His sagacious lordship then proceeded to pronounce an order which prohibited the father or his agents from taking possession of his children, or from intermeddling with them till further orders. It was farther arranged that £200 a-year should be set aside for their support and education, such sum being deducted by Shelley's father from his annuity.

The effect of this sentence on the mind of Shelley may well be conceived. He had returned to England with feelings of the strongest affection for the land of his birth, expressing his intention "to make that most excellent of nations his

perpetual resting place," and met with persecutions of the worst description almost on the threshold.

He never afterwards saw his children, who were transferred to the care of a clergyman of the Church of England; and so deeply was his mind affected by this cruel separation, that it preyed upon him as a continual canker, and he

*Jacob's Report of Cases during the Time of Lord Eldon, vol. iii., 7266.

could never trust himself to speak of it even to the nearest and dearest friend he had.

"Such was his fear," says Mrs. Shelley, "to wound the feelings of others, that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of deep, unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire to embody themselves in forms deprecative of all the weakness and evil which cling to real life."

Some of the bitter and stormy feelings that threatened to overwhelm him, found expression in a curse, which, in a moment of agony, he addressed to the Lord Chancellor, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love.* He exclaims :

"O let a father's curse be on thy soul,
And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb,
And both on thy grey head a leaden cowl,
To weigh thee down to thy approaching doom!

"I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,
By hopes long cherish'd and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never cross'd.

Mrs. Shelley's Notes.

"By those infantile smiles of happy light,

Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth, Quench'd even when kindled, in untimely night, Hiding the promise of a lovely birth.

"By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentle love, such as the wisest teach;
Thou strike the lyre of mind! O grief and shame.

By all the happy see in children's growth,

That undeveloped flow'r of budding years, Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,

Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears.

"I curse thee, though I hate thee not: O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell
Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave

This curse should be thy blessing. Fare thee well."

When these proceedings and their results were related to Lord Byron, he did not hesitate. to express his deep sense of the injury Shelley had sustained, and declared that had he been in England at the time, "he would have moved heaven and earth to have reversed such a decision," and that it was a most unwarrrantable act of oppression, a cruel outrage, before which

the bright, pure image of liberty or justice must stand appalled, every Englishman, be he of whatever creed or belief he may, will now acknowledge.

CHAPTER VIII.

Shelley marries Mary Godwin-His residence at Great Marlow Nature of his studies-His philanthropyMode of Life at Marlow.

SOON after the events just narrated, Shelley married Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin, a circumstance which led an admirer of "Queen Mab," to refer him to the note in that work, hostile to matrimony, taxing him with apostacy, in having twice entered that state, to which the poet replied:

:

"I abhor seduction as much as I adore love, and if I have conformed to the uses of the world on the score of matrimony, it is that disgrace always attaches to the weaker side."