Studies in literature Author:Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SHELLEY (III) IT happened on the 19th of June, 1822,—the day when news of Leigh Hunt's arrival in Italy reached Shelley at Casa Magni, and started him prepari... more »ng his small yacht for the cruise from which he was never to return alive—that another and a very different Englishman mounted a stout cob at Kensington, to take holiday jogging the road through Edgware, Stanmore and Watford, to St. Albans. I suppose, indeed, that among notable men of the time you could hardly choose a pair more dissimilar, in temperament, habit and person, than Shelley and William Cobbett; than the '' pard-like spirit'' whose mortal face remains fixed in our imagination as immortally young, ardent, beautiful—in motion so pard-like, or so like a very Ariel, that Trelawny at the close of their first meeting looked up to ask "Where is he?" and was answered "Who? Shelley! Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where"; than (shall we borrow so much as is true from Arnold's famous unfortunate sentence?) this angel ballasting, for his last voyage, his luminous wings with a volume of Sophocles and a volume of Keats on either hip; and that other farmer-like, positive, cynically-mouthed fellow turned sixty, trotting the home counties in dust-coloured coat,drab breeches and gaiters, and reining up by a gate to run his eye over so many acres of barley or of swede turnips and calculate their autumn yield in pounds, shillings and pence. Yet the one dissimilar was in exile, as the other dissimilar had been twice in exile, through persecution; and for reasons which, however colourably—nay, excusably—differentiated at the moment by circumstances and passion, can be detected by us, at our remove of almost a hundred years, as truly identical: this one reason, this vera causa, being that both men had...« less