But here again there are difficulties; for occasionally we come upon divergences of practice for which there is double and conflicting authority. In such cases, if I find good reason for belief in a certain rule as recognized by Shelley, I do not hesitate to apply his rule in correction of the text even where there is manuscript authority against the change, because very often the manuscript giving such authority is either hasty or seemingly immature, and the change such as he might reasonably be expected to make on proof-sheets, or whenever he discovered the departure from his own rule. The greatest difficulties of this kind are in the minute details of Laon and Cythna, of which difficulties examples will be found discussed in the notes in this edition.

Indeed, to carry out this view of the service required towards the text of Shelley, it has been necessary to insert a great number of notes on variations of detail, trivial in themselves, but often involving questions of principle not readily apparent without making the notes longer than they are. It should therefore be premised that those to whom details are an affliction must not expect to find one note in a dozen interesting,-the bulk of the notes being merely in furtherance of the twofold view that the absolute text of the original editions ought to be accessible to every one, and yet that the text of a library edition should not include obvious errors of the press, or inadvertences, whatever it may be necessary to record in foot-notes. On similar grounds it has seemed desirable to afford all

possible bibliographical information, so that students may be in the best attainable position to study the original editions, and supplement, confirm, or controvert my conclusions on textual questions. And if the result has been the production of an edition of Shelley with much dry detail in the notes, that result is owing to my conviction that more service was to be done to the cause in this way than in any other, such as an unscrupulous remodelling of the text and a free addition of expository or explanatory notes.

In order to avoid many of these very uninteresting details, I have often left the punctuation or orthography of the text as I found it, even in cases where I have not been convinced of its being precisely as Shelley left it, but where the matter was of very little importance, and could not possibly be decided, so that, had I attempted any change, I must have burdened the page with a note, with no corresponding advantage. So many of the changes in punctuation made, but not specified, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and discussed in the notes to the present edition, alter the sense of the passages without letting the reader know what has been done, that I could see no way of guaranteeing "no important change" but that of specifying every change however minute. I therefore adopted that rule; and the only exception to it is the practice in regard to past tenses and participles in ed. In this case it is sufficient to say here, once for all, that the accents have been supplied wherever there was no doubt that the final syllable was meant to be separately sounded.

This is almost always decided beyond a doubt by the scansion; but there are some few cases in which a line will scan equally well with the final ed mute or sounded. As far as I am aware Shelley never supplied the accents, so that whenever one occurs it is to be reckoned as a minute deviation from the original text.

The reproduction of the title-pages, tables of contents, &c., of the original editions will, I feel sure, be acceptable; and, in reprinting Shelley's various volumes in chronological order, and with the contents arranged as issued in his life-time, there seems to me to be a marked artistic advantage. It is true that, in adhering to this principle I am debarred from inserting where it might best be inserted the newly discovered sonnet from the Italian, mentioned in note 1 at page 57 of this volume; but on the other hand there is a decided interest in knowing what Shelley thought appropriate as minor poems to append to his larger ones. This knowledge might of course be afforded even in a rearranged edition; but the effect must be lost; and in such an instance as that of the poems issued with Prometheus Unbound, the effect is simply wonderful. Never since the age dominated by the genius of Eschylus was anything of like lyric exaltation produced in dramatic literature; and never, perhaps, since, in our poet's own words, "God first dawned on Chaos," had there been any human soul that "panted forth a flood of rapture so divine” as that incomparable group of lyrics which follow the incomparable fourth act of Prometheus,-still sounding in diverse

echoing keys and under infinite variations of melody the same intense intellectual passion, the same most holy love of humanity, the same godlike perception of ideal beauty. A "flood of rapture" still more divine remained to crown the work of the master in Epipsychidion, and a still more giant grasp on the combined resources of the lyric and dramatic crafts was still to be shewn in Hellas,-the one put forth by itself, the other with a single lyric of astonishing fitness; but the fact remains that the selection and arrangement of lyrics to accompany Prometheus was a thing unequalled in perceptiveness; and in that case, at all events, the highest importance is to be attached to the preservation of Shelley's order among these lesser poems,-lesser only than greater things of his own, and greater than anything lyric to be found elsewhere in modern literature.

In regard to the posthumous poems generally the case is different; and it is at the option of every editor to arrange these to the best of his judgment, according to the knowledge accessible to him, and the special requirements of his edition. Of at least one point, however, I have no doubt,-namely that everything distinctly immature should form a separate chronology; and it is for that reason that the immature Queen Mab, instead of preceding the mature Alastor, in which Shelley's real career begins, is treated as the climax of the juvenile period, and reserved for an appendix. Shelley lived to protest against its being published at all; but it has now become an

inalienable part of the world's possessions; and all we can do out of respect to his memory is to assign to it the position which he assigned, that of a juvenile work.

As regards both the juvenile works and all the other volumes published or printed while Shelley was alive, there were two courses open to me beside the one I have chosen; and both of them would have been very much easier: the one, to reprint with mechanical exactness and without remark the original editions, still remains to be done if it be thought worth while; but I do not imagine it will be thought worth while, as an exact reprint of the originals is embodied in the present text and notes: the other, to rewrite Shelley's works according to the editor's view of how he ought to have written them, has been sufficiently pursued elsewhere.

Why there should be any need to do more than simply reprint those poems which were printed in the first instance under Shelley's own supervision, is a curious question, and one which needs to be considered carefully and fully. We have heard enough and too much about Shelley's being "a careless writer,"-enough because such truth as there is in this current assertion has been long ago laid to heart by those who are discerning in such matters, and too much because very few are discerning, and the text that cost the greatest lyric poet of England infinite pains to elaborate has been held fair ground whereon every clumsy and thoughtless emendator (or rather innovator) might do just what suited his fancy.