DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY
ness whose name he does not know, and whose character and veracity there is none to vouch for, and allow him to strike this blow at the mother- heart of this friendless girl. The biographer says, "We may not infer from this that Harriet did not feel" why put it in, then? "but we learn that those about her could believe her to be hard and insensible." Who were those who were about her? Her husband? He hated her now, because he was in love elsewhere. Her sister? Of course that is not charged. Peacock? Peacock does not testify. The wet-nurse ? She does not testify. If any others were there we have no mention of them. "Those about her " are reduced to one person her husband. Who reports the circumstance? It is Hogg. Perhaps he was there we do not know. But if he was, he still got his information at second hand, as it was the operator who noticed Harriet s lack of emotion, not himself. Hogg is not given to saying kind things when Harriet is his subject. He may have said them the time that he tried to tempt her to soil her honor, but after that he mentions her usually with a sneer. "Among those who were about her" was one witness well equipped to silence all tongues, abolish all doubts, set our minds at rest; one witness, not called, and not callable, whose evidence, if we could but get it, would outweigh the oaths of whole bat talions of hostile Hoggs and nameless surgeons the baby. I wish we had the baby s testimony; and yet if we had it it would not do us any good a furtive conjecture, a sly insinuation, a pious "if" or two, would be smuggled in, here and there, with a solemn
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