‘Last at his cross, and earliest at his grave.’

For critical utterances we have the ensuing:—­’A strain of patriotism pure, ardent, and even sublime....  Versification combining conciseness and strength with a considerable degree of harmony....  Both talent and genius....  Some passages of it, and those not a few, are of the first order of the pathetic and descriptive.’ (3) A Syrian Tale. Of this book I have failed to find any trace in the Quarterly Review, or in the Catalogue of the British Museum. (4) Mrs. Lefanu.  Neither can I trace this lady in the Quarterly.  Mrs. Alicia Lefanu, who is stated to have been a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and also her daughter, Miss Alicia Lefanu, published books during the lifetime of Shelley.  The former printed The Flowers, a Fairy Tale, 1810, and The Sons of Erin, a Comedy, 1812.  To the latter various works are assigned, such as Rosard’s Chain, a Poem. (5) Mr. John Howard Payne was author of Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin, an Historical Tragedy, criticized in the Quarterly for April, 1820.  I cannot understand why Shelley should have supposed this criticism to be laudatory:  it is in fact unmixed censure.  As thus:—­’He appears to us to have no one quality which we should require in a tragic poet....  We cannot find in the whole play a single character finely conceived or rightly sustained, a single incident well managed, a single speech—­nay a single sentence—­of good poetry.’  It is true that the same article which reviews Payne’s Brutus notices also, and with more indulgence, Sheil’s Evadne:  possibly Shelley glanced at the article very cursorily, and fancied that any eulogistic phrases which he found in it applied to Payne.

1. 51. A parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron. I have not succeeded in finding this parallel.  The Quarterly Review for July 1818 contains a critique of Milman’s poem, Samor, Lord of the Bright City; and the number for May 1820, a critique of Milman’s Fall of Jerusalem.  Neither of these notices draws any parallel such as Shelley speaks of.

1. 52. What gnat did they strain at here.  The word ‘here’ will be perceived to mean ‘in Endymion,’ or ‘in reference to Endymion’; but it is rather far separated from its right antecedent.

1. 59. The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats’s life were not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press.  See p. 22.

1. 63. The poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.  This statement of Shelley is certainly founded upon a passage in the letter (see p. 22) addressed by Colonel Finch to Mr. Gisborne.  Colonel Finch said that Keats had reached Italy, ’nursing a deeply rooted disgust to life and to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.’  The Colonel’s statement seems (as I have previously intimated) to be rather haphazard; and Shelley’s recast of it goes to a further extreme.