He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant’s, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin.  He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed.  He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning.

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous.  After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read Prometheus again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.

(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice.  In an introduction to Medwin’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley he begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is.  “Last century,” he declares, “produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value.  Medwin’s distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether the Byron Conversations and the Life of Shelley should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry.”  Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the “perfect idiot” he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron.  But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays.  He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who “saw Shelley plain” in Browning’s lyric.  None the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us.  A relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of English literature.

Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth.  Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science:  he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics.  At school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable.  Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin’s father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying:  “I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.”  During his life at University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.