With these grounds for conceiving that Shelley was disposed to live beyond his means, it was creditable in Godwin that, at the risk of offending the young gentleman, he warned him to avoid the hurtful inconveniences of financial extravagance. In giving the advice, that was so needful, Godwin used no needlessly irritating language. Doubtless Godwin’s marital sensitiveness would have been gratified, had Shelley decided to act on Mrs. Godwin’s suggestion. Perhaps he was pained by Shelley’s off-hand way of declining to act upon the lady’s advice. But no passage of the epistle countenances the suggestion that the writer would have written otherwise, had he not been piqued by what he thought disrespectful to his wife’s judgment. Neither impertinent in substance nor pettish in tone, the letter was in every respect a suitable epistle for Godwin to write to the young man, who, with every appearance of sincerity, had entreated the philosopher to enlighten his intellect and form his character. It is also to Godwin’s honour that, whilst writing in a quasi-parental capacity to his singular correspondent, he reminded the young man that one of his first objects should be the recovery of his father’s favour and affection.
Leaving the neighbourhood of Rhayader in the middle of June, 1812, the Shelleys journeyed to Tintern and Chepstow, and after looking at Mr. Eton’s cottage between Tintern Abbey and Piercefield, proceeded to Lynmouth, North Devon. During their sojourn of nine weeks and three days in this locality, the trio lodged in a house, that standing in Lynton, on the hill above the fishing-village, was within a few hundred yards of the Valley of Bocks. In a letter, dated from ‘Lynmouth, Valley of Stones, Sept. 19th, 1812,’ Godwin wrote to his wife in London: ‘Since writing the above, I have been to the house where Shelley lodged, and I bring good news. I saw the woman of the house, and I was delighted with her. She is a good creature, and quite loved the Shelleys. They lived here nine weeks and three days;’—words that, giving us the length of the poet’s sojourn in the loveliest part of North Devon, point to the day on which the trio came to the charming spot, either by water from the Mouth of the Severn, or by land along the ridge of the Somerset coast. Speaking possibly from documentary evidence (though her ‘authentic sources’ of information are too often sources of error) Lady Shelley says, that the poet, with his attendant womankind, left Lynmouth on 31st August, 1812. If Lady Shelley is right on this point (and even Lady Shelley is right sometimes), Godwin was wrong by two days in writing on the 19th of September, ‘My Dear Love. The Shelleys are gone! Have been gone these three weeks.’ The philosopher may of course have thrown nineteen days into the round number of weeks; but I am slow to think this of the narrator who, with his customary exactness in small matters, is careful to record the precise number of days, by which Shelley’s stay in the lodgings, exceeded nine weeks.
When the trio had settled down in the lodging-house (situated in Lynton, though Shelley dated his letters from Lynmouth, which he spelt in accordance with local pronunciation), correspondence was renewed between Godwin and his young friend. Dating from North Devon on 5th July, 1812, before the philosopher’s expostulatory letter had come to his hands, Shelley wrote to the sage of Skinner Street:—
‘We were all so much prepossessed in favour of Mr. Eton’s house that nothing but the invincible objection of scarcity of room would have induced us, after seeing it, to resign the predetermination we had formed of taking it.... The expenses incurred by the failure of our attempt, in settling at Nantgwillt, have rendered it necessary for us to settle for a time in some cheap residence, in order to recover our pecuniary independence. I still hope that you and your estimable family will, before much time has elapsed, become inmates of our house.... As soon as we recover our financial liberty, we mean to come to London.’
Two days later (7th July, 1812), when the expostulatory letter (forwarded from Chepstow) had been some twenty-four hours in his hands, Shelley again refers to the considerations which determined him to decline Mr. Eton’s house near Tintern Abbey, and ‘to seek an inexpensive retirement,’ in another part of the country. ‘It is a singular coincidence,’ he remarks, in the second of his letters from Lynmouth, to Godwin, ‘that in my last letter I entered into details respecting my mode of life, and unfolded to you the reasons by which I was induced, on being disappointed in Mr. Eton’s house, to seek an inexpensive retirement;’—words that, even in the absence of other evidence to the point, should have preserved Hogg from putting Mr. Eton’s cottage in Lynmouth. In the same epistle Shelley says, ‘My letter, dated on the 5th,’ (i.e. the day before the day on which he received the expostulatory letter) ‘will prove to you that it is not to live in splendour, which I hate,—not to accumulate indulgences, which I despise, that my present conduct was adopted.’ From this letter of the 7th July, it is obvious that Shelley did not regard Godwin as having overstept the privileges of his position, in expostulating with him on his pecuniary imprudence in the undated letter, which reached him only on the 6th, when his letter of the 5th was well on its way to Skinner Street. ‘I feel my heart,’ Shelley says on the 7th July, in reference to his previous letter of the 5th instant, ‘throb exultingly when, as I read the misgivings in your mind concerning my rectitude, I reflect that I have to a certain degree refuted them by anticipation.’ It never occurred to Shelley to take offence at the freedom of Godwin’s expostulatory letter. It was enough for him, on the 7th of July, to exult in knowing that he had on the 5th answered by anticipation the principal matters of the epistle, before opening it on the 6th. The undated expostulatory letter, which thus travelled from London to Lynmouth, viâ Chepstow, and came to Shelley’s hands at Lynmouth on the 6th July, cannot have left London later than the 2nd instant. It is more probable that Godwin wrote the epistle on one of the concluding days of June, than on the 1st or 2nd of July. Yet Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy and other gentlemen, claiming as Shelleyan specialists a peculiar right to dogmatize on Shelleyan questions, insist that this particular epistle, which cannot have been posted later than the 2nd of July, would never have been written by Godwin, had not his vanity been acutely piqued by the passage of the letter, dated to him by Shelley on the 5th of July, in which he spoke with extravagant eulogy of the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress, as a Deist and Republican, who openly instructed her little pupils in her religious and political views, and seemed to have formed her mind by the precepts of Political Justice, before it was her good fortune to peruse the pages of that immortal work.
Shelley was urgent in the same letter that Fanny Imlay, alias Wollstonecraft, alias Godwin, might be allowed to journey from London to Devonshire in Miss Hitchener’s company, and stay with him and Harriett at Lynton till the autumn, when they would bring her back to Skinner Street. As Godwin had not educated the young lady, or any of the girls of his curiously composed family, in religious Free Thought, it is not surprising that Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter was not allowed to travel from London to Lynmouth in the company of the Deistical schoolmistress, who joined the trio in North Devon some time about the middle of July. Though there is no conclusive evidence to the point, it has been no less reasonably than generally assumed, that this exemplary young schoolmistress brought with her to the Lynton cottage the large box of inflammatory literature, that had been opened at Holyhead, under circumstances and with consequences already set forth. Anyhow, it is certain that soon after her arrival at Lynton, Shelley had in his keeping at Lynton many copies of the printed compositions that were found in the big box by the Holyhead officials.
For some days Shelley may be presumed to have greatly enjoyed the society of the incomparable Portia (in Percy’s little circle the Shakespearian spelling of the name seems to have been preferred to Porcia) who had at length broken away from Hurstpierpoint, and joined the little circle in which he could now be hopeful of finding happiness for ever. Readers may be left to imagine how the elated Percy escorted his dear Portia to the Valley of Rocks, and other especially picturesque scenes of the delightful region; how he discoursed with her on human perfectibility and other lofty themes in language very much beyond Harriett’s comprehension; and how Portia hung on his words with philosophic acquiescence, that was something too adorative and manifestly acceptable to her husband for Mrs. Shelley to be altogether pleased by it, though she did her very best to think it all right and reasonable, and to regard Percy’s incomparable female worshiper as a superlatively clever and good and charming woman. Readers may also be left to imagine how Miss Westbrook scrutinized her dearest Portia, studied her voice and manner, watched her movements, and took note of her philosophic utterances, whilst, even from the first day of their personal intercourse, she laid her plans for ejecting the dark-eyed and foreign-looking intruder from the little circle, which she entered for the gratification of only one of the three persons, who had joined in begging her to come to them. In those days of his unutterable felicity, far was Shelley from imagining how cordially he would, in a few months, hate the young woman, who had come all the way from Sussex to make him happy for ever. Miss Westbrook, however, would have been less cheerful and complaisant to Portia in the earlier weeks of their association, had she not been reasonably hopeful in July, that before the end of November Percy would have seen quite enough of his incomparable Miss Hitchener.
Memorable in the story of Shelley’s life, as the place where he welcomed Portia to his domestic circle, Lynton is also memorable as the place where he busied himself with a literary enterprise, not unworthy of the young gentleman who had failed to regenerate Ireland with two pamphlets and a revolutionary broadside, and to demolish Christianity with a little syllabus. He had not been many days in North Devon before it occurred to the youthful enthusiast, that he could employ his leisure serviceably by sowing the seeds of revolutionary sentiment in Lynmouth and Barnstaple, and the several villages lying between the fishing-village whence he dated his letters, and the tranquil little borough whose inhabitants are pleased to style it ‘the metropolis of North Devon.’
For some weeks he had been contemplating with disgustful abhorrence the circumstances, under which a man named Eaton had been tried and punished by Lord Ellenborough for printing and publishing the Third Part of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason. This daring violator of law, with which as a printer and publisher he was quite familiar, had been indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in the ordinary way to undergo the severe punishment, to which he had rendered himself liable. Lord Ellenborough’s connexion with the affair was, that it devolved on him, as Lord Chief Justice, to try the prisoner in the ordinary way of his official duty, and after the culprit’s conviction to pass sentence upon him. Doubtless the Chief Justice was at pains to secure a conviction, because the evidence was conclusive, and the case a serious case; at least, in the opinion of the Chief Justice and the overwhelming majority of educated Englishmen. Doubtless, also, he passed a severe sentence, as he would none the less have been bound to do, even had he secretly questioned the wisdom of the law he was required to administer. There is, of course, room for difference of opinion on the question whether the law, under which this person, Eaton, suffered a severe punishment, was politic, salutary, and therefore humane. But even in these days of general disapproval of laws for the restraint of religious opinion, there can be no question that Lord Ellenborough was bound to administer the law. To Shelley it appeared otherwise. Had the Chief Justice been at less pains to secure a conviction, and passed a somewhat lighter sentence on the culprit, Shelley would perhaps have been less stormily indignant; but he would have been no less certain that the judge had ‘wantonly and unlawfully infringed the rights of humanity’ in merely discharging a function of his office. It was not in Shelley’s power to see that the main question of the case was not, whether Eaton had been guilty of an offence against natural morality; but whether he had been guilty of an offence against the law of the land. Discovering nothing to condemn, but, on the contrary, much to approve, in the publisher’s action, on the score of natural morality, Shelley spoke and thought of Eaton as a wholly guiltless person. It followed by Shelley’s logic that the judge who passed sentence on this guiltless person was a judge to be denounced as a ruthless persecutor of the innocent.
Taking this view of the matter, Shelley, on the eve of his withdrawal from Radnorshire (vide his letter of 11th June, 1812, to Godwin) was planning an Address to the public on the wickedness of the prosecution, and the iniquity of the judge.