ghttimes did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy
hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep
should have charitably bridged, but didn't.

Yes, mischief had been wrought. The biographer arrives at this
conclusion, and it is a most just one. Then, just as you begin to half
hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of
wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away
disappointed. You are disappointed, and you sigh. This is what he says
--the italics [''] are mine:

"However the mischief may have been wrought--'and at this day
no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head'--"

So it is poor Harriet, after all. Stern justice must take its course--
justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice
that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her. Except in the
back. Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate
it. Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the
bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and
may not, must not blink them; so it delivers judgment where judgment
belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all.
To resume--the italics are mine:

"However the mischief may have been wrought--and at this day no
one can wish to heap blame on any buried head--'it is certain
that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and
his wife were in operation during the early part of the year
1814'."

This shows penetration. No deduction could be more accurate than this.
There were indeed some causes of deep division. But next comes another
disappointing sentence:

"To guess at the precise nature of these cafes, in the absence
of definite statement, were useless."

Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have
been trying to outguess him, and now all of a sudden he is tired of it
and won't play any more. It is not quite fair to us. However, he will
get over this by-and-by, when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and
has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense.

"We may rest content with Shelley's own words"--in a Chancery paper drawn
up by him three years later. They were these: "Delicacy forbids me to
say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions."

A