they set down “elephants for want of towns.”  Dean Swift is a case in point.  Society has avenged itself by calumniating the man who spat upon its hypocrisies and rascalities; and to appease the wounded feelings of the world, he is attractively set down as a savage and a tyrant.  Mr. Thackeray and others find such a verdict artistically suitable to their criticisms or their narratives, (a French author has written a romantic book about the Dean and Stella,) and so the man is still depicted and explained as the slayer of two poor innocent women, a sort of clerical Bluebeard, and the horrid ogre who proposed to kill and eat the fat Irish babies.  Thackeray’s plan of dissertation, indeed, was inconsistent with any displacing or disturbing of the preconceived notions; the success of it was, on the contrary, to be built upon the customary old impressions of the subject.  Everybody is pleased to find his own idea in Thackeray, liking it all the better for the graphic way in which it is set forth and illustrated; and the result shows the shrewd artistic judgment of the critic, who apparently (especially in the Dean’s case) understands his readers rather better than his theme.  As for Swift,—­though a fair knowledge of the man may be gleaned from the several biographies of him that we have, his life has not yet been fairly written and interpreted; and we believe the same may be said of most literary men of genius.

It must certainly be said of Shelley,—­and this brings us to the beginning of our remarks.  Not one man in ten thousand would be capable of writing the life of that poet as it should be written,—­even supposing the biographer were one of his intimate friends.  Shelley went entirely away from the ranks of society,—­farther away than Byron, and was a man harder to be understood by the generality of men.  An autobiography of such a man was more needed than that of any other; but we could not expect an autobiography from Shelley.  He felt nothing but pain and sorrow in the retrospect of his life, and, like Byron, shrank from the task of explaining the mixture of self-will, injustice, falsehood, and impetuous defiance that made up the greater part of his history; and when he died, he left everything at sixes and sevens, as regarded his place and acts in the world.  Accordingly, until lately, no one ventured forward with a biography of the departed poet, who has been for more than a generation looked on, as it were, through the medium of two lights:  one, that of his poetry, which represents him as the loftiest and gentlest of minds; and the other, the imperfect notices of his life, which show him forth a cruel, headstrong, and reckless outlaw,—­hooted at, anathematized, (and by his own father first,) driven out, like a leper in the Middle Ages, and deprived of the care of his children.  In his case, however, the tendency to dwell upon and bring out the darker traits of biography does not exhibit itself in any remarkable way; and, on the whole, Shelley’s