[50] Cf.  Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I, 48:  “the wingless, crawling hours.”  This phrase ("my part in submitting ... minutes”) and the remainder of the paragraph are an elaboration of the simple phrase in F of F—­A, “my part in enduring it—­,” with its ambiguous pronoun.  The last page of Chapter VIII shows many corrections, even in the MS of Mathilda.  It is another passage that Mary seems to have written in some agitation of spirit.  Cf. note 26.

[51] In F of F—­A there are several false starts before this sentence.  The name there is Welford; on the next page it becomes Lovel, which is thereafter used throughout The Fields of Fancy and appears twice, probably inadvertently, in Mathilda, where it is crossed out.  In a few of the S-R fr it is Herbert.  In Mathilda it is at first Herbert, which is used until after the rewritten conclusion (see note 83) but is corrected throughout to Woodville.  On the final pages Woodville alone is used. (It is interesting, though not particularly significant, that one of the minor characters in Lamb’s John Woodvil is named Lovel.  Such mellifluous names rolled easily from the pens of all the romantic writers.) This, her first portrait of Shelley in fiction, gave Mary considerable trouble:  revisions from the rough drafts are numerous.  The passage on Woodville’s endowment by fortune, for example, is much more concise and effective than that in S-R fr.  Also Mary curbed somewhat the extravagance of her praise of Woodville, omitting such hyperboles as “When he appeared a new sun seemed to rise on the day & he had all the benignity of the dispensor of light,” and “he seemed to come as the God of the world.”

[52] This passage beginning “his station was too high” is not in F of F—­A.

[53] This passage beginning “He was a believer in the divinity of genius” is not in F of F—­A.  Cf. the discussion of genius in “Giovanni Villani” (Mary Shelley’s essay in The Liberal, No.  IV, 1823), including the sentence:  “The fixed stars appear to abberate [sic]; but it is we that move, not they.”  It is tempting to conclude that this is a quotation or echo of something which Shelley said, perhaps in conversation with Byron.  I have not found it in any of his published writings.

[54] Is this wishful thinking about Shelley’s poetry?  It is well known that a year later Mary remonstrated with Shelley about The Witch of Atlas, desiring, as she said in her 1839 note, “that Shelley should increase his popularity....  It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours....  Even now I believe that I was in the right.”  Shelley’s response is in the six introductory stanzas of the poem.