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XVI.—Shelley and The Abbe Barruel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In Notes and Queries for February 10, 1917, John H. Sandham Griffith, Esq., of Llwynduris, Llechryd, Cardiganshire, announced that he had in his possession Shelley's set of the Hon. Robert Clifford's translation (4 vols., 1797-8) of the Abbé Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme. The set, Mr. Griffith believes, was left by Shelley at Horsham after his expulsion from Oxford;1 and he further explains that “there was such a considerable degree of intimacy existing between the poet's family and my ancestor William Sandham of Horsham, a tenant and near neighbor of Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, that the poet was probably a frequent visitor, and obtained a loan of £100 in January, 1811, before being sent down from Oxford, which he never repaid. The unredeemed promissory note is in my possession, and also a holograph letter, requesting a further loan on the plea of ‘now being reduced to the very last extremity,‘ written from Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet West-brooke [sic].” Volume II of the set, Mr. Griffith says, “bears the poet's autograph in full, and the date 1810.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1921
References
1 If Mr. Griffith is corret, Shelley afterwards bought or borrowed another set of Barruel's work. See below, note 4.
2 Life of Shelley, New Ed., 1913, p. 379.
3 Prom. Urib. iii, ii, 35-9.
4 Mary Shelley wrote in her Journal, October 11, 1814: “Shelley reads the History of the Illuminati, out of Barruel, to us.” Again, on the 23rd and 25th of August preceding, there are statements by Mary in the same Journal recording their joint reading of Barruel's work. Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, by Mrs. Julian Marshall. (2 vols. 1889). Vol. I, pp. 92, 77, 78.
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