On L[ord] B[yron's] writing a poem to his sister wherein he says, "And when friends e'en paused and love," etc., Rogers, going to some one, said: "I don't know what L[ord] B[yron] means by pausing; I called upon him every day." He did this regularly, telling L[ord] B[yron] all the bad news with a malignant grin. When L[ord] B[yron] wrote "Weep, daughter of a royal line," Rogers came to him one day, and, taking up the Courier, said: "I am sure now you're attacked there; now don't mind them"; and began reading, looking every now and then at L[ord] B[yron] with an anxious searching eye, till he came to "that little poet and disagreeable person, Mr. Samuel—" when he tore the paper, and said: "Now this must be that fellow Croker," and wished L[ord] B[yron] to challenge him. He talked of going to Cumberland with L[ord] B[yron], and, asking him how he meant to travel, L[ord] B[yron] said "With four horses." Rogers went to company, and said: "It is strange to hear a man talking of four horses who seals his letters with a tallow candle."
Shelley is another instance of wealth inducing relations to confine for madness, and was only saved by his physician being honest. He was betrothed from a boy to his cousin, for age; another came who had as much as he would have, and she left him "because he was an atheist." When starving, a friend to whom he had given £2000, though he knew it, would not come near him. Heard Mrs. Shelley repeat Coleridge on Pitt, which persuades me he is a poet.
[Here we see that Shelley must have repeated to Polidori that famous story of his about the attempt of his father to consign him, when he was an Eton student, to a madhouse, and about the zealous and ultimately successful effort of Dr. Lind, the Eton physicist, to save him from that disastrous fate. Next comes the statement that Shelley was betrothed from boyhood to his beautiful cousin Miss Harriet Grove—the marriage to take effect when he should attain his majority; an account which we know to be substantially true. The conduct of Miss Grove—or perhaps we should rather say of her parents as dictating her action—is placed in an unfavourable light; for it is plainly suggested that she abandoned Shelley for another bridegroom on the ground of a more immediate advantage in worldly position—the allegation of Percy's atheism being more a pretext than a genuine motive. The passage about a friend to whom Shelley had given £2000 must (I suppose beyond a doubt) refer to Godwin; but it is evident that Shelley, in speaking to Polidori, a comparative stranger, and this in the presence of Mary, had the delicacy to suppress the name. The charge thus alleged against Godwin is not, I conceive, accurate, although it approximated towards accuracy. I am not clear that Shelley, up to the time when he thus spoke in June 1816, had given Godwin money amounting to quite so large a total as £2000; but at any rate he cannot have done so up to the time when he was himself "starving"—or, in milder terms, when he was in very great and harassing straits for money and daily subsistence. That time was late in 1814, and in the first days of 1815. It is true that, even before this date, he had done something to relieve Godwin; but it was only, I think, in April 1816 that he gave the philosopher a really very considerable sum—£1000 in a lump. I say all this for the sake of biographical truth, and not with a view to vindicating Godwin—whose policy of bleeding Shelley in purse while he cut him in person has in some recent years been denounced with increasing vehemence, and it was indeed wholly indefensible. But human nature—and especially the human nature of an abstract speculator like Godwin—is capable of very odd self-deceptions; and I dare say Godwin thought he was equally and strictly right in both his proceedings—right in getting large sums of money out of Shelley, for a reforming sage ought to be subsidized by his neophytes—and right in repudiating and abusing Shelley, for the latter had applied Godwin's own anti-matrimonial theories to that one instance of practice which the philosopher did not at all relish.—To proceed to another point. The lines of Coleridge on Pitt which Polidori heard recited by Mrs. Shelley are to be sought for in his early poem entitled Fire, Famine, and Slaughter. In that poem (need I say it?) those three Infernal Deities are represented as meeting in "a desolated tract in La Vendée"; and on mutual enquiry they learn that one and the same person has sent them thither all three.
"Letters four do form his name"—
the name Pitt. Famine and Slaughter finally agree that the multitude, exasperated by their sufferings, shall turn upon Pitt and rend him—
"They shall tear him limb from limb!"
Fire, who has just come from doing Pitt's errands in Ireland, thinks this ungrateful: she concludes the poem with the memorable words—
"Ninety months he, by my troth,
Hath richly catered for you both:
And in an hour would you repay