Later Walton calls Frankenstein's eloquence "forcible and touching" (III:WC:6) and
just three weeks after the present letter the crew will witness its effect (III:WC:17).
But on that occasion the crew will not be swayed by Victor; and even Victor himself,
somewhat earlier, evinced himself as distrustful of mere eloquence, warning Walton
against the power of the Creature's speech and suggesting that it might mislead him
(III:7:26).

Eloquence as a concept implicitly assumes multiple perspectives and an underlying
uncertainty as to where truth resides. It is thus focussed as a highly vexed issue
in the novel, which reveals itself to be at once selfconscious in its employment of
manipulative rhetoric and suspicious of the effects.

Another way to define "unremitting ardour" would be, from the linguistic root, a perpetual
low-grade fever. The damage to Victor's bodily system becomes clear as the paragraph
unfolds.

Since study is itself customarily thought to be a passive occupation, Victor's employment
of the passive mood here calls our immediate attention to his unwillingness to accept
responsibility for a driving obsession. We have seen a like usage earlier (I:3:3 and
note).

Mary Shelley seems to have an adolescent's sense of what constitutes the "decline
of life." When we are introduced to Alphonse Frankenstein, a man who remained unmarried
for at least another two years after his decision to wed and and who then had three
children across a timespan of sixteen years, he seems as yet not to have begun the
decline attributed to him here. His delay in marriage is shared by Victor who finds
numerous reasons for postponing his nuptials with Elizabeth Lavenza. That this is
a family trait Mary Shelley wishes to accentuate rather than the reflection of some
antiromantic convention of her own or of her time is indicated by the case of Felix
De Lacey, who falls deeply in love at a young age.

This seems an innocent-sounding phrase, but if read carefully, it manifests what the
final chapter of Volume 1 will likewise suggest, that this novel resolutely refuses
to invoke a supernatural or transcendental framework for support. As human beings
can create other beings, they also mentally create a divinity to structure their universe:
the same human fallibility can attend both operations with tragic consequences.

Doubtless, this will seem only a natural human reaction, but once we have experienced
Victor's narration of the agon through which he and his Creature have suffered, such
sympathy will appear to be a rarer attribute, all the more prized for how seldom it
is actually practiced by the major characters of the novel. Walton's reaching out
in sympathy stands in marked contrast to the universal reaction elicited by the presence
of the Creature.

Civil magistrates; government functionaries. The word does not appear in Johnson's
1755 Dictionary, but he does include the cognate verb, to syndicate:

To judge; to pass judgment on, to censure. An unusual word.

In the Genevan political system, according to the account in the 4th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), there were only four syndics chosen from among the
magistrates and these held the greatest authority in the republic. Geneva's syndics
passed a sentence of exile on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, a time we might suppose
included in Alphonse Frankenstein's "many years." Mary Shelley mentions the event
in History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II.

Main text here.

Byron recorded an equally powerful Alpine storm issuing from the Jura in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas 92-96, during the summer of 1816.

Here, in a sudden reversal, Victor indicts himself, recognizing his responsibility
for the consequences of a scientific experiment over which he exerted no intellectual
or moral control. And yet, since he has neither evidence to offer nor can even place
himself within Switzerland when the crime was committed, he is effectually without
any responsibility in the eyes of society. Also, of course, he does not truly know
that the Creature was William's murderer and thus has, in any objective sense, nothing
to offer but supposition that would be inadmissible in a judicial proceeding.