Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/69

 DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

gladly have retraced her steps.&quot; Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace proven by the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must let it stand at that.

Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley s honor by authority of random and unverified gos sip scavengered from a group of people whose very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mis tress of Shelley; her part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow that is to say, from a person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this sorry rubbish with the name of &quot; evidence.&quot;

Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person professing to know is offered among this precious &quot;evidence.&quot;

1. &quot;Shelley believed&quot; so and so.

2. Byron s discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and so, and Mary told her.

3. &quot;Shelley said&quot; so and so and later &quot;admit ted over and over again that he had been in

��error.&quot;

��4. The unspeakable Godwin &quot;wrote to Mr. Bax ter&quot; that he knew so and so &quot;from unquestionable authority&quot; name not furnished. ^ How any man in his right mind could bring him self to defile the grave of a shamefully abused and defenseless girl with these baseless fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade anybody to believe it, or

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