In the letters which Shelley poured upon Hogg, from the 20th of December, till the end of the academic vacation, one comes upon much more about Harriett Grove, and his correspondence with her. To skim these flighty and rhapsodical letters is to miss the information that may be extracted from them. But to study them carefully is to take the present writer's view of Shelley's regard for his cousin, from the summer of 1810.
It is clear the cousins never plighted troth to one another. On 23rd December, 1810, Shelley wishes to know, whether he did wrong in luring his cousin to correspond with him, in order that they 'might see if by coincidence of intellect,' it would be well for them 'to enter into a closer, an eternal union;' the desire for information being clothed in words, amounting to an admission there had been no regular engagement. In the same letter, speaking of Miss Grove's coldness, Shelley speaks also of the failure of his sister's efforts to make the self-possessed beauty regard him with feelings warmer than those of cousinly kindness. That the young gentleman's strongest affections were not concerned in the affair appears from the fact that, within eight days of swearing on the altar of perjured love, he could write with comparative calmness of his inability to fall in love at present with any other young lady.
In language that may be suspected of having contributed something to Lord Dundreary's colloquial style, he wrote to Hogg, on 28th December, 1810, 'at present a thousand barriers oppose any more intimate connexion, any union with another, which, although unnatural and fettering to a virtuous mind, are nevertheless unconquerable.' After writing thus calmly, however, he relapsed into moods, of alternate dejection and fury. He 'slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night' (_i.e._ 2nd January, 1811), 'but did not die.' Again he vowed vengeance on the religious intolerance that had robbed him of his Harriett. On the 11th January, 1811, he wrote fiercely to Hogg, 'She is gone! She is lost to me for ever! She is married! Married to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible as himself; all these fine capabilities will moulder!'
It may not be inferred from the words 'She is married,' that the gentlewoman had already become a wife, or that Shelley meant to do more than announce her engagement to Mr. William Helyar, of Coker Court, Co. Somerset, whose wife she became in November, 1811, two months after the future poet's Scotch marriage to Harriett Westbrook. Bearing in mind the old distinction between marriage and its celebration, and remembering, at the same time, the ancient doctrine of the Church, that a mere matrimonial contract was wedlock--though not yet celebrated and sanctified into _holy_ wedlock--readers must take the words as a mere declaration that Miss Grove had plighted her troth to her future husband. The old ecclesiastical law, which made matrimonial pre-contract a sufficient ground for nullification of marriage, was based on the doctrine that an interchange of nuptial promises was, in itself, marriage. In his 'anti-matrimonialism'--a sentiment growing more and more powerful in the author of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_--Shelley, disdainful of the ecclesiastical celebration, looked upon the interchange of promises ('the engagement' of ordinary parlance) as the real marriage; and in doing so he was (strange to say) in accord with the canonists, and with the old matrimonial law that, surviving in North its extinction in South Britain, was, even to yesterday, generally known as 'the Scotch marriage-law.'