gay. Marvellous contrast, in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence and desolation of that same house eighteen years ago, when its nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a neglected child. Her, by-the-by, in after years I vainly endeavoured to trace. Apart from her situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child; she was neither pretty nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners."

His London privations ended with a reconciliation between himself and his guardians, and he was sent to Oxford his quarrel with them being that they would not allow him to go there.

De Quincey quitted Soho to go to Oxford, and Shelley, when he was expelled from Oxford in 1811, came to Soho. He travelled up to London on the coach with his friend Hogg. His cousin and sometime schoolfellow, Medwin, relates how before dawn on a March morning Shelley and Hogg knocked at his door in Garden Court, Temple, and he heard Shelley's cracked voice cry, in his well-known pipe, "Medwin, let me in. I am expelled," and after a loud sort of half-hysterical laugh repeat, "I am expelled," and add "for atheism." After breakfast they went out to look for lodgings, and, says Hogg, never was a young beauty so capricious, so hard to please " as Shelley; but the name of Poland Street attracted him because it suggested recollections of Thaddeus of Warsaw and freedom, and he declared "we must lodge here, should we sleep on the step of a door." A bill advertising lodgings to let hung in the window of No. 15, so they knocked and entered and inspected them-"a quiet sitting-room, its walls papered with trellised vine-leaves and clustering grapes," with a

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similarly decorated bedroom opening out of it, and Shelley whispered, "We must stay here for ever.'

"For ever" dwindled to something less than a year; but here for that time Shelley lived and resumed his interrupted studies, as far as might be, and was secretly supported by his sisters, who sent their pocket-money round to him by the hand of their schoolfellow, Harriett Westbrook, daughter of the retired tavern-keeper, John Westbrook, who was living near Park Lane, at 23 Chapel Street (now Aldford Street).

In April 1811 Shelley's father wrote insisting that he should break off all relations with Hogg and place himself under a tutor of his father's selection, and Shelley replied, from his Poland Street lodgings:

"MY DEAR FATHER,-As you do me the honour of requesting to hear the determination of my mind, as the basis of your future actions, I feel it my duty, although it gives me pain to wound the sense of duty to your own character, to that of your family, and feelings as a Christian,' decidedly to refuse my assent to both the proposals in your letter, and to affirm that similar refusals will always be the fate of similar requests. With many thanks for your great kindness, I remain your affectionate, dutiful son, "PERCY B. SHELLEY."

His father presently relented so far as to make him an allowance of two hundred pounds a year. One evening in August, having arranged a hasty elopement with Harriett Westbrook, Shelley walked from Poland Street to a small coffee-house in Mount Street, and

as Dr. Dowden sets forth in his Life of the poet, dispatched a letter thence to Harriett, her father's house in Aldford Street being close handy, telling her at what hour he would have a hackney coach waiting for her at the door of the coffee-house. At the appointed time the coach was there in readiness, and a little behind time "Harriett was seen tripping round the corner from Chapel Street, and the coach wheels rattled towards the City inn from which the northern mails departed."

They travelled post-haste to the North, and were married in Edinburgh; and in another three years the deserted Harriett had ended her life in the Serpentine, and Shelley had gone off with Mary Godwin. Meanwhile, however, returning to London after his marriage to Harriett, Shelley stayed for a few days at the house of his father-in-law, and then at Cooke's Hotel, in Albemarle Street. On another occasion he lodged for a short time at a house still standing in Marchmont Street (No. 26), a drab and dingy thoroughfare in the neighbourhood of Russell Square.

Hazlitt was a Soho resident for no longer than about six months. In 1830 he came from his lodgings in Bouverie Street to occupy rooms at No. 6 Frith Street. He was then already failing in health, separated from his wife, harassed financially through the failure of his publishers, altogether broken and dispirited. Much disappointment, the thwarting of many of his highest personal ambitions, had soured and embittered him. Haydon calls him a "singular mixture of friend and fiend, radical and critic, metaphysician, poet and painter, on whose word no one could rely, on whose heart no one could calculate."