In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been carried.  Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else she can ask for.  I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven.  At home we have enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results.  Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are ‘our own flesh and blood,’ and, as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote.  Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums?  This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have sought in vain.  Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr. Bradlaugh.  You should have known our Charles while you were in the ‘Queen Mab’ stage.  I fear you wandered, later, from his robust condition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much of it as possible.  Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle.  This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe.  They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun.  Men of sense and taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre.  These biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of ‘old unhappy far-off things, and sorrows long ago.’  Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has produced two heavy volumes, styled by him ‘The Real Shelley.’  The real Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology.  He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you ‘a damned Atheist’ in the post-office at Pisa.  He finds that you had ‘a little turned-up nose,’ a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the world.  To be in harmony with your nose, you were a ‘phenomenal’ liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of self-approbation—­in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.  Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, ‘a bad old man.’  But enough of this