After a considerable interval, some notices of Shelley have appeared, without, however, throwing much additional light on the wayward heart and pilgrimage of the poet. Mr. C.S. Middleton has published a book upon Shelley and his writings; Mr. T.J. Hogg has given a sketch of his life; and E.J. Trelawny some recollections of him, as well as of Byron. None of these pretends to explain that eccentric nature, or harmonize in any way his acts and his feelings; though a few things may be gathered that tend to make the biography somewhat more distinct than before, in some particulars. On the subject of his first unfortunate marriage, we are made aware that his wife was a self-willed, ill-taught young woman, who set her own father at defiance, and threw herself on the protection of such a wandering oddity as Percy Shelley. She was strong-minded, and brought with her into her husband's house her elder sister, also strong-minded, a ridiculous and insufferable duenna, whom Shelley hated with all his heart and soul, and wished dead and buried out of his sight,--finding, no doubt, his unsteady disposition controlled and thwarted by the voice and authority of his sister-in-law, who, knowing that her father furnished the young couple with their chief means of livelihood, would be all the more resolute in advising them or domineering over the migratory household. At last, these women grew tired of the moping and ineffectual youth who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable, and all hope of the baronetcy very far off indeed; they grew tired of him and went away,--the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing vagabond. With her natural decision of mind, aided and encouraged, very likely, by her astute relatives, she thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have felt the hardship of living with such a melancholy outlaw. Having nothing in common with the devoted Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar. She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her "attacking Latin" for the purpose of construing the poet Horace. How she must have hated all poets! She had other ideas,--ideas of ease, respectability, baronetcy; and her disappointment was greater than she could bear. Mr. Hogg says, she had a propensity to strong courses, and would talk of suicide in a speculative way. It is not difficult to discover the truth of that unfortunate union and disunion. Shelley, betrayed by the impulses of his enthusiast nature and the ignorant and deplorable credulity of a bookworm, allowed himself to be imposed upon by a designing boarding-school girl and her relatives, and everything followed as a matter of course. The unhappy wife recklessly broke the bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,--and on him also, by a Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.[1]