There are better examples to emulate than those who have only refrained from depraving or tyrannizing over their subjects, because they remembered the fates of Pisistratus' and Tarquin. If generosity and virtue should have dominion over your actions, my lessons can hardly be needed; but if the discipline of a narrow education may have extinguished all thirst of genuine excellence, all desire of becoming illustrious for the sake of the illustriousness of the actions which I would incite you to perform. Should you be thus-and no pains have been spared to make you so-make your account with holding your crown on this condition of deserving it alone. And that this may be evident' I will expose to you the state in which the nation will be found at your accession, for the very dead know more than the counsellors by whom you will be surrounded. The English nation does not, as has been imagined, inherit freedom from its ancestors. Public opinion rather than positive institution maintains it in whatever portion it may now possess, which is in truth the acquirement of their own incessant struggles. As yet the gradations by which this freedom has advanced have been contested step by step. 1 Pisistratus is probably a slip for the sons of Pisistratus. 2 Cancelled reading, But if these motives. * Cancelled readings, lessons for discipline; and is to prevent for may have extinguished in the next line. + Cancelled reading, evident to you. 5 In the MS. them is struck out in favour of it. 6 Cancelled readings, and this has been, and in the same line conquest for acquirement. [In the Relics of Shelley Mr. Garnett published a letter from Mrs. Shelley to Mrs. Leigh Hunt, wherein mention is made of Shelley's "Essay on Devils." Mr. Garnett said in a note (page 131), “This amusing fragment was prepared for publication in 1839, with the rest of Shelley's prose works, but withdrawn, for reasons which seven other essayists have since conspired to deprive of much of their weight." The preparations went so far as setting up in type, with such omissions as pre-Essays-and-Reviews expediency seemed to demand. In a proof, however, which was preserved, Mrs. Shelley reinserted the omitted passages: this proof is in the possession of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, who have kindly allowed me the privilege of first giving to the world this remarkable example of Shelley's lighter mood. The essay is given from the interpolated proof, the MS. not being at hand. Adverting to the remarks quoted at page 376 of this volume, on the subject of a "Lucianic essay," it is to be observed that, in the essay on the Devil and Devils, as preserved, there is no explicit setting-forth of the thesis that the Holy Ghost and then God the Father follow the Devil in departing from the popular belief. It is true that the Devil is described as the weak point, outwork, and so on, of the Christian faith; and had the essay been finished the line indicated might probably have been followed. It seems possible that the preceding fragment, The Elysian Fields, may be a portion of an essay dealing with these matters independently in another method, or that Shelley began to approach this subject in the form of a Lucianic epistle, and then rejected that form in favour of the present.-H. B. F.] ON THE DEVIL, AND DEVILS. To determine the nature and functions of the Devil, is no contemptible province of the European Mythology. Who, or what he is, his origin, his habitation, his destiny, and his power, are subjects which puzzle the most acute theologians, and on which no orthodox person can be induced to give a decisive opinion. He is the weak place of the popular religion-the vulnerable belly of the crocodile. The Manichæan philosophy respecting the origin and government of the world, if not true, is at least an hypothesis conformable to the experience of actual facts. To suppose that the world was created and is now superintended by two spirits of a balanced power and opposite dispositions, is simply a personification of the struggle which we experience within ourselves, and which we perceive in the operations of external things as they affect us, between good and evil. The supposition that a good spirit is, or hereafter will be, superior, is a personification of the principle of hope, and that thirst for |