Failing in the attempt to refute Mr. Shelley’s philosophy*, the Reviewers attack his private life. What is the argument of this? or what right have they to know any thing of the private life of an author? or how would they like to have the same argument used against themselves? Mr. Shelley is now seven and twenty years of age. He entered life about 17; and every body knows, and every candid person will allow, that a young man at that time of life, upon the very strength of a warm and trusting nature, especially with theories to which the world are not accustomed, may render himself liable to the misrepresentation of the worldly. But what have the Quarterly Reviewers to do with this? What is Mr. Shelley’s private life to the Quarterly Review, any more than Mr. Gifford’s, or Mr. Croker’s, or any other Quarterly Reviewer’s private life is to the Examiner, or the Morning Chronicle, or to the Edinburgh Review,—a work, by the bye, as superior to the Quarterly, in all the humanities of social intercourse, as in the liberality of it’s opinions in general. The Reviewer talks of what he “now” knows of Mr. Shelley. What does this pretended judge and actual male-gossip, this willing listener to scandal, this minister to the petty wants of excitement, now know more than he ever knew, of an absent man, whose own side of whatever stories have been told him he has never heard? Suppose the opponents of the Quarterly Review were to listen to all the scandals that have been reported of writers in it, and to proclaim this man by name as a pimp, another as a scamp, and another as a place or pulpit hunting slave made out of a school-boy tyrant? If the use of private matters in public criticism is not to be incompatible with the decencies and charities of life, let it be proved so; and we know who would be the sufferers. We have experienced, in our own persons, what monstrous misrepresentations can be given of a man, even with regard to the most difficult and unselfish actions of his life, and solely because others just knew enough of delicacy, to avail themselves of the inflexible love of it in others.†

We shall therefore respect the silence hitherto observed publicly by Mr. Shelley respecting such matters, leaving him when he returns to England to take such notice or otherwise of his calumniators as may seem best to him. But we cannot resist the impulse to speak of one particular calumny of this Reviewer, the falshood of which is doubly impressed upon us in consequence of our own personal and repeated knowledge of the reverse. He says Mr. Shelley “is shamefully dissolute in his conduct.” We laugh the scandal-monger to scorn. Mr. Shelley has theories, as we have said before, with regard to the regulation of society, very different from those of the Quar-

* There are some further observations on Christianity in our political article in this week, which will apply to the present subject.

† The Reviewer in question, always true to his paltry trade, is pleased, in speaking of the Editor of this paper, to denounce his “bustling vulgarity, the ludicrous affectation, the factious flippancy, and the selfish heartlessness, which it is hard for the Reviewer’s feelings to treat with the mere gentle contempt they merit.” Indeed! The saying is a borrowed one, and much the worse for its shabby wear. Oh, good God! how applicable are all these charges but the political one, to some of those we could tell the world! Applied as they are, they have only excited a contemptuous mirth against the Reviewer among the companions of the Editor, who hereby, with a more than exemplary fairness of dealing, repays his mock-contempt with real.