Since the foregoing observations were written, the writer has seen a certain corroboration of them in the interesting “Memorials of Shelley,” recently edited by Lady Shelley, and published by Ticknor and Fields.  For, in the preface of this book, she takes occasion to speak of the misstatements of all those who have hitherto written on the subject of the poet, instancing the fallacies of Captain Medwin’s book, and also, in an especial manner, though vaguely enough, the incorrectness, amounting to caricature, put forth by a later biographer, one of Shelley’s oldest friends,—­by which she evidently means to indicate Mr. Hogg.  At the same time, the nature of her Ladyship’s book is, involuntarily, an additional evidence of the difficulty that seems fated to attend all attempts to set forth or set right the character of Shelley.  Indeed, she appears to be in some degree conscious of this; for she says, apologetically, that she has published the “Memorials” for the special purpose of neutralizing the misstatements and spirit of Mr. Hogg’s work, and also lets us know that the time is not yet come for the publication of other and more important matter calculated to do justice to the character of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

It is only natural to think that Lady Shelley is not the person to write the biography of the poet, whose relationship to her is such a close one.  She would far more willingly leave the events of his troubled life forever unremembered.  Indeed, when we find, that, in her long widowhood of thirty years, Mrs. Shelley shrank from the task of writing the life of her husband, we can the more easily understand why any member of his family, especially a lady, should be the most unfit to undertake the task.  Nobody could expect Lady Shelley to enter into those painful explanations necessary to it.  Accordingly, in the work before us, we do not find any light thrown on those places where a person would be most anxious to see it.  Lady Shelley slurs over the undutiful boyhood of the poet and the terrible sternness of his Mirabeau-father.  She merely glances across the first foolish marriage and the catastrophe that closed it, as a bird flies over an abyss.  On such subjects she cannot set about contradicting anybody.

But it is an ungrateful task to go on speaking of short-comings in a case like this, where the hardest critic in the world must sympathize with the feelings of the author, whatever becomes of the book.  And yet the book will be very welcome to every one who regards it as a feminine offering of tender admiration and grief laid upon the grave of departed genius.  Though not exactly the sort of personal history one would wish for from another hand, it is still valuable, as furnishing very interesting matter for a future biography.  We have in it several new letters of Shelley’s, some letters of Godwin’s, and others of Mrs. Shelley’s, together with a number of touching extracts from the diary of the latter.  There are also two papers from the poet’s