[3] The exact degree of blame due to Shelley is very difficult to determine. He had nothing to do with the suicide, though the separation was the first in a train of circumstances that led to it. It seems clear that Harriett did not desire the separation, and clear also that she did nothing to assert her rights. Shelley ought not to have left her, but he had not the patience to accept as permanent the consequences of a mistaken marriage.
[4] Lewes’s “Life of Goethe.”
[5] Only a poet can write of his private sorrows. In prose one cannot sing,—
“A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.”
[6] Schuyler’s “Peter the Great.”
[7] That valiant enemy of false pretensions, Mr. Punch, has often done good service in throwing ridicule on unreal distinctions. In “Punch’s Almanack” for 1882 I find the following exquisite conversation beneath one of George Du Maurier’s inimitable drawings:
Grigsby. Do you know the Joneses?
Mrs. Brown. No, we—er—don’t care to know Business people, as a rule, although my husband’s in business; but then he’s in the Coffee business,—and they’re all Gentlemen in the Coffee business, you know!
Grigsby (who always suits himself to his company). Really, now! Why, that’s more than can be said of the Army, the Navy, the Church, the Bar, or even the House of Lords! I don’t wonder at your being rather exclusive!
[8] I am often amused by the indignant feelings of English journalists on this matter. Some French newspaper calls an Englishman a lord when he is not a lord, and our journalists are amazed at the incorrigible ignorance of the French. If Englishmen cared as little about titles they would be equally ignorant, and two or three other things are to be said in defence of the French journalist that English critics never take into account. They suppose that because Gladstone is commonly called Mr. a Frenchman ought to know that he cannot be a lord. That does not follow. In France a man may be called Monsieur and be a baron at the same time. A Frenchman may answer, “If Gladstone is not a lord, why do you call him one? English almanacs not only say that Gladstone is a lord, but that he is the very First Lord of the Treasury. Again, why am I not to speak of Sir Chamberlain? I have seen a printed letter to him beginning with ‘Sir,’ which is plain evidence that your ‘Sir’ is the equivalent of our Monsieur.” A Frenchman is surely not to be severely blamed if he is not aware that the First Lord of the Treasury is not a lord at all, and that a man who is called a “Sir” inside every letter addressed to him has no right to that title on the envelope.