+Stanza 45,+ 1. 2. The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones. There is a grand abruptness in this phrase, which makes it—­as a point of poetical or literary structure—­one of the finest things in the Elegy.  We are to understand (but Shelley is too great a master to formulate it in words) that Keats, as an ’inheritor of unfulfilled renown’—­i.e. a great intellect cut off by death before its maturest fruits could be produced—­has now arrived among his compeers:  they rise from their thrones to welcome him.  In this connexion Shelley chooses to regard Keats as still a living spiritual personality—­not simply as ‘made one with Nature.’  He is one of those ’splendours of the firmament of time’ who ‘may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not.’

11. 3-5. Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him. For precocity and exceptional turn of genius Chatterton was certainly one of the most extraordinary of ’the inheritors of unfulfilled renown’; indeed, the most extraordinary:  he committed suicide by poison in 1770, before completing the eighteenth year of his age.  His supposititious modern-antique Poems of Rowley may, as actual achievements, have been sometimes overpraised:  but at the lowest estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind.  He wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different order.  Keats admired Chatterton profoundly, and dedicated Endymion to his memory.  I cannot find that Shelley, except in Adonais, has left any remarks upon Chatterton:  but he is said by Captain Medwin to have been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings.

1. 5. Sidney, as he fought, &c.  Sir Philip Sidney, author of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, the Apology for Poetry, and the sonnets named Astrophel and Stella, died in his thirty-second year, of a wound received in the battle of Zutphen, 1586.  Shelley intimates that Sidney maintained the character of being ‘sublimely mild’ in fighting, falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living.  The special references appear to be these. (1) Sidney, observing that the Lord Marshal, the Earl of Leicester, had entered the field of Zutphen without greaves, threw off his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot which slew him. (2) Being mortally wounded, and receiving a cup of water, he handed it (according to a tradition which is not unquestionable) to a dying soldier. (3) His series of sonnets record his love for Penelope Devereux, sister to the Earl of Essex, who married Lord Rich.  She had at one time been promised to Sidney.  He wrote the sonnets towards 1581:  in 1583 he married another lady, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham.  It has been said that Shelley was wont to make some self-parade in connexion with Sir Philip Sidney, giving it to be understood that he was himself a descendant of the hero—­which was not true, although the Sidney blood came into a different line of the family.  Of this story I have not found any tangible confirmation.