y
beautiful figure of a drowned youth in a state of nudity, though
Shelley's body was naturally found clothed when it was recovered on the
seabeach--indeed it is recorded that he had a volume of Keats and a
Sophocles in his pocket. This figure is placed in a singular shrine,
lighted by a dome, that somehow contrives to suggest a mixture between
a swimming-bath and the smoking-room of a hotel. Well, it may be said
that the least we can do is to give posthumous honour to those whom we
bullied and derided in their lifetime. A memorial placed in a seat of
learning and education is a sort of stimulus to the young men who are
trained there to go and do likewise; but do the worthy men who placed
this memorial at Oxford really wish their students to emulate the
example of Shelley? If a sensitive young man of wild ideas went up to
Oxford now, how would he be treated? Probably nowadays some virtuous
and enthusiastic young tutor would feel a certain sense of
responsibility for the young man. He would endeavour to influence him;
he would implore him to play games, to go to lectures, to attend early
chapel. He would do his best to check any symptom of originality or
free thought. He would try to make him dutiful and orthodox, and to
discourage all his fantastic theories.

Which of these eminently respectable gentlemen who have brought before
the public the necessity of commemorating two great poets are on the
lookout for talent of the kind that Keats and Shelley exhibited? How
many of them, if they came across a latter-day young poet, indolent,
unconventional, crude, fantastic, would encourage him to be true to his
ideas and to work out his own salvation on his own lines? Which of
them, if they had been confronted with our two poets in the flesh,
would have encouraged Keats to be Keats and Shelley to be Shelley?
Would they not rather have done their best to inculcate into them their
own tamer conceptions of culture and righteousness?

Of course there is something impressive in the posthumous fame of these
two men of genius collecting in their wake a crowd of adoring
respectabilities, like the people in the German story who touch the
magic spear carried by the young hero, and are unable to withdraw their
hands, but trot grotesquely behind their conqueror through street and
market-place. The melancholy part of the situation is that one feels
that these excellent people, for all their admiration, have not learnt
the real lesson of th