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were less likely to affect Shelley's health injuriously, than was the intellectual excitement which set in with him at hours when other mortals are struck and strewn by the leaden mace of slumber. Shelley's drowsy fit came on early, and when it had passed, he was as a skylark saluting the new day, but at midnight."—(Dowden's "Life," Vol. i., p. 337.)
Shelley was not averse to physical exercise or even strenuous exertion. "It was, indeed, a point of honour with Shelley," says Prof. Dowden, "to prove that some grit lay under his outward appearance of weakness and excitable nerves; for he was an apostle of the Vegetarian faith, and a water drinker, and must not discredit the doctrine which he preached and practised."—(Dowden's "Life," Vol. ii., p. 119.) Writing to Leigh Hunt, 29th June, 1817, the poet says, "Do not mention that I am unwell to your nephew, for the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease, in the same manner as the sectaries of a new system of religion are held to be more moral than other people, or a reformed Parliament must at least be assumed as the remedy of all political evils. No one will change the diet, adopt the religion, or reform the Parliament else."—(Dowden's "Life," Vol. ii., pp. 119-120.)
Shelley left England for ever in 1818, and there is little precise information as to his dietetic habits in the last four years of his life. At times he was not a strict Vegetarian, for in 1820, writing to Maria Gisborne, he says of his household, "We eat little flesh and drink no wine." Yet to the end he was practically a Vegetarian placing upon Bread—"the staff of life"—his chief reliance.
Shelley's Vegetarianism was satirised in a curious squib published after his death in the Medical Adviser of Dec. 6, 1823, which was edited by Alexander Burnett, M.D. This is reprinted in "Book Lore," III., 121. The following letter from the late Sir Percy Shelley may be cited:—
Boscombe Manor,
My wife tells me that she forgot, when she wrote to you yesterday, to answer your inquiries as to my father's practice of Vegetarianism.
I think I remember my mother telling me that he gave it up to a great extent in his later years—not from want of faith, but from the inconvenience.
