window, and fired at him again. A second struggle took place. More pistols were discharged. Shelley struck at the intruder with a sword. There was a fight for the sword, which the assassin had almost succeeded in seizing when a servant burst into the room, and again he made his escape. The story is told in a letter from the first Mrs. Shelley; and nothing can be more striking than her account of the terror and dismay of the whole family, and of the nervous system of her husband entirely overturned by the horrors of the night. By the irresistible evidence of circumstances both these stories are disproved. Mrs. Shelley no doubt was giving what she believed to be a perfectly true account of what she herself had witnessed. But she did not see the supposed assassin at all. Probably she may have heard a noise as if some such fight, as her husband afterwards described to her, were actually taking place. Pistols were certainly fired; but they were fired by Shelley himself. He had been brooding over the unpaternal plot against his life and liberty till his heated brain conjured into visible existence the tool who was to put it in execution. He fought with his enemy with sword and pistol, as Luther hurled the readiest weapon he could lay his hands on at the fiend whose bodily presence startled him in the Wartburg. But his eyes, like Luther's in this case, were made the fools of his imagination. The murderer who attacked, and his friend Williams who warned him, were both alike the very painting of his fear.'

'The man,' says Coleridge, 'who mistakes his thoughts for persons and things is mad.' And Shelley's hallucinations, though not to be confounded with what is usually called insanity, are certainly not compatible with perfect soundness of mind. They were the result of an excessive sensibility, which, only a little more severely strained, would have overturned reason altogether. It has been said that the horror of his wife's death produced some such effect; and that, for a time at least, he was actually insane. Lady Shelley says nothing about this, and we have no explicit statement of the fact by any authoritative biographer. But it is not in itself improbable, and there are not wanting in his own writings indications of such a calamity. We cannot tell how much of the description of the maniac in Julian and Maddalo' may not be taken from the history of his own mind. There are other poems which suggest the same observation. And it is certain that there were times when the mere intensity of his emotions and physical sensations was inconsistent with either mental or bodily health. On one occasion, for example, the sensitiveness of the organ of sight was so distressing, that he complained

Y 2

complained of the microscopic distinctness with which the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees presented them selves to him. He was obliged to pause in writing down his recollections of a dream, 'overcome with thrilling horror.' He had to rush pale and agitated from the room, where Lord Byron was reading aloud Christabel,' with so vivid and horrible a reality it had burst upon him, that sight to dream of, not to see,' the bosom and the side of the Lady Geraldine. All this was partly owing, no doubt, to mere physical illness; not improbably to vegetarianism. He would live for weeks on tea, and bread and butter, and lemonade. A disordered stomach was of course the consequence of this detestable diet, and his bodily disorder exasperated the morbid sensibility of his imagination. He was generally well and cheerful when he was obliged to live on what he could get' at country inns; and Mr. Peacock records with satisfaction the success of his own simple prescription of three mutton chops. This was during a boating excursion on the Thames. He lived in my way,' says Mr. Peacock, 'for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.' But though his natural excitability might be aggravated, it was by no means created by bodily illness. All his emotions were equally intense, whether they were those of pleasure or of pain: his joys were 'aching joys and dizzy raptures;' and his suffering was anguish and despair.

The quivering sensibility which Shelley has often described is the most striking characteristic of his nature, as it shows itself in his poetry. And in this respect his poetry and his life are identical. There seems to have been hardly a moment in his existence in which he did not fancy that he was assailed by some exquisite pain from one quarter or another, from within or from without. There is hardly a point at which he comes in contact with the world without being wounded to the quick. But this is owing to the imperfection of his sympathy with human nature. There was nothing to relieve or to interest him in the rough every-day struggles, anxieties, and enjoyments of everyday men and women, because he neither understood nor was capable of perceiving them. The abstract passions which the genius of Spenser loved to represent in allegory-Pain, and Strife, and Hate, and Revenge, 'trembling Fear,' and 'lamenting Sorrow' these things, the purest abstractions, formed the whole of humanity to him, and the contemplation of the purest abstractions excited in him such emotions as the most pathetic realities of life can hardly excite in other men. He was unha ppily

happily destitute of the one quality which might have enabled him to understand, as he never did, the spirit of human dealings, and would certainly have proved the best sedative for his overexcited sensibility. He had no humour. His sense of the cruelty which lies in the ridicule of an uncouth figure, an empty stomach, or a threadbare suit of clothes, would have sealed his eyes for ever to the infinite love and sympathy with humanity which alone can imagine a Peter Peebles or a Dominie Sampson. For he never seems to have felt or known that tenderness is more inseparable from humour, than from the finest sensibility with which poet was ever gifted. To sympathise with others is a lesson which the genuine humourist teaches better than any other preceptor. Sir Walter says very finely of the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' that we bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature. But far less gentle humourists than Goldsmith merit the same benediction. They reconcile us to human nature, because they teach us to understand it; and whether as a poet or a reformer, Shelley's capital defect was that he understood nothing so little. He sometimes shows us a radiant world of dazzling arms, and glorious eyes, and floating locks; sometimes a gloomy region of pale murderers, and lying ministers, and cruel priests; but in neither of these do we breathe the same atmosphere as that in which the human creatures of our actual earth live, and work, and have their being. His opinions accordingly are never applicable to the real concerns of living men.

Such a mind may be gifted with the highest poetical genius, but it is evident that it differs as widely as possible from the all-comprehensive spirit of the genius essentially dramatic, and accordingly there is no better illustration of the views we have expressed than Shelley's tragedy of the 'Cenci.' Of this play Lady Shelley asserts that it comes nearer to Shakspeare than any other writer has approached since Shakspeare's time.' If this were merely a vague way of expressing admiration of the poet's genius, it might well be justified by appealing to the power with which the characters of Beatrice and her father seize upon our imagination, and the deep tragical effect of their appalling story. But when a dramatist is said to come near Shakspeare, it is implied, we presume, that he has presented his characters and handled his story in the same manner as Shakspeare would have done; and no criticism of the 'Cenci' could be more inaccurate. There are, indeed, many little touches throughout the poem which show a very careful study of Macbeth and King Lear. The scene where Beatrice and Lucrezia listen for Cenci's murder is an example.

But

But Shelley's poem does not contain the elements in which his own nature was deficient, and these are precisely the elements for which Shakspeare's plays are most remarkable. He could not represent the conflicting passions by which men's souls are agitated who commit great crimes, or who revenge them, for his own undivided mind had never been the scene of a struggle. Shakspeare in his most passionate characters never fails to show the complexity of the human mind. Shelley deals with nothing but the essential passion. Cenci is the personification of wickedness, and the poet has shown us no other aspect and no other attribute of his character. Beatrice is the personification merely of suffering and unutterable wrong. But it did not lie in Shelley's mind to depict any conflict of motives. Scruples and misgivings were all unknown to him, and therefore they are unknown to Beatrice.

If this view of Shelley's character as a purely impulsive one be correct; if he acted throughout without restraint on the impulses of the heart; that heart must have been a noble one, unless the evidence of all his friends who loved him is absolutely worthless. But the good and the evil of his life were limited by his own disposition. If his impulse led him astray, he knew of no external law which demanded obedience in opposition to that. Therefore it was that when his affection for his wife had grown cold, or been displaced by passionate love for another, she was abandoned without mercy. He who has no fixed standard of morality can have no insight into the real nature of moral distinctions. This was conspicuously the case with Shelley. He is always confounding that which is right with that which is merely customary, and anathematising it accordingly. And he gravely permits himself to say of the most infamous of all crimes that it may be right or wrong according to circumstances. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism.' He did not see that, whatever the defiance of human opinion may be, the defiance of a moral law can never be either glorious or heroic, and that the general condemnation of mankind can hardly make it so. He thought it was noble for a man to brave the opinion of men, without pausing to ask himself whether that opinion was right or wrong. His own remarkable courage in exposing himself to invective was, perhaps, partly owing to this kind of oversight. It did not occur to him that the attacks of his antagonists might, by any possibility, be the honest expression of outraged morality and insulted faith. It was enough that they were a multitude and that he was

alone.

alone. The mere circumstance of being abused was in his eyes a testimony to his worth. This was why he called himself an atheist. I took up the word,' he said, as a knight took up a gauntlet.'

We must not leave the subject, however, without saying that this word is inapplicable to his later opinions. He soon became dissatisfied with the materialism which we have seen him expressing at Oxford, and which he erroneously attributed to Locke. It was this materialism which conducted him to atheism, by very intelligible stages, and it is not to be supposed that he retained the religious doctrine much longer than the philosophy on which it was founded. Even in Queen Mab' there are indications of the very different belief of which his later writings are full-a belief that, instead of annihilating Divinity, finds Divinity in everything. The peculiar modification of pantheism which he adopted is difficult to grasp, and we think it by no means necessary that we should try to explain it. It will be better, we think, to quote from Adonaïs," one of the most intelligible, and certainly one of the most musical expressions of this faith:

"Peace, Peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep

He hath awakened from the dream of life

"Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone
Threading itself where'er that power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own:
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear,

Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

The