(19) In the same year (1813), he produced Queen Mab with a false imprint.
(20) In the same year (1813), he for several weeks laboured under the notion that he was suffering from leprosy; a delusion conclusively evidential of transient mental derangement.
(21) In 1814 he produced a further demonstration of The Necessity of Atheism, under the deceptive title of A Refutation of Deism, and with a Preface made up of untruths. It has been questioned whether this work was ever published in the commercial sense of the term. It is, however, certain that the work was written for circulation, and that it was legally published.
(22) In the same year (1814) he wooed and won Mary Godwin under cover of deceitful practices, on one occasion allaying William Godwin’s suspicions and apprehensions with an explanation, which, as it appeared a sufficient explanation to the anxious father, must have been disingenuous and deceitful. Moreover, we have Mary Godwin Shelley’s evidence that in wooing her he told her the wild fiction about his father’s purpose to shut him up in a lunatic asylum, and of his preservation from such imprisonment through Dr. Lind’s timely intervention.
(23) In or about 1815 Shelley told Peacock that his sentence of expulsion from Oxford had been preceded by his formal arraignment before a numerous assembly on a charge of producing an atheistical work, and that he had defended himself with a formal oration delivered to this numerous assembly. At the same time he showed Peacock a report of this oration in what had the appearance of being a newspaper.
(24) In or about the same year (1815) Shelley, in conversation with Peacock, gave the inaccurate account of the offence that resulted in his dismissal from Eton, saying that he was sent from the school for pinning a boy’s hand to a table with a penknife.
(25) In the year (1816), shortly before he started from England for Switzerland, with Claire and Mary Godwin, he poured upon Peacock a stream of misstatements (referable either to falsehood, delusion, or both) respecting Mr. (Tremadoc) Williams’s alleged visit to Bishopgate and sojourn in London, and the purpose of his father and uncle to lock him up in a lunatic asylum, alleging that his object in going abroad was to get beyond the reach of his father and uncle, who were set on depriving him of his liberty.
(26) In 1817 Shelley instructed the Olliers to tell the complicated untruth under cover of which they could withdraw from the position of principal publishers of Laon and Cythna, and put Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones in their place.
(27) In 1818, on coming to Venice, Shelley, for a sufficient object, told Byron that Mrs. Shelley was staying at Padua, though he was at the time well aware she was at Bagni di Lucca with her children.
(28) In the winter of 1818-19 (if reliance may be placed on his statements made to Byron and Medwin at Pisa in 1821-2) he imagined himself the recipient of singular attentions from a married lady of beauty, wealth, and noble connections, who, after proffering him her heart in 1816, and following him in that year from England to Switzerland, followed him, in 1818, from England to Naples, at which place, according to his story, she expired in the winter of 1818-19, under his sympathetic observation.