The Warwickshire Herald. — 1899-06-08 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

THE POET SHELLEY. The biography of James and Horace Smith, the authora of "Rejected Addresses." which has Neu compiled by Mr. Arthur H. Reavan contains, many reminiscences of literary men of the past. Among them IS one by Horace Smith of Shelley : in the year 1816, at the house of our mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, then residing at Hampstead, I made my first personal acquaintance with this remarkable man (Shelley). Punishments disproportionately severe always excite sympathy for their victim, rather than condemnation of his offence. In the midst of all the reckless enthusiasm that prompted Shelley, like a moral Quixote to run a-tilt at whatever he considered an abuse, I felt convinced ; that his aims were pure and lofty, that he was solely animated by an impassioned philanthropy, in 1 the prosecution of which he was ready to sacrifice his life; and, such being his motives, I thought it most cruel and unjust that he should be proscribed as a reprobate, and be made the butt of the most malignant invectives. Having long compassionated him as a grievously over-punished man, and having recently read big poems with a profound admiration of his genius, I had looked forward to our first meeting with no common interest. He was Pot in the cottage when I arrived, but I was introduced to another young poet of no cumuli talent— Keats, who was &stilted, alas ere many years had 'town, to meet the same premature death, and to lie in the same cemetery with Shelley beneath tin ruined walls of Rome. Keats .bis been desorils.d by ! Coleridge in Ids • Table Talk' as a • loose, slack, I not well-dressed youth.' and to an observant .-ye I his looks and his attenuated frame already fore,shadowed the consumption that had marked him for I its prey. "In a short time Shelley was announced. and I beheld a fair, freckled, blue-eyed, light-haired, delicate-looking person, whose countenance was serious and ti ooghtful ; whose stature would have been rather toll had he carried himself upright; whose tarot st voice, though never loud, was somewhat unmusical. Manifest its it was that his preoccupied mind bad no thought to spare for the modish adjust mint of his faehionably-made clothes, it was inqxissible to doubt, even for a moment, that you were gazing upon a ratlem.,,t : a first impression which subsequent observation never failed to confirm, even in the most exalted acceptation of the term, as indicating one that is gentle, generous, accomplished, brave. 'Never did a more finished gentleman than Shelley step across a drawing-room,' was the remark of Lord Byron; and Captain Medwin, writing after several years' acquaintance with Shelley, and an extensive intercourse with the polite world, thus expresses a similar opinion: • I can affirm that Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found that was never wanting, even to the most minute particular, in the infinite and variaus observances of pure, entire, and perfect  At Battersea, on Baturday, at an inquest held on the body of a suicide, named Ballard, some shameful details of immorality on the part of deceased's wife were alleged. Elizabeth Simpson, aged fifteen months. of Frederick-street. Islington. was left in a nursery chair, with another infant in the room, about ayear older. When the mother returned she found the , deceased hanging.by the neck, she having slipped off the chair, the bandage round her waist also blipping and causing strangulation.