"Shelley tended me like a brother.

He applied my leeches, administered my medicines, and during six weeks that I was confined to my room, was assiduous and unintermitting in his affectionate care of me." The poet's solitude and melancholy at this time impressed his cousin very painfully.

Though he was producing a long series of imperishable poems, he did not take much interest in his work.

"I am disgusted with writing," he once said, "and were it not for an irresistible impulse, that predominates my better reason, should discontinue so doing." The brutal treatment he had lately received from the "Quarterly Review", the calumnies which pursued him, and the coldness of all but a very few friends, checked his enthusiasm for composition.

Of this there is abundant proof in his correspondence.