanyrallt, Shelley undertook to write a long and ‘wheedling letter’ to the Duke of Norfolk in order to induce His Grace to take measures for his pecuniary advantage. Neither laudanum nor imaginativeness can be held accountable for this declaration of a resolve to write a deceptive letter.
(18) The year 1813 was the year of the Tanyrallt Mystery; an affair fruitful of inaccuracies of statement, some of which must be ascribed to untruthfulness on Shelley’s part, though some of them may have been altogether due to delusion.