The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I have been reading all the old Shelley literature lately, Hogg and Trelawny and Medwin and Mrs. Shelley, and that terrible piece of analysis, _The Real Shelley_. Hogg's _Life of Shelley_ is an incomparable book; I should put it in the first class of biographies without hesitation. Of course, it is only a fragment; and much of it is frankly devoted to the sayings and doings of Hogg; it is none the worse for that. It is an intensely humorous book, in the first place.

There are marvellous episodes in it, splendid extravaganzas like the story of Hogg's stay in Dublin, where he locked the door of his bedroom for security, and the boy Pat crept through the panel of the door to get his boots and keep them from him, and a man in the room below pushed up a plank in the floor that he might converse, not with Hogg, but with the man in the room above him; there is the anecdote of the little banker who was convinced that Wordsworth was a poet because he had trained himself to write in the dark if he woke up and had an inspiration. There is the story of the Chevalier D'Arblay, and his departure to France; and the description of his correspondence, in which he said for years that he was inconsolable and suffering inconceivable anguish at being obliged to absent himself from his wife; yet never able to assign any reason for his stay.