rgan, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of 'old unhappy far-off
things, and _sorrows_ long ago.' Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old
stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him 'The Real Shelley.' The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman
so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle
that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you 'a damned Atheist' in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had 'a little turned-up nose,' a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a 'phenomenal' liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, 'a bad
old man.' But enough of this inopportune brawler. For Humanity, of which
you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of
Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly--as slowly as doom came on Jupiter
in your 'Prometheus,' but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled,
perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will
read. by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse,
the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not
wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek)
make life worth enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky,
and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and
eclipse, he will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that
are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens. In
Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your
'voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and perhaps more deathless
than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human
spirit.

XVIII. To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet de Chambre du Roi.

Monsieur,--With what awe