n truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the
results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in
the colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon
her husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying
himself by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous
relations with a school-girl acquaintance of his.

If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in
those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as
that could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put
the whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive
the janitor.

All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and
the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the
rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he
tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's
desertion of his wife in 1814.

Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was
teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a
degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire
to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his
various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder--
which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him valuable
help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to
correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking of
love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet
Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school-
teacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter-
writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person could have
made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an
angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in
unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his whole
generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison. Besides,
he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an
atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university
with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against
him, his friends were cold. Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him;
and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way fo