tage in the character of Shakespeare's
plays, under the figured name of Cooks." "The character of Shakespeare's
plays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking
about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some
sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would
naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to
the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever "an actor in
Shakespearean drama." At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic
praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an
indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some
extent followed the events of Shelley's life until the end, he had filled
in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book
is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with
gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts
rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of
Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--a
student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of
Shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley again
and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him
"Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who
brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography
over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow
express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great
extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_
and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old
woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen
quotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion:

He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to
swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled
over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms,
and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from
smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by
a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation
existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening part