desolate, and renews his intercourse with Helen, under whose influence his spirit has a second birth of faith, hope, and power to agitate, while his bodily health begins to fail. Although Helen's account is a trifle vague, there seems to me to be no doubt that, during this spiritual revival, Lionel was conducting a second courtship of Helen, the end of which is that she consents to a second union with him of the same unconventional character as the first. No sooner is this matter settled than Lionel is arrested on a charge of uttering a blasphemous and seditious libel of and concerning Almighty God and of and concerning the Holy Scriptures, to translate into the jargon of the contemporary law-courts the flowing poetic generalities of Helen's narrative. "Soon, but too late," Lionel is released from prison, and proceeds in a carriage from London to his home in the Welsh mountains near the coast, with the stamp of death already on him; and there, after a short time, he dies. Helen goes mad, is tended by Lionel's mother, and gives birth to a son. When she recovers her reason she learns for the first time that she is a mother, that Lionel's mother has died during her period of insanity, that Lionel has left great wealth to her by will, and that "the ready lies of law" have bereft her and her child of all. She commences an action to vindicate her legal rights; but what came of it is not recorded. Whatever the result of her lawsuit, Helen acquires a home with her little son on the banks of the Lake of Como, where Rosalind takes up her abode with her early friend. Eventually Rosalind's daughter is restored to her (we hear no more of her other two children), and grows up with Helen's son ; and the young people are at last married, or rather, I should say, consecrated to each other, for we are not told whether in this respect they followed the orthodox traditions of Rosalind or the anti-matrimonial heresy of Lionel and Helen. Of the two friends Rosalind dies prematurely, while Helen lives to be old and dies among her relations. Such in brief is the argument of Rosalind and Helen: I have interpreted the details of the narrative literally and set them down in commonplace terms, in order to emphasize and bring home to the mind the fundamental INTRODUCTION. xi conceptions which Shelley has embodied in so much poetry and overlaid with so much of his characteristic propagandism, that the mind is apt to dwell upon isolated passages rather than lay hold on the fable as a whole. No doubt the poet had good reasons for leading the attention of Peacock to the ideal side of the subject; but probably Peacock's wit was far too keenly edged for the real basis of the work to escape him, although he may perhaps not have discovered what Shelley may perhaps have been most anxious to have undiscovered, namely, that the relations of Rosalind and Helen were a reproduction of the relations of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and an early friend,-a reproduction highly idealized, be it conceded, but still a reproduction. Whatever Peacock may have known or divined on this subject, he can scarcely have failed to recognize his friend's delightful self-portraiture in Lionel; for this is one of the thinnest of the disguises in which Shelley has masked the essential characteristics of his personality, that personality which Peacock had himself been caricaturing as Scythrop, in my opinion rather wildly and remotely, in his charming book Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818. Nor is it likely that the author of Nightmare Abbey, when he read for Shelley the proofsheets of Rosalind and Helen and recognized in Lionel the lineaments of which he had just given the world so different a representation in Scythrop, failed to observe in what particular popular agitation it was that Lionel figured as taking part. For, although the terms are large enough to be applicable to the French Revolution, the local colour is wholly English; and I cannot avoid the conclusion that here we have nothing more or less than an idealized record of the Reform agitation of 1816 and 1817. That very collapse of the democratic aspirations which Shelley witnessed in 1817 finds its appropriate place in Rosalind and Helen; and the final outrage of Lionel's imprisonment on a charge of blasphemy is precisely what Shelley was in constant risk of experiencing himself, and had been ever since his boyhood. I have already referred to the basis of that part of the poem which deals especially with the relations between the two women whose names it bears; and I cannot better enlarge on this point than by quoting a passage from the second volume of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, in which we read at pages 130 and 131 as follows: : "It can hardly be doubted that the incidents and feelings portrayed were to some extent suggested to Shelley by Mary's relations with the friend of her girlhood, in the old Dundee daysIsabel Baxter. Since Mary's flight from her father's house in July, 1814, Isabel had fallen away from friendship. Now she was herself a wife, and rumours, probably false rumours, reached Mary that Isabel was not a happy wife. A visit of Isabel's father, William Baxter, to Marlow, in September, tended to draw the alienated friends once more together; and when it was proposed that Isabel Booth should be Mary's companion on the journey to Italy, she would gladly have acceded to the proposal. But David Booth, her husband, no ordinary man, had heard scandalous and lying tales of Shelley's life; his strong moral sense was shocked by the thought of danger to his wife's character or fame, and sternly yet tenderly he forbade a renewal of the intimacy. So by the Lake of Como there was no meeting, like that represented in the poem, of the sundered friends." Now although we must not for a moment mix up in our minds the stalwart-minded David Booth and the inconceivably despicable wretch whom Shelley has invented for a mate to Rosalind,-although, indeed, we may accept both Rosalind and her husband as ideal personalities created for the purpose of giving expression to Shelley's views on certain matters of personal conduct, still I think it probable that this episode in Mary's history not only "to some extent suggested" certain incidents, but was the predominating influence which drove Shelley to set about his eclogue. If so, the record just quoted is doubly interesting as establishing approximately the time of Shelley's first occupation with Rosalind and Helen. That the poem was begun at Marlow we know from Mrs. Shelley, but not whether early or late in 1817, or whether during the summer which was mainly devoted to Laon and Cythna. It was in September, as we learn from Professor Dowden, that Laon and Cythna was finished-the 23rd of September; INTRODUCTION. xiii and by the 26th Mrs. Shelley was already bewailing the enforced abandonment of the eclogue; so that, if the Baxter incidents of that month were the beginning of the scheme, he must have been working on both poems at once; for he left Marlow for London on the day of Laon and Cythna's completion; and, while in London, he seems to have communicated to Mary an injunction of Abernethy's pupil, William Lawrence, "to cease from the exciting toil of composition, and to seek the benefits of rest and change of air."1 On hearing this, Mary wrote to him, "It is well that your poem [meaning Laon and Cythna] was finished before this edict was issued against the imagination; but my pretty eclogue will suffer from it."2 Whether the composition was resumed at Marlow in defiance of the edict, I do not know; but if not, Shelley had already done enough of it to commit to the press; for, before finally quitting England on the 12th of March 1818, he had confided the poem, or a part of it, to his publisher, Mr. Ollier. This was probably the portion copied by Mary at Marlow as recorded in her diary under date the 19th of February 1818; and the original manuscript most likely went to Italy with them. Perhaps, when the poem was completed in August 1818 at the Baths of Lucca, and Shelley wrote to Peacock as if Mary had just then copied it all out, he had so far altered the original scheme as to make a fresh copy of the whole necessary. I have not failed to deprecate the confusion of David Booth with Rosalind's husband as depicted by Shelley; but we must now look a little more closely at the BaxterBooth circle, as we find it delineated in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley. In the house of William Baxter at Dundee, Mary had, it seems, "spent some of the happiest months of her girlhood," finding "close and dear companions" in his daughters, Christy and Isabel; but, although Baxter was a man of such liberal views as to merit and incur expulsion from the sect of Glassites which his forefathers had helped to establish at Dundee, and although, to boot, he was Godwin's ardent 1 Dowden's Life of Shelley, vol. ii., p. 129. D admirer as well as his friend, Isabel's friendship was withdrawn on Mary's flight with Shelley in 1814. David Booth, to whom Isabel was led to ally herself in a union far more strange though more orthodox, was many years older than her father, "a self-educated man of vigorous intellect, imperious will, and disposition imperiously kind, . . . not five feet high, very dark of hue, with eyes red and watery, and something of the imp, if not the fiend, in his look." It seems he was a brewer and afterwards a schoolmaster, recognized in and about Newburgh as "a person of stupendous learning and mysterious power." He "was in principles a republican," and it was "whispered that he had sold himself to the devil for learning." If it was also whispered, as we have seen, that the young girl who had surrendered her life into the keeping of this elderly curiosity was not a happy wife, the whisperers had certainly some show of reason on their side at all events, when Baxter had found out how unaltered Mary was by her union with Shelley, which by the bye was now duly conventionalized, and how entirely amiable, frugal in personal habits, benevolent, and delicately considerate of others, was the man of genius to whom she had given herself,—when the sometime Glassite of Dundee had told all this to his daughter, her devotion to her brewer was not so enthralling but that she would gladly have "made it up" with Mary and accompanied the Shelleys to Italy. But David Booth said "No." In November 1817, both Booth and Baxter spent an evening with the Shelleys in London; and before the close of the year the sturdy little brewer, whether seeing in the attractions of that charming society an element of danger to his wife's peace and his own, or finding Shelley's views in morals and politics really too wide for even his republican swallow, over-ruled the tolerant impulsiveness of his too facile, not to say frisky, young father-in-law (Baxter was a little over forty), and decreed eternal separation. The verdict was communicated to Shelley by Baxter; and the poet took the close of the episode in such a serious, frank, and dignified spirit that I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce here his letter to Baxter on the subject, |