Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point—his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given—the Professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever{88} society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father—an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another—a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet—notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies—by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani—with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres (witness “Epipsychidion”); and, anon, Harriet is “a frantic idiot,” Elizabeth a “brown demon,” and Emilia a “centaur.” “It was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of Shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst.” It is, perhaps, fortunate that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such “infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than mere{89} saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit—at least, when it suited his mood and convenience—for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. He was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming” eccentricities. “When Bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have ‘a little hell of his own.’” At Eton “in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor.” On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” he replied, “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil.” The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “Here I swear,” he writes to Mr. Hogg, “and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” His resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such a{90} world! He had all the na?veté as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he printed a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. He was summoned before the University authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others.” Much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. Hogg—the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife—writes: “He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘I am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘I am expelled!’... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words ‘Expelled! expelled!’” Professor Dowden thinks “it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the Creed,{91}” compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg’s authority for the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley.” Of course, in face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by horror,’” is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “His voyage,” says his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must of............