THE JULIAN SHELLEY
Shelley's Works. Vol. 9. Edited By Roger Ingpen and Walter Peck. (Bean. E3 3s. per vol.)
Tins second volume of Mr. Ingpen's monumental edition of Shelley—Volume 9 of the set—contains the letters of the poet written between June 1812 and December 1818. This was perhaps the most interesting part of his life. At the beginning of it he was still that rather vague, slippery-minded youth, who wrote the fulsome letters to the detestable Eliza- beth Hitchener. Then came the residence in Wales, and the attempt on his life by a half savage sheep-farmer. In October 1813 we find Harriet, beautiful, capricious, too impressionable girl, writing to a friend "A little more than two years have passed since I made my first visit here to be united to Mr. Shelley. To me they have been the longest and happiest years of my life." In the same letter she says of their daughter Ianthe, "My darling babe is quite well, and very much improved." Yet within a few months all was disaster between man and wife. Under the influence of her sinister sister, she gave up all efforts to share Shelley's intellectual enthusiasms and became • cold and perverse. The startled poet—only a boy of 21—at this critical time encountered Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin. The result was an earthquake in the realm of the spirit. Peacock, his friend, says : "Nothing that I eve, read in tale or history could ever present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring when I called on him. Between his old feelings for Harriet, from whom he was not then separated, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, gestures and speech, the state of a mind suffering, "like a little Kingdom, the nature of an insurree. tion." His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress' disordem, He caught Up a bottle of laudanum and Said,'" I never part from this."
Then came the elopement with Mary and the estrangement from Godwin, her stepfather. Most noticeable is the chants in his character under the influence of that wonderful gill His affectations- depart, and the underlying intellectual vigoto shines forth. From that time he became the mature genii', and we discover in the rest of this volume the magnificent letters from Italy and the Alps, some of the noblest descript,v prose in our language. Mr. Ingpen's footnotes, as usual, are full of meat. He is a master of this succinct art.
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