Mr. Hookham having sent Shelley 20l. as a loan, instead of returning the subscribed money, the poet argues from the bookseller’s action and epistle, that the latter has ‘applied the 20l.’ (sent for that purpose) ‘to the benefit of the Hunts.’
Within a few hours of writing the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham, Shelley wrote to Mr. Williams, begging for 25l. he needed for the payment of ‘little debts;’ observing in the same note, ‘I am surprised that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of. Surely enquiries have not been sufficiently general, or particular?’
Whilst Mrs. Shelley’s words, ‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day, from being up all night,’ indicate that the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham was written on the morrow of the imaginary attacks at Tanyrallt, the manner in which Shelley here refers to measures for discovering the assassin shows that the note to Mr. Williams must have been written at a time when ‘the investigations’ were in an early stage of their progress to a damnatory conclusion. Had he known of the discovery of the bullet-mark in the wainscot, Shelley could scarcely have suggested that the investigations of the case had not been sufficiently ‘particular.’ A few hours later, when he heard how particular they had been, his slight face must by turns have flushed with annoyance and then whitened with shame.
The evidence is abundant that Shelley was touched acutely by the shame of his position, during the last days of his sojourn in Carnarvonshire. There is a pathetic note of sincerity in one passage of the insincere letter he wrote from Bangor Ferry to the bookseller of Old Bond Street;—the passage in which he declared he was less delighted by the arrival of Mr. Hookham’s remittance, because it rescued him from ‘a situation of peculiar perplexity,’ than because it assured him he still retained the confidence of at least one friend, whose generous conduct ‘made amends to’ his ‘feelings, wounded by the suspicion, coldness, and villany of the world.’ It was thus that the young man, with a singular aptitude for thinking himself persecuted by any one who presumed to call him to order, spoke of his Carnarvonshire neighbours, because they were offended by his attempt to trifle with their credulity. Those of them who kept out of his way, or otherwise showed a disinclination to speak to him of his latest escapade, were frigid, unfeeling, hard-hearted. Those, who hinted their inability to see how a bullet issuing from a pistol pointed due south could take a course due north, were meanly suspicious. Those, who frankly declared their disbelief of the assassination-story, were sheer villains. Though the discovery of the bullet-mark in a place it could not have reached, after passing from the window through his night-dress, must have convinced him (if he needed to be convinced) that the ball had issued from his own pistol, he persisted in declaring the ball had proceeded from the weapon of his imaginary assailant. ‘The ball,’ he wrote from Bangor Ferry, ‘of the assassain’s pistols (he fired at me twice), penetrated my night-gown and pierced the wainscot;’—omitting to add, for his correspondent’s information, that the ball struck the wainscot in a way proving the bullet to have issued from his own pistol. As might be expected of the young man, who three years earlier had declared his intention to have recourse to deception because it would answer his purpose, and just three months earlier had declared his intention to write a wheedling letter to the Duke of Norfolk because he might get some money by doing so, Shelley stuck to his erroneous statements when he must have known them to be misstatements, however much he may have been under the influence of pure hallucination, when he first uttered them. His stubborn adherence to the misstatements, in the letter to Mr. Hookham, is rendered the more offensive by the Pecksniffian style in which he, in the same letter, proclaims his delight in contemplating truth and virtue. ‘If,’ he remarks, ‘the discovery of truth be a pleasure of singular purity, how far surpassing is the discovery of virtue!’ In the same vein he observes in the postscript,—‘Though overwhelmed with our distresses, we are by no means indifferent to those of liberty and virtue!!!’
(7.)—Dublin and Killarney.
Preserving amidst his varied distresses this honourable concern for the interests of liberty and virtue, Shelley journeyed from Bangor to Holyhead, and after a tedious and rough sea-passage (of forty hours duration) arrived on Tuesday, 9th March, 1813, at Dublin, where he passed several days at 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, the residence of Mr. John Lawless.
Ignorant of his friend’s intimacy with the Irishman of letters, who in 1813 was at work on the Compendium of the History of Ireland, Hogg may well have been at a loss how to account for Shelley’s second visit to the people, whose wrongs he had failed to redress with two pamphlets and a broadside. But with their imperfect knowledge of the poet’s relations with honest Jack Lawless, the readers of this page can readily discover motives for the second visit to the land of greenness and thraldom. There is no positive evidence that Shelley procured money either from Mr. Medwin or anyone else for the publication of a voluminous History of Ireland. But a Compendium (though scarcely a voluminous one) of Irish History was produced by honest Jack Lawless in 1814; and twenty-eight years later, Frederick William Conway (who was editor of the Dublin Weekly Messenger in 1812-13, with good opportunities for observing the nature of honest Jack’s intercourse with the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England), referred to Shelley in the Dublin Evening Post (November 17th, 1842), as having been ‘made the pecuniary dupe of a person not less sincere in his politics, but in money matters less honest,’—words that unquestionably referred to honest Jack Lawless’s pecuniary dealings with the youthful poet. Other evidence has already been given that Lawless’s friendly relations with Shelley were attended with pecuniary arrangements. Harum-scarum youngster though he was, Shelley would scarcely have given his Lynton landlady the draft on ‘Lord Cloncurry’s brother,’ without any grounds for thinking that Jack Lawless was under an obligation to honour the writing. One would like to know more of honest Jack’s literary and financial relations with the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of England; but enough is known to justify readers in assuming that, besides going to Ireland in March, 1813, to receive the solace of his friend’s sympathy with his distress, Shelley went to 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, Dublin, to see how his ‘literary friend’ was getting on with ‘the work,’ that on its publication could not fail to ‘produce great profits.’
It is in the reader’s memory that Hogg promised to visit the Shelleys in Carnarvonshire, and pass a few days with them at Tanyrallt, in March, 1813,—an arrangement that could not be carried out, when the poet, with his wife and sister-in-law, had left Wales for Ireland. To spare him the annoyance (similar to the annoyance Godwin endured half-a-year earlier) of journeying to Tanyrallt, only to find they had departed, Mrs. Shelley had given Hogg timely information of the circumstances which had determined her and her husband to fly to Ireland. As the letter, which afforded him this information, was ‘written from Tanyrallt, a day or two after the catastrophe,’ Hogg was guilty of a curious slip when (writing from memory of the lost epistle) he declared that, to the best of his recollection, apart from the different date, it was ‘precisely similar, word for word,’ indeed, to the letter Harriett wrote to Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street, from Dublin on the 12th (Lady Shelley says 11th) of March, giving the details of the alleged attacks. As Harriett’s later letter to Mr. Hookham began with the words, ‘My Dear Sir, We arrived here last Tuesday, after a most tedious passage, during the whole of which time we were dreadfully ill,’ it cannot have corresponded so precisely, as Hogg represents, with her earlier letter from Tanyrallt. Had the Shelleyan enthusiasts noticed this droll slip, they would have discovered in it yet another proof of Hogg’s incomparable villany, instead of attributing the excessive statement to the writer’s honest purpose of saying emphatically that, in so far as it related to the alleged attempts at assassination, the later epistle to Mr. Hookham seemed like a copy of the earlier letter to him. It appeared also that Harriett (not Shelley) wrote similar accounts of the assassination-incidents either from Tanyrallt or Ireland, to other persons, besides Mr. Hookham and Hogg. ‘I have been informed,’ says the biographer, ‘that she also sent to other persons a narrative of the nightly fears in the same terms, writing descriptive circulars, and dispatching them in different directions.’ Why were these letters of intelligence written by Harriett instead of her husband, who certainly was the natural and fittest person to put on record the matters, so closely touching his honour? Though she made it to one of her correspondents, readers may smile at the statement, that Harriett wrote the letters, in order to spare her husband the pain of recalling again and again the horrors of that awful night.
Having made arrangements for the long journey to Carnarvonshire, Hogg determined to make the longer trip to Dublin, in accordance with his friends’ entreaties that he would join them at 35 Cuffe Street. The result of the determination was, that some few days later he experienced in the Irish metropolis just such a disappointment as William Godwin had experienced at Lynton. On coming to Cuffe Street, after an unusually rough and trying journey, he learnt that the Shelleys, with Miss Westbrook, had gone off to Killarney. Of course he lost no time in asking the fugitives, through the post, why they had treated him so unhandsomely, and whilst awaiting their reply amused himself as he best could in exploring Dublin, and studying the manners and humours of the people with whom he became acquainted, chiefly through Jack Lawless’s friendly offices. For a moment readers of this page may well imagine, that Shelley had relapsed into his former hallucination respecting Hogg’s intentions towards Harriett, and had carried her off to Killarney in order to keep her out of his way. But Shelley’s action, on hearing of his friend’s arrival in Dublin, disposes of the suspicion. There had been misunderstanding on the part of the Shelleys, attended with uncertainty whether Hogg would cross the sea. A sudden whim for visiting Killarney was enough to convert this uncertainty respecting his purpose into a confidence that he would not come to them. So off they went to Killarney, in the very worst season for viewing the Lakes, a few days before Hogg appeared at Jack Lawless’s door.
Mr. Lawless advised Hogg to run to Killarney and join his friends there; but Hogg did not think it advisable to spend money in running south after the trio who might have already started for the Giant’s Causeway. After spending nearly all the time and money at his disposal, the young Templar returned to London without coming to the presence of the people he had travelled so far to see; but not without gathering materials for a singularly vivid and humorous account of life and manners in Dublin seventy years since. Bidding his Irish acquaintances adieu, Hogg started on his homeward journey some four-and-twenty hours before Shelley and Harriett arrived at the Cork Hotel, Dublin, after covering two hundred and forty English miles in less than forty-eight hours. Intelligence of Hogg’s appearance in Dublin having come to them at noon on Monday, 29th March, 1813, Shelley and his wife (now within three calendar months of her accouchement), without Miss Westbrook, started for the capital, posting to Cork, where they caught the mail that deposited them in Dublin at 3 p.m. of Wednesday, 31st March. Though Lady Shelley says they did not return to London till May, 1813, it is certain that Shelley and Harriett were at 23 Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the second week of April.