The accounts of
him by firmer hands are still cramped by the individuality of the
authorship.
His school-friend, Hogg, is a gentleman of independent property;
Shelley detected the sensitiveness of his nature; and I know that the
man has been capable of truly generous conduct. How is it, then, that
he has written such utterly unintelligible stuff, and has descended to
such evasions as to insert initials, lest people should detect amongst
Shelley's correspondents a most admirable friend, who happened, it
is supposed, to be of plebeian origin? Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg,
I surmise, was conscious, somewhat early in life, that his better
qualities were not fully appreciated; and his love of ease, his wit,
his perception of the ludicrous, made him take refuge in cynicism
until he learned almost to forget the origin of the real meaning of
the things he talked about. His account of Shelley is like a figure
seen through fantastically distorting panes of glass.
Thomas Love Peacock, again, is a man to whose extraordinary powers
Shelley did full justice. He has worked through a long official career
without losing his very peculiar dry wit; but a dry wit was not the
man exactly to discern the form of Shelley's mind, or to portray it
with accuracy and distinctness.
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