he addressed the finest letters that perhaps were ever written about Italy. On Peacock's memoir of Shelley, Mrs Campbell remarks that

"It is the man of many pleasures writing about the man of many sorrows. . . . But of such passions as racked Shelley, of such consuming visitations of poetical imagination, of such heroic hope, of such desperate faith, he was ignorant, even coldly incredulous."

In this Peacock is by no means singular. The world in general, however it may rhapsodise about such poems as happen to be the vogue, is in reality "coldly incredulous " of the poet's stress and strain, and looks on his hours of creative labour as spent in a kind of self-pleasing idleness.

A very different friend was Trelawny, whom they sometimes called the Pirate, not as a nickname, but as a statement of literal fact. He was a wild adventurer, who had roved over the face of the earth, violent in his passions and vain of his wickedness, singularly handsome and singularly brutal. He renounced his family, his country, and his creed for no better reason apparently than to gratify a savage temper. No one knew how many wives he had married, or why, or where he married them; but they disappeared. He would ride a good horse to death with perfect indifference, and take as much pleasure in cold-hearted

bloodshed as a Chinaman. “He betrayed his own country, joining a privateer, from which, in aid of the French, he assisted in sinking an English ship and drowning her crew. He had no shame on account of his treachery." In fact, he seemed incapable of shame. These exploits are not the calumnies of some enemy, but are on record in his own autobiography, a hideous book which he called 'The Adventures of a Younger Son,' and declared it to be a "true and particular history of my life." Possibly he lied, but there is no proof of it. If he ever professed shame, it was in a kind of boast, as when he wrote to some one after he had narrowly escaped being drowned near the Niagara Falls:

"I am so hardened in doing wrong that it is a pity I was not drowned." Men of his stamp, clear-sighted, brilliant and unscrupulous, often have the wit to disarm criticism by making a semi-pathetic confession like this. It would have been quite successful with Shelley, for instance, who held through life to his early faith that

"Every soul contains perfection's germ."

In one thing Trelawny was perfectly sincere, in his wholehearted admiration and love for Shelley. He actually understood him, one knows not how. But the truth of his insight is proved in this observation :

"The passions and feelings

66

You will meet besides with a Mr Trelawny, a wild but kind-hearted seaman."

On closer acquaintance he certainly was repelled by Trelawny; he must have recognised something hard and violent in the "kind-hearted seaman," and the least touch of cruelty was unbearable to him. But Mary Shelley was not repelled, either then or later. Trelawny took no trouble to disguise his past life or character; but the ruffian with a brow of brass sometimes has a strange attraction for women of the type of Mary Shelley, cold-hearted, over educated, and self-centred. In her mind, besides, he was associated with the last months of her husband's life, and the last service that a friend could render. Trelawny wrote to her from Rome in 1823, describing the place where Shelley's ashes were buried in the English cemetery :

"I have just planted six young cypresses and four laurels. My own stone, a plain slab, till I can decide on some fitting inscription, is placed on the left hand. I have likewise dug

my grave, so that when I die, there is only to lift up my coverlet and roll me into it. You may lie on the other side if you like."

This resolution of being buried at Shelley's side he never forgot, and fifty-eight years afterwards he was actually buried there. It is clear that Shelley was his one romance, the only pure affection that had a place in his unnatural heart.

As a tribute to the poet's character, it is worth more than a testimonial signed by seven blameless bishops in conclave.

But Shelley had more pleasure in the society of Edward and Jane Williams than in Trelawny's. They were a young couple who came to Pisa for a while, and afterwards shared the Casa Magni with Shelley and his family, till poor Williams, a sailor, was drowned with Shelley, when the Ariel capsized in the bay of Spezzia. Jane Williams, to whom Shelley wrote more than one exquisite lyric, returned with Mary to England, and lived for some time with that unfortunate and most enigmatical woman, of whom Mrs Campbell says

"Mary Shelley was deeply reserved, but with that odd sort of reserve which is sometimes uncannily lacking in restraint. A kind of self-consciousness pervaded the very recesses of her soul. We feel that she was distant even with herself. The harrowing pages of her journal from the time

of Shelley's death almost till her own are loaded with selfcriticism, self-analysis, repression, and exhortation; her unsleeping and self-centred grief, conscious of itself, and of her weeping, pours out like a tragic actor monologue after monologue, which are never quite spontaneous for all their bitterness and hard despair, nor deeply moving for all their manifest courage and pain. We pity, but we do not share her grief; it is a too frozen passion. But it arrests us as one more testimony to that power in Shelley which made all who had known him feel after his death that they had lived in the presence of some godlike being."

This was, in fact, the effect of his gentleness and generosity, his simple ascetic life, and the magnanimity which made him so ready to forgive, slow to condemn, quick to respond to every claim of human sympathy. In one thing, however, he was less than "godlike"; it was in a certain rashness of imagination which led him sometimes into actual delusions and follies, recalling the strange frights and fancies of his youth. He could invest his friends with wonderful and transcendent qualities, and when they proved to be of ordinary faulty human-kind, he could regard them with equal exaggeration as semi-fiends. It was partly due to a complete lack of the sense of humour in himself, involving, as it usually does, a lack of the sense of propor

tion. Like all poets, he was susceptible to beauty, and even more than most poets to the beauty of women. He idealised them, and with the enthusiasm of a born worshipper endowed them with the highest qualities of his own soaring imagination. Now, most women are unpoetical creatures, but especially beautiful women.

""Tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true."

If we are wise, we shall read the lovely poem Ariel to Miranda," and the lyric "The stars will awaken," without wasting much speculation upon Jane Williams, to whom they were written, and who was nothing more or less wonderful than a pretty young woman with a voice. Another such was the young Italian contessina Emilia Viviani, whose only interest for ourselves is that she was the inspiration of "Epipsychidion," a marvellously beautiful love-poem, which glows and trembles with a strange mystical rapture. Shelley certainly lost his head over the fair Viviani, if he did not lose his heart. The distinction may be left to some one of the band of busy biographers who feel themselves sufficient for these things. The circumstances were romantic in a curiously conventional way. There was the beautiful girl, the cruel father, the unwelcome suitor both wealthy and old, and the usual convent walls enclosing the despairing victim, while Shelley, as it were a troubadour, sang

beneath them. The illusion lasted but a few weeks, long enough, however, for the poem to be written, and then came the familiar cold fit of disappointment. The lady vanishes in a cloud of disapproval; the poem remains, in a halo of glory.

Yet we agree with Mrs Campbell that Shelley's finest poems were not those that expressed a personal and passing emotion, but rather those which speak through the voice of nature with an appeal to universal passion, though it come through "the pain of finite hearts that yearn "-not poems like "Epipsychidion," that is to say, but poems like the "Ode to the West Wind " and " The Cloud." We do not rank

chief result of thought is to make one modest in judgment. Have we not Matthew Arnold's great mistake to remember, his undervaluing of Shelley !

and yet it was was he who warned us in all sincerity to beware of "les jugements saugrenus.'

With most of Mrs Campbell's appreciations we are in full agreement, but not with all. She is both candid and acute in her explanation of the source of Shelley's occasional weakness. "He could mistake for genuine inspiration some passing emotional excitement, and set to work to write a poem which must either peter out in a few lines, or expand into a sentimental and pointless rigmarole.

In the midst of

his finest work a similar experience sometimes overtook him: he became excited by some idea actually tawdry or irrelevant

to his subjectand then he would write with a chilly sentimentality, or long-windedly, or inharmoniously."

This is excellent criticism, and, taken in conjunction with her enthusiastic feeling for the poet's height of achievement, reminds us of Browning's conviction that

"Naught blinds us less than admiration, friend!”

But we do not agree with Mrs Campbell's estimate of Shelley's blank verse, which she finds both "original" and satisfactory. Take this instance chosen without search or