est when the urgency of her
imagination leaves her no leisure either to display her learning
or adorn her style. She herself calls _Valperga_ a "child of
mighty slow growth," and Shelley adds that it was "raked out of
fifty old books." Mrs. Shelley, always an industrious student,
made a conscientious survey of original sources before fashioning
her story of mediaeval Italy, and she is hampered by the
exuberance of her knowledge. The novel is not a romance of
terror; but Castruccio, though his character is sketched from
authentic documents, seems towards the end of the story to
resemble the picturesque villain who numbered among his ancestry
Milton's Satan. He has "a majestic figure and a countenance
beautiful but sad, and tarnished by the expression of pride that
animated it." Beatrice, the gifted prophetess who falls deep in
love with Castruccio, ends her days in the dungeons of the
Inquisition. Mrs. Shelley's aim, however, is not to arouse fear,
but to trace the gradual deterioration of Castruccio's character
from an open-hearted youth to a crafty tyrant. The blunt remarks
of Godwin, who revised the manuscript, are not unjust, but fall
with an ill grace from the pen of the author of _St. Leon_: "It
appears in reading, that the first rule you prescribed was: 'I
will let it be long.' It contains the quantity of four volumes of
_Waverley_. No hard blow was ever hit with a woodsaw."[121]

In _The Last Man_, which appeared in 1825, Mrs. Shelley attempted
a stupendous theme, no less then a picture of the devastation of
the human race by plague and pestilence. She casts her
imagination forward into the twenty-first century, when the last
king of England has abdicated the throne and a republic is
established. Very wisely, she narrows the interest by
concentrating on the pathetic fate of a group of friends who are
among the last survivors, and the story becomes an idealised
record of her own sufferings. The description of the loneliness
of the bereft has a personal note, and reminds us of her journal,
where she expresses the sorrow of being herself the last
survivor, and of feeling like a "cloud from which the light of
sunset has passed."[122] Raymond, who dies in an attempt to place
the standard of Greece in Stamboul, is a portrait of Byron; and
Adrian, the late king's son, who finally becomes Protector, is
clearly modelled on Shelley. Yet in spite of these personal
reminiscences, their characters lack distinctness. Idris,