husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire."

The biographer finds a technical fault in this; "the Shelleys were in
Edinburgh in November." What of that? The woman is recalling a
conversation which is more than two months old; besides, she was probably
more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon its
unimportant date. Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it; for
that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body of
the book. Still, that would not have answered; even the biographer's
enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real grievance,
this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this rawhead-and-
bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams, those
rickety spectres labeled WET-NURSE, BONNET-SHOP, and so on--no, the
father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his pathetic
goblins to a competition like that.

The fabulist finds fault with the statement because it has a technical
error in it; and he does this at the moment that he is furnishing us an
error himself, and of a graver sort. He says:

"If Turner carried off his wife to Devonshire he brought her
back and Shelley was staying with her and her mother on terms
of cordial intimacy in March, 1814."

We accept the "cordial intimacy"--it was the very thing Harriet was
complaining of--but there is nothing to show that it was Turner who
brought his wife back. The statement is thrown in as if it were not only
true, but was proof that Turner was not uneasy. Turner's movements are
proof of nothing. Nothing but a statement from Turner's mouth would have
any value here, and he made none.

Six days after writing his letter Shelley and his wife were together
again for a moment--to get remarried according to the rites of the
English Church.

Within three weeks the new husband and wife were apart again, and the
former was back in his odorous paradise. This time it is the wife who
does the deserting. She finds Cornelia too strong for her, probably.
At any rate, she goes away with her baby and sister, and we have a
playful fling at her from good Mrs. Boinville, the "mysterious spinner
Maimuna"; she whose "face was as a damsel's face, and yet her hair was
gray"; she of whom the biographer has said, "Shelley was indeed caught in
an almost invisible thread spun around him, but unconsciously, by this
subtle and benignant enchantress." Th