opportunity to enjoy it, more or less, during that
brief period. Did he want some more of it? We must fall back upon
history, and then go to conjecturing.

"In the early part of the year 1814, Shelley was a frequent
visitor at Bracknell."

"Frequent" is a cautious word, in this author's mouth; the very
cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one
suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common
everyday kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up
with the unassuming term "frequent." I think so because they fixed up a
bedroom for him in the Boinville house. One doesn't need a bedroom if
one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way to
respond like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of
sentiment and rub up one's Italian poetry a little.

The young wife was not invited, perhaps. If she was, she most certainly
did not come, or she would have straightened the room up; the most
ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition
in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night. Shelley was
away--why, nobody can divine. Clothes were scattered about, there were
books on every side: "Wherever a book could be laid was an open book
turned down on its face to keep its place." It seems plain that the wife
was not invited. No, not that; I think she was invited, but said to
herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman
touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling
hand-contacts with him accidentally.

As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, "where he found an easeful
resting-place in the house of Mrs. Boinville--the white-haired Maimuna--
and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner." The aged Zonoras was deceased, but
the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck, as we see. "Three charming
ladies entertained the mocker (Hogg) with cups of tea, late hours,
Wieland's Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manna of refined
sentiment."

"Such," says Hogg, "were the delights of Shelley's paradise in
Bracknell."

The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg:

"I will not have you despise home-spun pleasures. Shelley is
making a trial of them with us--"

A trial of them. It may be called that. It was March 11, and he had
been in the house a month. She continues:

Shelley "likes t