Shelley was proceeding home with rapid strides, bearing the skirts of his new coat on his left arm, to procure his pistols that he might wreak his vengeance upon the offending dog. I disliked the race, but I did not desire to take an ignoble revenge upon the miserable individual.
“Let us try to fancy, Shelley,” I said to him, as he was posting away in indignant silence, “that we have been at Oxford, and have come back again, and that you have just laid the beast low—and what then?”
He was silent for some time, but I soon perceived, from the relaxation of his pace, that his anger had relaxed also.
At last he stopped short, and taking the skirts from his arm, spread them upon the hedge, stood gazing at them with a mournful aspect, sighed deeply and, after a few moments, continued his march.
“Would it not be better to take the skirts with us?” I inquired.
“No,” he answered despondingly; “let them remain as a spectacle for men and gods!”
We returned to Oxford, and made our way by back streets to our college. As we entered the gates the officious scout remarked with astonishment Shelley’s strange spencer, and asked for the skirts, that he might instantly carry the wreck to the tailor. Shelley answered, with his peculiarly pensive air, “They are upon the hedge.”
The scout looked up at the clock, at Shelley and through the gate into the street, as it were at the same moment and with one eager glance, and would have run blindly in quest of them, but I drew the skirts from my pocket and unfolded them, and he followed us to Shelley’s rooms.
We were sitting there in the evening at tea, when the tailor, who had praised the coat so warmly in the morning, brought it back as fresh as ever, and apparently uninjured. It had been fine-drawn. He showed how skilfully the wound had been healed, and he commended at some length the artist who had effected the cure. Shelley was astonished and delighted. Had the tailor consumed the new blue coat in one of his crucibles, and suddenly raised it, by magical incantation, a fresh and purple Phœnix from the ashes, his admiration could hardly have been more vivid. It might be, in this instance, that his joy at the unexpected restoration of a coat, for which, although he was utterly indifferent to dress, he had, through some unaccountable caprice, conceived a fondness, gave force to his sympathy with art; but I have remarked in innumerable cases, where no personal motive could exist, that he was animated by all the ardour of a maker in witnessing the display of the creative energies.
Nor was the young poet less interested by imitation, especially the imitation of action, than by the creative arts. Our theatrical representations have long been degraded by a most pernicious monopoly, by vast abuses and enormous corruptions, and by the prevalence of bad taste. Far from feeling a desire to visit the theatres, Shelley would have esteemed it a cruel infliction to have been compelled to witness performances that less fastidious critics have deemed intolerable. He found delight, however, in reading the best of our English dramas, particularly the masterpieces of Shakespeare, and he was never weary of studying the more perfect compositions of the Attic tragedians. The lineaments of individual character may frequently be traced more certainly and more distinctly in trifles than in more important affairs; for in the former the deportment, even of the boldest and more ingenuous, is more entirely emancipated from every restraint. I recollect many minute traits that display the inborn sympathy of a brother practitioner in the mimetic arts. One silly tale, because, in truth, it is the most trivial of all, will best illustrate the conformation of his mind; its childishness, therefore, will be pardoned.