as follows: 1. Familiar poems in the style of Anstey's "Bath Guide," the first two in the volume, already mentioned as by Elizabeth Shelley. 2. A cycle of little poems evidently addressed by Shelley to Harriet Grove in the summer of 1810 (Nos. 3-7, 12, 13). 3. Tales of terror and wonder in the style of Monk Lewis (Nos. 14-17). 4. A few miscellaneous pieces (Nos. 8-11). Stockdale states that he recognized one of the pieces as by Monk Lewis, and that on his communicating the fact to Shelley the latter with all the ardor natural to his character expressed the warmest resentment at the imposition practised upon him by his coadjutor, and entreated me to destroy all the copies, of which about one hundred had been put in

circulation.' Dr. Garnett is unable to identify any poem as by Monk Lewis, and suggests that the plagiarized poem may be a song on Laura (No. 11). GHASTA (No. 16) is the poem mentioned by Medwin as containing a plagiarism from Chatterton. Of the value of the volume as a whole, Dr. Garnett says: It shows, at all events, that the youthful Shelley could write better verse than can be found in his novels, and that he even then possessed the feeling for melody that is rarely dissociated from more or less of endowment with the poetical faculty. Biographically, it contributes something to illustrate an obscure period of his life, and strengthens the belief that his attachment for his fair cousin was more than a passing fancy.'

Page 1. QUEEN MAB.

The unusual metrical form in which the poem is cast is described by Shelley in a letter to Hogg, February 7, 1813: I have not been able to bring myself to rhyme. The didactic is in blank heroic verse, and the description in blank lyrical measure. If an authority is of any weight in support of this singularity, Milton's Samson Agonistes, the Greek choruses, and (you will laugh) Southey's Thalaba may be adduced.' The model of the lyrical portion is, in fact, Thalaba, the cadences of which are closely reproduced in general. The motive of the poem, as is shown by the motto prefixed, is Lucretian; Shelley imagined that in attacking religion he was performing a service to humanity similar to that of the Latin poet in attacking superstition, and also that in his philosophy of nature and necessity he was following in the footsteps of the most illustrious poet who has embodied scientific conceptions in verse. The form of the tale he took from Volney, Les Ruines. The sources of his thought, both with respect to his view of the system of nature and to his reflections on human institutions and their operation on society, are developed with sufficient fulness in his own NOTES, which have attracted perhaps more attention than the poem they illustrate. These, with a few exceptions noted in the place of omission, are given below, the text being revised so as not to reproduce obvious errors; Shelley's references and extracts, except when he may have meant to paraphrase, have also been corrected; that is to say, the original editions which he himself probably used have been consulted, and the passages printed as they there occur literally; thus in the extracts from the Système de la Nature par M. Mirabaud, for example, there are many errors, but the text that Shelley had before him has been faithfully transcribed, in all cases. Much of these NOTES had been previously published by Shelley. The note, There is no God,' embodies Shelley's Oxford tract, The Necessity of Atheism, published at Worthing in 1811; the note, I will beget a Son,' embodies portions of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, printed at Barnstable, 1812, and the note, No longer now he slays, etc., was published slightly revised as A Vindication of Natural Diet, London, 1813. The fragment of Ahasuerus, referred to in the note, Ahasuerus, rise,' was picked up by Medwin (Life, i. 57), and is a modified translation of Schubart's

Der Ewige Jude, which appeared in The Ge man Museum, vol. iii, 1802.

SHELLEY'S NOTES TO QUEEN Mab. I. 242, 243:

The sun's unclouded orb

Rolled through the black concave.

Beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium or of numer ous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted. Observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8' 7" in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles. Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.

Whilst round the chariot's way
Innumerable systems rolled.

The plurality of worlds-the indefinite immensity of the Universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religions systems, or of deifving the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him.

The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light Sirius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles

To employ murder as a means of justice is an idea which a man of an enlightened mind will not dwell upon with pleasure. To march forth in rank and file, and all the pomp of streamers and trumpets, for the purpose of shooting at our fellowmen as a mark; to inflict upon them all the variety of wound and anguish; to leave them weltering in their blood; to wander over the field of desolation, and count the number of the dying and the dead, - are employments which in thesis we may maintain to be necessary, but which no good man will contemplate with gratulation and delight. A battle we suppose is won: thus truth is established, thus the cause of justice is confirmed! It surely requires no common sagacity to discern the connection between this immense heap of calamities and the assertion of truth or the maintenance of justice.

Kings and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being.

To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering and self-consequence; he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exhibitor.' — Godwin's Enquirer, Essay V.

I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood that I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is haps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion.

1 See Nicholson's Encyclopedia, art. 'Light.'

per

FALSEHOOD AND VICE

A DIALOGUE

WHILST monarchs laughed upon their thrones
To hear a famished nation's groans,
And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe
That makes its eyes and veins o'erflow, -
Those thrones, high built upon the heaps
Of bones where frenzied Famine sleeps,
Where Slavery wields her scourge of iron,
Red with mankind's unheeded gore,
And War's mad fiends the scene environ,
Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar,-
There Vice and Falsehood took their stand,
High raised above the unhappy land.

FALSEHOOD

Brother! arise from the dainty fare,
Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow;
A finer feast for thy hungry ear

Is the news that I bring of human woe.

VICE

And, secret one, what hast thou done,
To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?
I, whose career through the blasted year
Has been tracked by despair and agony.

FALSEHOOD

What have I done! - I have torn the robe
From baby Truth's unsheltered form,
And round the desolated globe
Borne safely the bewildering charm;
My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor
Have bound the fearless innocent,
And streams of fertilizing gore
Flow from her bosom's hideous rent,
Which this unfailing dagger gave—.
I dread that blood! - no more this day
Is ours, though her eternal ray

Must shine upon our grave.
Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given
To thee the robe I stole from heaven,
Thy shape of ugliness and fear
Had never gained admission here.

VICE

And know that had I disdained to toil,
But sate in my loathsome cave the while,
And ne'er to these hateful sons of heaven,
GOLD, MONARCHY and MURDER, given;
Hadst thou with all thine art essayed
One of thy games then to have played,
With all thine overweening boast,
Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost! -
Yet wherefore this dispute? - we tend,
Fraternal, to one common end;
In this cold grave beneath my feet
Will our hopes, our fears and our labors meet.

FALSEHOOD

I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth;
She smothered Reason's babes in their birth,
But dreaded their mother's eye severe,-
So the crocodile slunk off slyly in fear,
And loosed her bloodhounds from the den.
They started from dreams of slaughtered men,
And, by the light of her poison eye,
Did her work o'er the wide earth frightfully.
The dreadful stench of her torches' flare,
Fed with human fat, polluted the air.
The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries
Of the many-mingling miseries,

As on she trod, ascended high
And trumpeted my victory! -
Brother, tell what thou hast done.

VICE

I have extinguished the noonday sun
In the carnage-smoke of battles won.
Famine, murder, hell and power
Were glutted in that glorious hour

Which searchless fate had stamped for me
With the seal of her security;

For the bloated wretch on yonder throne
Commanded the bloody fray to rise;
Like me he joyed at the stifled moan
Wrung from a nation's miseries;

While the snakes, whose slime even him defiled,
In ecstasies of malice smiled.

They thought 't was theirs, but mine the deed!
Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed-
Ten thousand victims madly bleed.
They dream that tyrants goad them there
With poisonous war to taint the air.
These tyrants, on their beds of thorn,

Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame,
And with their gains to lift my name
Restless they plan from night to morn;
I-I do all; without my aid

Thy daughter, that relentless maid,
Could never o'er a death-bed urge
The fury of her venomed scourge.

FALSEHOOD

Brother, well: -the world is ours;
And whether thou or I have won,
The pestilence expectant lours
On all beneath yon blasted sun.
Our joys, our toils, our honors meet

In the milk-white and wormy winding-sheet.

A short-lived hope, unceasing care,
Some heartless scraps of godly prayer,
A moody curse, and a frenzied sleep
Ere gapes the grave's unclosing deep,
A tyrant's dream, a coward's start,
The ice that clings to a priestly heart,
A judge's frown, a courtier's smile,
Make the great whole for which we toil.
And, brother, whether thou or I
Have done the work of misery,
It little boots. Thy toil and pain,
Without my aid, were more than vain ;
And but for thee I ne'er had sate
The guardian of heaven's palace gate.

V. 1, 2:

Thus do the generations of the earth

Go to the grave and issue from the womb.

'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.'

V. 4-6:

Ecclesiastes, i. 4-7.

Even as the leaves

Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year Has scattered on the forest soil.

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings.

Suave, mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem ;
Non quia vexari quemquam 'st jucunda voluptas,
Sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.
Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
Per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli.
Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
Edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
Errare atque viam palantis quærere vitæ,
Certare ingenio. contendere nobilitate,
Noctes atque dies niti præstante labore
Ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.
O miseras hominum mentes! O pectora cæca!
Lucretius, ii. 1-14.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race. In consequence of our consideration for the precious metals one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expense of the necessaries of his neighbor; a system admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crime which never fail to characterize the two extremes of opulence and penury. A speculator takes pride to himself, as the promoter of his country's prosperity, who employs a number of hands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation. The nobleman who employs the peasants of his neighborhood in building his palaces, until 'jam pauca aratro jugera regiæ moles relinquent,' flatters himself that he has gained the title of a patriot by yielding to the impulses of vanity. The show and pomp of courts adduce the same apology for its continuance; and many a fête has been given, many a woman has eclipsed her beauty by her dress, to benefit the laboring poor and to encourage trade. Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society? The poor are set to labor, for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage, oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him: -no; for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society. No greater evidence is afforded of the wide extended and radical mistakes of civilized man than this

fact: those arts which are essential to his very being are held in the greatest contempt; employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness; 1 the jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to subsist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind.

I will not insult common sense by insisting on the doctrine of the natural equality of man. The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability; so far as it is practicable, it is desirable. That state of human society which approaches nearer to an equal partition of its benefits and evils should, cæteris paribus, be preferred; but so long as we conceive that a wanton expenditure of human labor, not for the necessities, not even for the luxuries of the mass of society, but for the egotism and ostentation of a few of its members, is defensible on the ground of public justice, so long we neglect to approximate to the redemption of the hu

man race.

Labor is required for physical, and leisure for moral improvement; from the former of these advantages the rich, and from the latter the poor, by the inevitable conditions of their respective situations, are precluded. A state which should combine the advantages of both would be subjected to the evils of neither. He that is deficient in firm health or vigorous intellect is but half a man. Hence it follows that to subject the laboring classes to unnecessary labor is wantonly depriving them of any opportunities of intellectual improvement; and that the rich are heaping up for their own mischief the disease, lassitude and ennui by which their existence is rendered an intolerable burden.

English reformers exclaim against sinecures, but the true pension list is the rent-roll of the landed proprietors. Wealth is a power usurped by the few, to compel the many to labor for their benefit. The laws which support this system derive their force from the ignorance and credulity of its victims; they are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many who are themselves obliged to purchase this preeminence by the loss of all real comfort.

The commodities that substantially contribute to the subsistence of the human species form a very short catalogue; they demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labor necessarily required to produce them were equitably divided among the poor, and, still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labor would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample. There was a time when this leisure would have been 1 See Rousseau, De l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes, note 7.

of small comparative value: it is to be hoped that the time will come when it will be applied to the most important purposes. Those hours which are not required for the production of the necessaries of life may be devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the enlarging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sources of enjoyment.

It was perhaps necessary that a period of monopoly and oppression should subsist before a period of cultivated equality could subsist. Savages perhaps would never have been excited to the discovery of truth and the invention of art but by the narrow motives which such a period affords. But surely, after the savage state has ceased and men have set out in the glorious career of discovery and invention, monopoly and oppression cannot be necessary to prevent them from returning to a state of barbarism.'. Godwin's Enquirer, Essay II. See also Political Justice, book VIII., chap. ii.

It is a calculation of this admirable author that all the conveniences of civilized life might be produced, if society would divide the labor equally among its members, by each individual being employed in labor two hours during the day.

Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.

How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered which should make