ng. The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast
of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and
therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of
his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of
conviction and maintenance, in the midst of all these phenomena of
our universe, telluric and uranological, as the test of everything
valuable in human character and morals. And thus it has come about,
that genius, with its native instincts of reason, truth, and common
sense, is doomed to pay the penalty of its preeminence and its
divergencies, and suffer at the hands of friends and enemies alike,
from the show of those false appearances, insincerities,
equivocations, which are its natural and proper antipathies.

Since the foregoing observations were written, the writer has seen a
certain corroboration of them in the interesting "Memorials of
Shelley," recently edited by Lady Shelley, and published by Ticknor
and Fields. For, in the preface of this book, she takes occasion to
speak of the misstatements of all those who have hitherto written on
the subject of the poet, instancing the fallacies of Captain Medwin's
book, and also, in an especial manner, though vaguely enough, the
incorrectness, amounting to caricature, put forth by a later
biographer, one of Shelley's oldest friends,--by which she evidently
means to indicate Mr. Hogg. At the same time, the nature of her
Ladyship's book is, involuntarily, an additional evidence of the
difficulty that seems fated to attend all attempts to set forth or
set right the character of Shelley. Indeed, she appears to be in some
degree conscious of this; for she says, apologetically, that she has
published the "Memorials" for the special purpose of neutralizing the
misstatements and spirit of Mr. Hogg's work, and also lets us know
that the time is not yet come for the publication of other and more
important matter calculated to do justice to the character of Percy
Bysshe Shelley.

It is only natural to think that Lady Shelley is not the person to
write the biography of the poet, whose relationship to her is such a
close one. She would far more willingly leave the events of his
troubled life forever unremembered. Indeed, when we find, that, in
her long widowhood of thirty years, Mrs. Shelley shrank from the task
of writing the life of her husband, we can the more easily understand
why any member of his family, especially a la