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PREFACE.

BY THE EDITOR.

IN the present volume is given the residue of Shelley's Poetical Works arranged according to the plan laid down in the prefaces to the first and third volumes, and dealt with on the principles there stated. It will be seen that the greater part of the volume consists of mature posthumous poems, original and translated; and that it is only in the section devoted to Juvenilia that we come back upon volumes issued by Shelley in his lifetime.

It seems necessary to add a few remarks to those already made in the former prefaces. First, as regards the complement of the posthumous poems, it should be stated. that, wherever I have noticed certain words spelt otherwise than there is reason to believe Shelley spelt them, I have restored what I think his spelling: thus, inchant, being the spelling of that word for which I have found authority, that orthography has been adopted whenever enchant has been observed in the posthumous poems; and the same remark applies to inwoven and enwoven. I have also, whenever the word passed has come under my notice, substituted past,-knowing that such was Shelley's

habitual way of spelling the word. But, although these changes are made in the mature posthumous poems, they are not as a matter of course made in such of the Juvenilia as Shelley printed himself: there, the original forms are preserved, unless for some special reason given.

In the preface to the first volume, it was pointed out that Shelley's quotations from foreign tongues had not been interfered with; and the same plan has been followed throughout. In regard to the epigram on the title-page of Adonais and the verses from Moschus at the head of the preface to that poem, as well as the quotations from Homer and Plutarch in the Notes to Queen Mab, the exact Greek scholar will find much to complain of; but I suspect these extracts give us pretty accurately the measure of Shelley's own exactness at the periods in question, and it seems hardly worth while to give the quotations correctly as a supplement to his versions. In the verses from Lucretius quoted on the title-page to Queen Mab, however, a printer's error, juratque for juvatque, has been corrected; but I have even left the titles of, and extracts from, French works as I found them in the Queen Mab Notes, the errors in accents &c., affording some additional evidence as to Shelley's scholarship or accuracy in the year 1813, and having thus an intrinsic value for the student of the poet.

Although in a general way the setting of lines is arranged so that the indentations (or, as they are technically called, "indentions") have some correspondence with the rhymes, there are two forms of verse in which this plan has

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