Footnotes:
[1] The authorities differ respecting these preliminary measures; some saying that she deliberately walked into the low water, whilst others represent that she walked on the Bridge in the rain, in order that her dress should be soaked and weighted with water, before she took the leap to death. Godwin’s account in the Memoirs is:—‘The rain suggested to her the idea of walking up and down on the Bridge till her clothes were thoroughly drenched and heavy with the wet, which she did for half an hour, without meeting a human being. She then leaped from the top of the Bridge, but still seemed to find a difficulty in sinking, which she endeavoured to counteract by pressing her clothes closely round her;’—an account for which the writer may be assumed to have had Mary Wollstonecraft’s authority.
[2] What construction Jerdan put upon the words of wrath is known from a clause of the scorching passage of the famous article of the Literary Gazette, in which he set forth the worst of the evil capabilities to be looked for in Shelley’s pupils:—‘A disciple following his tenets would not hesitate to debauch, or, after debauching, to abandon, any woman; to such it would be matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a family, whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer; to such it would be sport to tell a deserted wife to obtain with her pretty face support by prostitution; and when the unhappy maniac sought refuge in self-destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of associate strumpets.’—Vide Literary Gazette, 19th May, 1821.
[3] It should be borne in mind that had he persevered in his design of following medicine, the expelled Oxonian could not have gained an M.D. degree in England. The member of a medical family, with cousins following medicine under different qualifications, Shelley was of course aware that, though he might take the diplomas of the College of Surgeons and the Apothecaries’ Hall, he could not as a mere London medical student become ‘a physician.’
[4] In his autobiography it is admitted by Hunt, that, before his liberation from prison, on 3rd February, 1815, his personal acquaintance with Shelley was very slight. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘my imprisonment that brought me acquainted with my friend of friends, Shelley. I had seen little of him before; but he wrote to me, making me a princely offer, which at that time I stood in no need of.’ In another place the autobiographer says, ‘I first saw Shelley during the earlier period of the Examiner, before his indictment on account of the Regent, but it was only for a few short visits, which did not produce intimacy.’ Hunt does not seem to have ever visited Shelley at Bishopgate, or, in any fair sense of the term, to have known Shelley whilst the latter lived there. In the summer of 1816, Shelley was in Switzerland. On his return from Switzerland, he went to Bath. There was no intercourse (to be called friendship) between him and Hunt, till the close of 1816. In April, 1818, Shelley went to Italy, where in the last week of his existence he again came face to face with Hunt. Like Trelawny, Hunt made the most of his personal intercourse with Shelley. Readers should bear in mind that the period of the personal intercourse of the two poets, i.e. the period during which they saw much of one another, speaking together face to face, began at the close of 1816, and ended in April, 1818,—a period less than eighteen months. Till he saw his way to suck money out of the youngster’s pocket, Hunt never troubled himself about Shelley. In the short year and half of their personal association, the editor of the Examiner found Shelley a profitable acquaintance.
[5] Mr. Rossetti makes Shelley arrive at Naples on 1st December, 1818, and I am far from saying that the careful writer is wrong on the immaterial point. It is enough to know for certain that the poet made only a short stay (at the most, a sojourn of less than three weeks) at Rome on the occasion of his journey from Northern to Southern Italy.