the volumes seen through the press by himself is infamously printed. Generally speaking, however, where there is no manuscript extant, the text as printed in Shelley's life-time must be accepted as the nearest obtainable approach to an authority; and even when there is a manuscript extant, it is by no means a final authority as a matter of course. The relative value of a poem as printed in Shelley's lifetime and as written out by him must depend not only upon the revision of the press by the author or his substitute, but upon the technical quality of the printer's work, and the amount of care bestowed upon the manuscript. If the printed version is obviously a careless piece of typography, it loses much of its authority even if seen through the press by Shelley himself. This is preeminently the case with Laon and Cythna; and the extant manuscript fragments tend to shew that the printer had not one of Shelley's best manuscripts to work from. Alastor, on the contrary, seems to me a very creditable piece of printer's work, on the whole; and, if a manuscript of that volume were discovered, I should not expect it to authorize us in more than two important verbal alterations. The Rosalind and Helen volume, again, of which proof sheets were certainly not seen by Shelley, is inferior to the Alastor volume as an authority; but probably the manuscript of the eclogue itself would be found very hasty and inconsistent in the matters of detail in which alone the printed text is suspicious to any great extent.

These three instances are merely typical of the kind of

consideration applicable to every one of Shelley's volumes; and to reprint the series of volumes published by and for him just as they stand, without correcting palpable errors, would thus be an inadequate attempt to approach the genuine text. I have therefore not scrupled to remove many small blemishes of three classes, (1) those for which I think the printer responsible, (2) those for which I think it likely Shelley is responsible, but would have removed if he had observed them, and (3) those for which I think Shelley's substitute for the time being responsible. Every alteration has been made simply because I have thought the original was not what Shelley meant it to be, or would have wished it to be; and every alteration is specified, as far as I am aware, and unless there be accidental errors of the press in getting this edition into type.

In one small matter, that of Latin, Greek, and Italian quotations, I have not sought to bring any scholastic interference to bear on what I have thought was deliberately written by Shelley: what have seemed to be printers' errors in these quotations, I have specified and removed; but in other cases I have not thought it worth while to supply or correct accents and so on; because, under my own regulation, I could not do so without a note, and notes would be perhaps still more of an affliction there than elsewhere. Besides, those who know more of the grammar of foreign tongues than Shelley did will not be misled, those who know less will not be annoyed.

It is easy enough to go on the assumption that every

thing in a text is right, and reprint it in fac-simile; and it is not much less easy to go on the opposite assumption that everything a little out of one's ordinary experience is wrong, and alter it forthwith. But the difficulty, in such texts as Shelley's, is to discriminate between unintentional inaccuracies in printing or writing and intentional eccentricities of style, metre, punctuation, and orthography. In my opinion the least correct of all the volumes published by Shelley during his life-time is very far pleasanter to read, and very much nearer the fact of his intention, than any of the posthumous texts that have been published up to the present time. The chief reason of this I take to be a want of veneration on the part of his editors,-a failure to perceive that one man is not as good as another, and that Shelley's eccentricities, even his errors if errors there be, must be far more interesting to intelligent humanity at large than the punctilious correctness of intelligent mediocrity. Even if the aggregate genius of the present generation were brought to bear upon the task of systematizing Shelley's style and grammar and so on, we might perhaps not obtain anything comparable to the real Shelley; and I can conceive no better service to do to his memory than the very humble one of attempting to restore in every instance what he wrote or meant to write. I have therefore adopted as a principle, that it is better to leave unchanged any doubtful passage, about which there may be several opinions, and which is not, as a matter of certainty, corrupt. There is a wide distinction between recording a suggestion in a

note and making an alteration in the tèxt, and I would ask readers of this edition to consider as criticism merely, and not as emendations, all suggestions of possible change that they find in the foot-notes. Their being in the notes and not in the text is intended, and will doubtless be understood, as an indication that they are offered for consideration, and not laid down as safe emendations.

There can be no reasonable doubt that, from one cause and another, the current texts of Shelley are very corrupt; but the course of my studies has led me to think that the original editions are not nearly so corrupt as they are generally said to be, or as might be expected, and also that much has been called corrupt which is really nothing but elliptical, or unusual in point of grammar, of construction, of orthography, or of punctuation. Hitherto, in my opinion, Shelley's editors have not made sufficient allowance for unusual features of his work which were deliberate, or which he would have seen no reason, as far as we can judge, for altering. To take as an example a single curious instance of seeming inconsistency, I would draw attention to his use of the interjection O or Oh. Throughout his works and Oh are used interchangeably without any apparent rule; and, more than this, they are sometimes followed by a comma, sometimes by no stop at all, sometimes by a note of exclamation. To me it appears most objectionable to interfere with this irregularity. Whatever Shelley's view on this small but important word may have been, I do not presume to think he unerringly carried out

that view in writing; but O is so constantly used within a line or two of Oh, that I cannot think he would have left so many of these divergences of practice had they been wholly unintentional. Of the half-dozen different ways of using the two forms of interjection, no two, if minutely considered, are of precisely the same metric value; and it is hardly fantastic to suppose that a slightly different intonation or stress is indicated by these slightly different interjections, though Shelley may have been wholly unconscious of any intention in the matter, and have simply written in each case what seemed to convey the weight of thought and word his mind was uttering.

The bearing on metric effect of what at first sight may appear to be mere slovenlinesses of grammar, orthography, and punctuation, is not easy to estimate in the case of so subtle a master of music as Shelley: I suspect his punctuation often depended more on euphony than on grammar; and it must always be intrinsically safer to leave the text as it is in these minute particulars than to tamper with it, unless there be a strong presumption that it has become corrupt since it left his hands. At all events, not only has this seemed to me safer and more in accordance with editorial obligations; but I have even thought it well worth while to preserve in the text, and not merely in the notes, so much of the minute history of Shelley's mind as is unfolded to us in the peculiarities and inconsistencies of his orthography &c.,-at least when it has seemed likely that the orthography &c. were his, and deliberately adopted.