ting himself, he gives the
reader a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words,
and that he doesn't take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his
hand! He is always lurking behind a non-committal "if" or something of
that kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless
poison here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a
position to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to
pieces and examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing
purpose to make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great
sin--but it is in the general view that this is revealed, not in the
details. His insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it
is that makes it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of
the cloud of microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip
up a glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny
it; and he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every
glassful is white, and prove it to any one's eye--and yet that lake was
blue and you can swear it. This book is blue--with slander in solution.

Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which
immediately follows the letter containing Shelley's self-exposure which
we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual
sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the
cake-walk as a whole:

"Shelley's happiness in his home, as is evident from this
pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident,
also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to
take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it
henceforth with the quietness of despair. But we can perceive
that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful
for success in such an attempt. And clearly Shelley himself
was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of
blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for
gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not
fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which
could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly
exclude from his imagination."

That paragraph commits the author in no way. Taken sentence by sentence
it asserts nothing against anybody or in f