oar, believed to have come out of the schooner, which the Italian sailors however strenuously denied, was noticed in an Italian boat at Leghorn, one of those that had gone out and returned on the same occasion. Captain Roberts, who examined the schooner carefully after her recovery, came to the conclusion at first that she had been swamped in a heavy sea, but afterwards that she had been run down by one of the feluccas in the squall; and in this the Genoese dockyard authorities, and other competent persons generally, agreed. Some suspicions of foul play arose it was surmised (as recorded by Leigh Hunt and his son) that a native boat had attempted to board the Don Juan piratically, tempted by the sum of money that she carried. Any suspicion of this kind, however, remaining unconfirmed, died out; and for years and years past nobody had disputed the conclusion that the schooner had been either swamped by the sea or accidentally run down. It is only of late, 1875, that the old suspicion of a shameful and detestable crime has again been publicly raised, and with added circumstance and cogency. It was said that an old sailor had recently died at Spezia, confessing to the priest that he was one of the crew that ran-down Shelley and Williams, and he begged the priest to publish the confession. The crime, he said, was committed under the impression that Lord Byron was on board, with a large sum of money. They did not intend to sink the boat, but to board her and murder Byron: she sank as soon as struck. Trelawny considers this alleged confession to be highly consistent with the internal evidence of the case, and he still believes it to be true. The story was somewhat closely investigated at the time by persons on the spot; and it appears to be established that in 1863-not so recently as had at first been inferred-a boatman died near Sarzana, making (or at any rate alleged on reasonable authority to have made) a confession of his having taken part in the murder, as above stated, of Shelley and Williams. Beyond this, the roots of the question have not yet been reached. What Miss Trelawny wrote this from Rome on 22nd November 1875 to her father, the friend of Shelley. 2 Sir Vincent Eyre, writing to the Times on 28th December 1875, says that the account is this: "A boatman, dying near Sarzana, confessed about twelve years ago that he was one of the five who, seeing the English boat in great danger, ran her down, thinking Milord Inglese was on board, and they should find gold." This account reaches us by the following stages: (1) Sir V. Eyre was, in May 1875, informed as above by (2) a lady, an old friend of the Shelley family, living in a villa overlooking the Bay of Spezia, who had been so informed by (3) an Italian noble once residing in the vicinity, but now dead, who had been so informed by (4) the priest to whom the confession was madeand who (as Sir Vincent implies) did not violate the secret of the confessional because he left the boatman unnamed. Sir Vincent mentioned the matter to a friend of the Trelawny family, and thus it came round to Miss Trelawny in November 1875. we really want to know is, not whether some such confession was in fact rumoured in 1863, and again in 1875, but whether it was actually made, and was demonstrably or probably true. This has not yet been settled in the affirmative; and one would be fain to credit the negative as long as one can. The corpses of Shelley and Williams were in the first instance buried in the sand, and quick-lime was thrown in. But such a process, as a final means of disposing of them, would have been contrary to the Tuscan law, which required any object thus cast ashore to be burned,' as a precaution against plague; and Trelawny, seconded by Mr. Dawkins, the English Consul at Florence, obtained permission to superintend the burning, and carry it out in a manner consonant to the feelings of the survivors. This process was executed with the body of Williams on the 15th of August-on the 16th with Shelley's. A furnace was provided, of iron bars and strong sheet-iron, with fuel, and frankincense, wine, salt, and oil, the accompaniments of a Grecian cremation: the volume of Keats was burned along with the body. Byron and Leigh Hunt, with the Health-Officer and a guard of soldiers, attended the poet's obsequies. It was a glorious day, and a splendid prospect-the cruel and calm sea before, the Apennines behind. A curlew wheeled close to the pyre, screaming, and would not be driven away; the flame arose golden and towering. The corpse had now turned a dark indigo-colour. "The only portions that were not consumed," says Trelawny, "were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt." The ashes were coffered, and soon afterwards buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. This was done at first under the direction of Consul Freeborn, and with the usual rites, for the authorities were urgent for immediate This is distinctly stated both by Mrs. Shelley and by Lady Shelley. Yet Trelawny shows quite as clearly that the burning of the bodies was only allowed after some solicitation, and was "an unprecedented proceeding." We are to understand that summary burning, as for instance in a lime-kiln, would have been the ordinary Italian plan; and that the "unprecedented" thing was the removal of the once hastily interred bodies, the ceremonial cremation after the classic pattern, and the delivery of the ashes to the surviving relatives. 2 Captain Trelawny has no recollection of this detail; and he of course is the authority for all matters connected with the cremation. Still, it seems difficult to disregard the statement in the Shelley Memorials (p. 200), probably derived from Leigh Hunt: "The copy of Keats was lent by Leigh Hunt, who told Shelley to keep it till he could give it to him again with his own hands. As the lender would receive it from no one else, it was burnt with the body." The like statement is made in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography; and a letter from Mr. Browning (Hunt's Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 266) also makes it plain that Hunt continued to give this account of the matter.-I have lately (May 1877) been informed on good authority that the volume of Keats was buried in the sand along with Shelley's corpse; and that, when the corpse was taken up, the volume was found to have entirely perished, save only its binding. The latter may or may not have been burned.' action; but Trelawny, shortly visiting the spot, found that Shelley's grave lay amid many others,-so he exhumed the ashes, and redeposited them, with no further consultation of the authorities, in a spot of ground selected and purchased by himself. He planted six young cypresses and four laurels by Shelley's grave, and had his own dug close beside, with a stone which remains (and long may it remain) uninscribed. He added the quotation from Shakespeare to the inscription upon. Shelley's grave, which runs exactly as follows: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY COR CORDIUM NATUS IV AUG. MDCCXCII OBIIT VIII JUL. MDCCCXXII. "Nothing of him that doth fade Into something rich and strange." Though buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Shelley is not strictly in the same enclosed ground with his son William and Keats, but in a space immediately adjoining. He is in the new cemetery, they are in the old one. Further burials in the old cemetery were discontinued about this period, because the College of Fine Arts in Rome objected (and reasonably) that the frequent planting of cypresses and other trees in that enclosure would obscure the view of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. I will here only add that Mary Shelley returned to England (whither she had been preceded by Mrs. Williams) in the autumn of 1823, died in February 1851, and is interred at Bournemouth. Not far off, at Christchurch, her son has erected a sumptuous monument to her and his illustrious father's memory. His own seat, Boscombe, is in the same vicinity. This son, Percy Florence, succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of Sir Timothy in April 1844. Godwin had died in 1836. XXXI. ANECDOTES AND EXCERPTS. I find myself little inclined or qualified to dilate at this point upon Shelley's character and genius, or upon the loss which the world and English literature suffered in his death. If his writings do not speak for themselves to the reader's intellect and heart, and if the record of so lofty, beautiful, and pure a life-one so steeped in every noblest enthusiasm, and developing into every noblest performance-is not sufficient, the biographer may well despair of supplementing these. I at any rate feel an oppressive sense of incompetence, of the meagreness and futility of verbal estimate, as I stand within the mighty shadow, and reflect what terms might be wanted to express it. Reverence and love, and a passionate tribute of admiration, may best beseem the biographer: and these are not the feelings which find their most apt expression in analytic words—rather in silence and absorption of spirit. -is As regards the poems, the only observation I wish to ad here is that their astonishing beauty of musical sound-admi tted on all hands as one of their quite exceptional excellencescombined with, perhaps partly dependent on, an indiference, uncommon in degree among finished poetical writers, to mere correctness of rhyming structure. The precise attention I had to bestow on this point brought the fact very orcibly before me-revealed a looseness of rhyming very much greater than I had before observed in my less technical readings of Shelley. Now, as Shelley himself opined, "the canons of taste are to be sought in the most admirable works of art ;" and the combination, in his poems, of inexactitude of rhyming with almost unrivalled music of sound, suggests strongly whether this may not after all be the right way to attain the highest forms of verbal harmony in poetry-of course, given the true and great master. I will not enlarge upon the point, but simply append a list of loose rhymes to be found upon five pages1 taken absolutely at random; a list selected with a purpose would exhibit a still stronger case :-"Lot, thought-alone, shone-afar, war -stood, flood-evil, revel-strong, among-none, groandrove, love-sinecure, fewer-count, front, account-require, Oliver-off, enough-down, one-promotion, motion-amid, pyramid-floors, alligators-river, ever, wheresoever-thee, thee (twice over)-low, how-fail (rhymeless)-despair, dearaccept not, reject not." Try yet two other pages at random :Good, solitude, flood-lot, thought-alone, on-firmament, lament-despair, here-withdrawn, gone, moan-burning, morning-die, me-fell, befell." 66 It will, I think, be more to the purpose of a true presentation of Shelley's character if, instead of perorating upon it, I cite here a few out of the many illustrative anecdotes; and these I shall cull with the sole object of such illustration, and in the words (mostly condensed) of the narrators-careless whether the impression produced by them be grave or mirthful. I will Of my edition of 1870. also add two estimates of Shelley's genius given by pre-eminent living poets, and of enduring value when the mere exercitations of critics shall have vanished from record. Shelley's personality was especially self-consistent a solid rock of native genuineness, giving forth varied but not inharmonious manifestations. No one ought to be surprised at singularities, oddities, or semiabsurdities, in these phases of character; and anybody whose sympathy is with men, and not with such substitutes as humanity," the "poet-soul," or the like cheap abstractions, will feel the greatness in Shelley even more conceivable, instead of less so, when he has thoroughly explored the by-ways of his nature. The little that Mrs. Shelley has written concerning her husband shows a love and admiration of his personal character of which only a small part should be set down to the score of conjugal affection; and the unconventional nature of Trelawny, oscillating between violence and romance, seems to have entered into Shelley's more sympathetically than that of any other biographer. To Hogg and Peacock, valuable as were their acumen and opportunities, Mr. Thornton Hunt demurs as writers of Shelley's life in any complete sense; and his remark on his father in the same capacity appears to me particularly right. Leigh Hunt "was scarcely suited to comprehend the strong instincts, indomitable will, and complete unity of idea, which distinguished Shelley: accordingly we have from my father a very doubtful portrait, seldom advancing beyond details which are at once exaggerated and explained away by qualifications."-I now proceed to the anecdotes, to which I append the names of the several narrators, and the date, actual or approximate, to which the circumstances pertain. The flavour of an anecdote is very volatile, and seldom uninjured by transfer into a different vehicle of words. Shelley in boyhood "had a wish to educate some child, and often talked seriously of purchasing a little girl for that purpose. A tumbler who came to the back door to display her wonderful feats attracted him, and he thought she would be a good subject for the purpose: but all these wild fancies came to nought. He did not consider that board and lodging would be indispensable." (Miss Shelley, circa 1807.) "If mercy to beasts be a criterion of a good man, numerous instances of extreme tenderness would demonstrate his worth. We were walking one afternoon in Bagley Wood: on turning a corner, we suddenly came upon a boy who was driving an ass. It was very young and very weak, and was staggering beneath |