After setting forth the words of the spurious epistle, Mr. MacCarthy remarks in his usual style of laborious inaccuracy:--
'This letter, whatever its claim to authenticity may be, is dated February 22nd, 1811. Six days later--_that is_, on the 2nd of March in the same year--Shelley addressed, for the first time, another newspaper editor then personally unknown to him, but who became a few years later one of his most valued and intimate friends--Leigh Hunt.'
February 22nd, 1811. Six days later--that is, on the 2nd of March in the same year!--What particularity and what curious persistence in blundering! The gentleman, who is so severe on Hogg for an occasional slip, is more than usually fortunate when he is only twenty-five per cent wrong in a calculation of days. Mr. MacCarthy, however, is right in holding there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of the youthful Shelley's first letter to the Editor of the _Examiner_. Written in the Oxonian Shelley's best, but far from strenuous, style, the epistle (of 2nd March, 1811) to Leigh Hunt--the epistle Leigh Hunt never answered--could not have proceeded from any hand but Shelley's hand. Strangely ingenious things have been done in the way of Shelleyan forgeries, but no fabricator of spurious letters and other materials for fictitious biography would have thought of manufacturing the delicious bit of puerile bounce that makes the letter end in this droll fashion:--
'My father is in parliament, and on attaining twenty-one I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat. On account of the responsibility to which my residence in this University subjects me, I, of course, dare not publicly avow all I think; but the time will come when I hope that my every endeavour, insufficient as they may be, will be directed to the advancement of liberty.
'Your most obedient servant, 'P. B. SHELLEY.'
From his Eton days to a time considerably subsequent to his expulsion from Oxford, it was Shelley's practice to open correspondence with strangers by telling them how greatly he differed in his worldly circumstances and prospects from ordinary young men. In this strain of boyish boastfulness, he is known to have approached so many people, that it is reasonable to suppose it to have been his usual device for putting himself in the favourable regard of persons, whose acquaintance he sought. To the Messrs. Longman, of Paternoster Row, he wrote from Eton: 'My object in writing it was not pecuniary, as I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of Sussex.' To Stockdale he introduced himself by word of mouth in much the same fashion. In the earliest days of their acquaintance, Hogg heard not a little from Sir Bysshe Shelley's grandson, of matters redounding to the dignity of the Castle Goring Shelleys; the romantic traditions of his house; the arguments with which the Duke of Norfolk urged him to look to politics as his proper field of action. 'My father is in parliament,' he writes on 2nd March, 1811, to the editor of the _Examiner_, whom he has never seen, 'and on attaining twenty-one I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat.' Ten months later (10th January, 1812), he is writing to William Godwin, whilst seeking the philosopher's friendship by letter before seeing him,