From the dates already cited, it may be assumed that the Pisan edition of Adonais was in London in the hands of Mr. Ollier towards the middle of August, 1821, purchasable by whoever might be minded to buy it.  Very soon afterwards it was reprinted in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, published by Limbird in the Strand—­1 December, 1821:  a rather singular, not to say piratical, proceeding.  An editorial note was worded thus:  ’Through the kindness of a friend, we have been favoured with the latest production of a gentleman of no ordinary genius, Mr. Bysshe Shelley.  It is an elegy on the death of a youthful poet of considerable promise, Mr. Keats, and was printed at Pisa.  As the copy now before us is perhaps [surely not] the only one that has reached England, and the subject is one that will excite much interest, we shall print the whole of it.’  This promise was not literally fulfilled, for stanzas 19 to 24 were omitted, not apparently with any special object.

After the publication in London of the Pisan edition of Adonais, the poem remained unreprinted until 1829.  It was then issued at Cambridge, at the instance of Lord Houghton (Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes) and Mr. Arthur Hallam, the latter having brought from Italy a copy of the original pamphlet.  The Cambridge edition, an octavo in paper wrappers, is now still scarcer than the Pisan one.  The only other separate edition of Adonais was that of Mr. Buxton Forman, 1876, corresponding substantially with the form which the poem assumes in the Complete Works of Shelley, as produced by the same editor.  It need hardly be said that Adonais was included in Mrs. Shelley’s editions of her husband’s Poems, and in all other editions of any fulness:  it has also appeared in most of the volumes of Selections.

As early as 1830 there was an Italian translation of this Elegy.  It is named Adone, nella morte di Giovanni Keats, Elegia di Percy Bishe Shelley, tradotta da L. A. Damaso Pareto. Genova, dalla Tifografia Pellas, 1830.  In this small quarto thirty pages are occupied by a notice of the life and poetry of Shelley.

I shall not here enter upon a consideration of the cancelled passages of Adonais:  they will appear more appositely further on (see pp. 92-94, &c.).  I therefore conclude the present section by quoting the Quarterly Review article upon Endymion—­omitting only a few sentences which do not refer directly to Keats, but mostly to Leigh Hunt:—­

’Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise.  On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author’s complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work.  Not that we have been wanting in our duty; far from it; indeed, we have made efforts, almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it:  but, with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists.  We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation—­namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.