merges into spring, after but a few days of bleaker weather."

I was suffering from the effects of my abode in the East, and placed myself under the hands of the celebrated Vaccà, of whom Shelley and Lord Byron both speak with deserved praise.

During a long and severe attack of illness, aggravated by the fatigues of my journey from Geneva, Shelley tended me like a brother. He applied my leeches, administered my medicines, and during six weeks that I was confined to my room, was assiduous and unintermitting in his affectionate care of me,-care I shall never forget; most ungrateful should I indeed be, were it not indelibly stamped on my memory.

During this imprisonment, it was, that I first had an opportunity of reading his works, with many of which I was unacquainted. The delight they afforded me often disarmed pain. I loved to trace in them, from our crude attempts at rhyme, his earliest thoughts, associated as they were with the recollections of our boy

hood; to follow the development of his genius. Nor was it only from his printed poems that I learned to estimate his surpassing talents, he lent me a MS. volume, containing his Ode to Liberty, The Sensitive Plant, the exquisite Arethusa and Peneus, and many other of his lyrics, which I devoured, and enthusiastically admired. He was surprised at my enthusiasm, and said to me," I am disgusted with writing, and were it not for an irresistible impulse, that predominates my better reason, should discontinue so doing." On such occasions, he fell into a despondent mood, most distressing to witness, was affected with a prostration of spirits that bent him to the earth, a melancholy too sacred to notice, and which it would have been a vain attempt to dissipate.

At other times perhaps, however, his features, that bore the impress of suffering, might have been false interpreters of the state of his mind, and his spirit might be lost in reverie, of which state it has been well said, that those subject to

.

it, are dissolved into the surrounding atmosphere, or feel as if the surrounding atmosphere were dissolved into their being. Something of this, I have more than once remarked in Shelley, as we stood watching from my open window in the upper part of the house, the sunsets of Pisa, which are gorgeous beyond any I have ever witnessed; when the waters, the sky, and the marble palaces that line the magnificent crescent of the Lung' Arno, were glowing with crimson -the river a flood of molten gold,-and I seem now to follow its course towards the Ponte al Mare, till the eye rested on the Torre del Fame, that frowned in dark relievo on the horizon. On such occasions, after one of these reveries, he would forget himself, lost in admiration, and exclaim,-" What a glorious world! There is, after all, something worth living for. This makes me retract the wish that I had never been born."

Other feelings, besides those of disappointment, had tended at this time to wound his

sensitive spirit. Had it been the Quarterly Reviewer's object, as it undoubtedly was, to place Shelley under a ban-to drive him from the pale of society, he could not have adopted a course more suited to his diabolical purpose. From the time of the appearance of this article, if his friends did not forsake altogether, they, with few exceptions, fell off from him; and with a lacerated heart, only a few months after the appearance of the number, he writes:

"I am regarded by all who know, or hear of me, except I think on the whole five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect. This five is a large computation, and I don't think I could name more than three." Who these exceptions were, he does not mention.

To show what the feeling of the English abroad was against him, in consequence of this vile attack, I will here repeat an anecdote, which I have already given to the world, and which must have highly gratified the re

spectable contributor to the Quarterly. But a few weeks had elapsed, when a singular and dastardly outrage had been committed on Shelley. He was at the Post-office, asking for his letters, addressed, as is usual in Italy, Posterestante, when a stranger in a military cloak, on hearing him pronounce his name, said, "What, are you that dd atheist, Shelley?" and without more preamble, being a tall, powerful man, struck him such a blow that it felled him to the ground, and stunned him. On coming to himself, Shelley found the ruffian had disappeared.

Raving with the insult, he immediately sought his friend, Mr. Tighe, the son of the renowned Psyche Tighe, who lost no time in taking measures to obtain satisfaction. Mr. Tighe was some time in discovering where the cowardly aggressor had put up; but at length tracked him to the Trè Donzelle. There were but few travellers then in the city, and the description of the man tallied exactly with that of an officer in