Lavender laughed that little matter off as a joke, but it was no joke to Sheila. She would try to like that old woman—yes: her duty to her husband demanded that she should. But there are some things that a wife—especially a girl who has been newly made a wife—will never forget; which, on the contrary, she will remember with burning cheeks and anger and indignation.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
SOME PASSAGES IN SHELLEY'S EARLY HISTORY.
Shelley's connection with Stockdale is one of the curiosities of literary history. It is as if Miranda had attached herself to the fortunes of Caliban. An inexplicable thing, except upon the assumption of the young poet's inexperience of men and his ignorance of affairs. It is, moreover, a new passage in his life which has hitherto eluded the most sagacious of his biographers. Who was Stockdale, and what was the relationship between these two personages, so opposite in character, intellect and pursuits? Stockdale's name was altogether unknown to honest folks before Shelley gave it currency and introduced the owner of it to polite society—at all events on paper. He owes his notoriety, therefore, entirely to the boy-poet, into whose way the good man was thrown by one of those inexplicable freaks of chance which often bring about such strange results both to subject and object.
John Joseph Stockdale was, like his father, a bookseller, who did a low sort of business in Pall Mall. For some forty years the Stockdales, father and son, were jointly or separately the John Murrays of the London Bohemians. Their house was the resort of novelists, poets, and especially dramatic writers, for twenty years before and twenty years after the close of the eighteenth century, and they were purveyors-general of circulating libraries, tempting the ambition of young authors with rosy promises of success and alluring baits of immortality, if they could only find the base metals in quantum stiff, to pay the cold-blooded paper-merchant and the vulgar type-setter. Many a poetic pigeon did the Stockdales pluck, no doubt, by these expedients. For in those days, as in these present, a young suckling full of innocence and his mother's nourishment deemed it the highest earthly honor to be admitted to the society of Bohemian bulls and fire-breathing poets; and to be further allowed the privilege of paying for dinner and wine, with dramatists and men of the Bohemian kidney as guests, was a distinction for which no amount of pecuniary disbursement could by any possibility be regarded as an equivalent.
It is hardly to be supposed, however, that Shelley—even if it could be shown that he actually joined the mob of Stockdale's wits as hale-fellow-well-met—ever participated in this loyalty to their sovran virtues and superiorities. He was the god, not they; and although he hid his divinity under a mask and knew the value of silence in a court of fools, yet he could not fail to be conscious that small and unimportant as he was held to be among those Titans of imagination and song, yet it would be found upon trial that he alone could bend the mighty bow of Ulysses, and had the right to wear the garland and singing-robes of the poet.
But the prior question remains, how Shelley, of all men then living, came to have any knowledge of such a person as Stockdale—still more, any dealings with him.
And it is remarkable that the answer to this question comes from one and the same source; and that is the private journal of Stockdale himself, who, like the petty Boswells of the serial literature of the present day, cozened, by flattery and other arts best known to that class, a considerable number of scholars and authors into a correspondence with him, and carefully preserving these their private letters until time should have enhanced the value of the autographs, and he could glorify himself in the fame of the writers, deliberately ransacked his old archives for this purpose; and finding a number of the boy Shelley's business-letters to him—curious, to be sure, and interesting enough to a hero-worshiper—he audaciously published them in an unclean magazine called Stockdale's Budget.
Personally, we know nothing of the Budget, but an English bookworm sets it down as "a sort of appendix to the more celebrated Memoirs of Harriet Wilson", which Stockdale had himself published a few years before. This was so boldly licentious, and so reckless in its attacks upon the private characters of the Upper Ten, that the publisher was prosecuted with merciless persistency until his business gave up the ghost. To convince the public that he was a martyr he started the Budget in 1827, and still appears to have kept his poets and dramatic satellites around him, and to have been a man of some repute for good-nature to young authors. Indeed, it is but fair to say that from the first moment of Shelley's introduction to him until we find him betraying Shelley's confidence in him to his father, to save him, if possible, from the publication of an atheistic theorem, he seems to have been fascinated by the young poet's character, and has testified under his own name that he had the highest confidence in his integrity, although it seems he lost a round sum by him in the end; and he adds that, in his belief, Shelley would "vegetate rather than live, in order to pay any honest debt."