LIST of leaves removed from Laon and Cythna and re-
printed with alterations in order to convert that book
into The Revolt of Islam.

Title-page.

Pages XXI and XXII (the end of the Preface).1

XXXIII and XXXIV (the fly-title Laon and Cythna, with quotation

Pages.

some passages

1 Mr. Rossetti (p. cr of his Memoir) says the changes affected ".
of the preface" in case of misconception, I may add that nothing in the
preface is cancelled or altered except the final paragraph, which simply dis-
appears with its footnote. See pp. 97 & 98.

II.

SHELLEY'S REVISED COPY OF "LAON AND CYTHNA."

In the foregoing Appendix on Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam, it has been stated that the copy from which the text has been edited in the present edition was presumably the one referred to by Peacock as having been marked by Mr. Ollier at the places considered by him objectionable; and, as it is certainly the copy worked upon by Shelley to meet the publisher's views, I do not see that there can be any reasonable doubt on the other point. The foot-notes, throughout the poem, furnish pretty full particulars of this most interesting relic, which it has been my good fortune to bring to light; but I think it well to give in the form of an appendix a less disjointed account of a volume which is really an important historical document, if it be true that our greatest poets are our greatest and most influential men, or, as Shelley himself puts it, that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

I know of few incidents in the history of literature more closely bordering on the tragic, without being actually tragical, than this dead-set made upon a great poet, who conceived that he had a gospel to the alleviation of the wrongs and

preach with a view to sufferings of humanity,

and who, as a dying man, desired most earnestly to leave some substantial record of what, as he deemed, it was not to be permitted him to go on delivering in person. That Shelley was not really a dying man, but only thought so by himself and certain others whose opinion ought to have been worth something, does not affect the extreme painfulness of the situation: according to the letter of

180

What is that Power (v.

1

VI.

"What sheni God Some moon-struck sophist stood

Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown
Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood
The Form he saw and worshipped was his own,
His likeness in the world's vast mirror shewn ;
And 'twere an innocent dream, but that a faith

Nursed by fear's dew of poison, grows thereon, that Power has

And that men say, Gadhaa appointed Death

A

to wreak immortal wrath.

chosen

лл

༨

Custom, domestic sway, aye, all that brings

Man's free-born soul beneath the oppressor's heel,

Are his strong ministers, and that the stings

Of death will make the wise his vengeance feel,

Tho' truth and virtue arm their hearts with tenfold steel.

#Men say

that they themselves have Head &

which

Jeen,

Orknown from other who have know such things A Shade a

Head, earth & Heaven jehmun

Worlds an invisible rod

Godwin already quoted, he considered himself dying, and poured his most fervent convictions into the ready mould of a poem which, if not a perfect work, was an unprecedented and truly remarkable work, full of splendour of imagination, fire of speech, purity of aspiration, and sublime disinterestedness. The question of mistaken views does not affect the matter one iota: here was this poem ready to appear before the world,-when suddenly the author was informed that it must be altered in some of its most vital particulars, or be discredited by the withdrawal of the publisher's name; and, under extreme pressure, he altered it in those vital particulars,-wittingly but unwillingly mangled it as a work of art, and let it go forth to the world, a monument fore-doomed as it were to crumble into ruin before he whom it was designed to commemorate should be well beneath the earth. It is the good fortune of humanity that Shelley was not a dying man, that he lived to erect for himself a far more glorious monument than the unmutilated Laon and Cythna, in the noble series of works with which he followed that hapless book, given out as it were by a god maimed and shackled; but the very series of works which he lived to leave us confers half its interest on the semi-tragic episode of the cancelling of Laon and Cythna, the living record1 of which episode has been lost to sight for nearly sixty years, to come to light again now in the fulness of that fame so tardily accorded by the poet's countrymen, but at length beyond all possibility of dispute or cavil.

It is not my business here to analyse, appraise, or criticize the poem whose creation shared the occupation of Shelley's mind with that harassing suit in Chancery, the result of

1 To afford an idea of the general appearance of the pages worked upon in manuscript, a fac-simile of one of those pages has been prepared with

the most laudable care by Mr. G. I. F. Tupper, of Scott's Chambers, Eastcheap, and is inserted opposite.