DEFENSE OP HARRIET SHELLEY
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 pictu resque figure, this rawhead-and-bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams, those rickety specters 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 re married according to the rites of the English Church.
Within three weeks the new husband and wife
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