(Q.M.) "Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted
Through clouds of circumambient darkness,

And pearly battlements around

Looked o'er the immense of heaven."

P. 164.

"Floated to strains of thrilling melody

Through the vast columns and the pearly shrines."

(Q.M.) "Floating to strains of thrilling melody
Through that unearthly dwelling,
Yielded to every movement of the will.
Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned;
And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,
Used not the glorious privilege

Omitted in A. C. words Fairy" and them.

Of virtue and of wisdom."

P. 164.

"Spirit,' the Fairy said," to "The secrets of the future."

In the next ensuing line (and in some others as well), the "Spirit" are cancelled, but no substitutes are provided for

P. 164.

"Pursued its wondrous way."

This line is in the D. W., as well as in Q. M.. then follows the passage printed in our Appendix, vol. iii. p. 376-7 (part i.): and with that ends the D. W.

P. 164.

"Necessity's [instead of Nature's] unchanging harmony.

P. 174.

"The virtuous man,

As great in his humility as kings

Are little in their grandeur,

when he falls,

His mild eye beams benevolence no more."

The text stands, not "as great," but who, great" &c. Every reader who follows out the thread of the sentence will see that "who, great" has no proper syntactical sequence. That Shelley wrote it I raise no question: but, as I have`

also not the least doubt that he would have altered it if the blunder had caught his far from punctilious eye, I have ventured to make the slight change obviously needed for construction's sake.

Pp. 179, 180.

"Whilst specious names,

Learnt in soft childhood's unsuspecting hour,
Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims
Bright reason's ray, and sanctifies the sword."

It seems to me that "sanctifies" is most probably a misprint for "sanctify"; for the word "names" (rather than manhood) appears to be the right nominative.

P. 182.

"Red glows the tyrant's stamp-mark on its bloom," to
Spread round the valley of its paradise."

"

Cancelled in A. C. and perhaps Shelley intended to cancel there also the three preceding lines, but only a marginal mark appears against them.

From A.C.:

P. 184.

"Even as the leaves " &c.

"Even as the leaves

Which countless autumn storms have scattering heaped
In wild dells of the tangled wilderness,

Through many waning years."

P. 184.

"They fertilize the land they long deformed."

According to A. C., this line should be followed by the ensuing (so far as one can clearly make out Shelley's intention):

"Till o'er the lawns a forest waves again.

The canker stains more faint,-from each decay
Its buds unfold more brightly, till no more

Or frost, or shower, or change of seasons, mar
The lustre of its cup of healing dew,
The freshness of its amaranthine leaves;
The monstrous nurse of loveliness again
Invests the waste with hues of vital bloom;

Again deep groves wave in the wind, and flowers
Gleam in the dark fens of the tangled woods;
And many a bird and many an insect keeps
Its dwelling in the shade, and man doth bend
His lonely steps to meet my angels there.
Thus suicidal Selfishness," &c.

Mr. Middleton quoted three of these lines (the three beginning "Its buds unfold"), and erroneously said that they terminate section 4 of Q. M. This being obviously impossible, I had to search in my edition of 1870 for a place whereat to insert them; and I then supposed a context on page 208 to be about the best. There, accordingly, they still appear, through my mistake,-with grammatical changes of "mar" into "mars," and "its" into "their."

P. 186.

"The sordid lust of self."

The Rev. Dr. Dobbin (Dublin) suggests to me that "self" ought to be "pelf "—which certainly seems more apposite to the context.

P. 189.

"His footsteps through that labyrinth of crime."

To correspond with the rest of the diction in this passage, I have substituted "His" for "Its," which appears in all other editions.

In the text,

P. 193.

"And, all their causes to an abstract point

Converging, thou didst bend, and call it God."

"call'd." The grammatical emendator has to choose between "call" and the uneuphonious call'dst."-This passage of Q. M., beginning "Thou taintest all thou look'st upon," was published in the Alastor volume as a separate composition under the title of Superstition. The close is there

altered thus:

"

And all their causes to an abstract point

Converging, thou didst give it name and form,
Intelligence, and unity, and power."

P. 197.

"The exterminable spirit it contains
Is Nature's only God."

Why "exterminable"? The word would naturally mean "such as can be exterminated"; but Shelley has already termed the spirit of the universe "eternal," and otherwise asserted its unendingness. I almost think that, instead of " 'exterminable," Shelley must have written "interminable," or "inexterminable"; or should we possibly read "ex-terminable," quasi "nonterminable, limitless"?

P. 202.

"So, when they turned" &c.

The meaning of 'So" is not very clear. Perhaps it should be "To." Ahasuerus would thus say: "These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn &c., to when they turned" &c.

P. 203.
All crime

Made stingless by the Spirit of the Lord."

I think this should assuredly be "the Spirit of the Lord"; in previous editions it stands "spirits."

P. 203.

"Unstained by crime and misery

Which flows from God's own faith."

Flow" would be correct, as it is quite obvious that both crime and misery are spoken of as thus flowing. If the reader opines that the word ought to have been altered in our text, I can hardly profess to dissent from him.

P. 205.

"Symphonious to the planetary spheres."

This line (with a minute verbal difference) is repeated from p. 192.

P. 206.

"O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace,

And midst the ebb and flow of human things
Shows somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,
A light-house o'er the wild of dreary waves."

The text gives show somewhat stable," as if it were the Spirit of Ianthe who is to show this. But I think that indisputably it is "virtue that really shows this, and consequently the word must be "shows."

"

Previous editions print "their" instead of "his." Their" would mean "of the tyrants," or else (less inadmissibly) "of luxury and wealth." But the true antecedent seems to be "man," and "he," in which case the only correct possessive pronoun must be "his."

P. 210.

"Dawns on the virtuous mind."

In previous editions, the word is "Draws" in this passage; but afterwards, where the same passage is cited in Shelley's Notes, Dawns." I think "Dawns" is right, and have therefore inserted it.

P. 212.
Section ix.

Not only up to but beyond this point, A. C. makes various emendations in the text of Q. M. Shelley's intention was, however, that from this point onwards they should count as variations or completions to D. W. (not merely to Q. M.). Under the peculiar circumstances of my text, therefore, I reserve for vol. iii. any precise account of them.

The text gives "the past," instead of "the future." Nothing, I conceive, can be more unquestionable than that Shelley wrote, or meant to write, "the future."

P. 231.

"Lord Bacon says that atheism " &c.

Shelley put inverted commas to the passage ascribed to Bacon. I have cancelled them, as the passage is far from being accurately quoted. See the Essay on Superstition.

P. 235.

"This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose title I have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincoln's Inn Fields."

Shelley's statement on this point has been a good deal canvassed. Mr. Hogg says that the fragment is not a translation at all, but is Shelley's own original composition. A writer in the Pall Mall Gazette ("Joannes," 21st Dec. 1866) refutes this assertion very convincingly. He proves that the fragment really is a translation from a German poem by C. D. F. Schubart; but not an exact translation. The passage beginning "I now mixed with the butchers of mankind," and ending "the giant's steel club rebounded from my body," is an interpolation; and the concluding sentence is substituted for one in which Ahasuerus is made by Schubart to receive ultimate forgiveness. The conclusion of Joannes is that Shelley most probably made the translation, adapting it to suit his own point of view. But the fact appears to be (though this also is

controverted by Captain Medwin) that Shelley did not begin to learn German till 1815 so he cannot have been the translator. Medwin says that Shelley's own account of the matter is strictly correct, save in one particular: it was not Shelley, but Medwin himself, who found the translated fragment, with its genuine ending, in Lincoln's Inn Fields (Medwin's Life of Shelley, vol. i., p. 57). That author conjectures that the translation had probably appeared in a magazine; and a writer in Notes and Queries (C. R. S., 2nd ser., vol. v., p. 373) shows that it came out in 1802 in a monthly magazine named the German Museum, vol. iii. Though Medwin is not an accurate writer, we may fairly accept as true his account of what happened to himself; and conclude that the rhapsodic tale of the Wandering Jew given in the notes to Queen Mab is a translated re-casting in prose of the German poem by Schubart, which recasting was found in the street by Medwin, and through him became known to Shelley.

P. 239.

"It cannot arise from reasoning."

The word in the original is "conviction"; but the insertion of that word does not, to my mind, "arise from reasoning," but from an inadvertent repetition.

P. 240.

"Dark flood of time," &c.

I confess to not knowing for certain whether or not these lines are Shelley's own. I presume they are.

P. 249.

"Written by a man of great talent."

I.e. Mr. Jefferson Hogg. The articles referred to are those named Shelley in Oxford, now incorporated in Mr. Hogg's Life of Shelley.

P. 249.

"At the age of seventeen."

The incident referred to is, of course, that of Shelley's expulsion from Oxford. " Seventeen is a mistake. Shelley was expelled in March 1811

"

and was then getting on towards nineteen.

P. 250.

"He wrote also a poem on the subject of Ahasuerus, . . . considerably altered before it was printed."

Captain Medwin (Shelley Papers, pp. 7, 8) says that Shelley, about the age of fifteen, and Medwin himself, wrote "six or seven cantos on the story of the Wandering Jew; of which the first four, with the exception of a very few lines, were exclusively mine." These four cantos were eventually published in Fraser's Magazine, and may be found reproduced, as Shelley's, in a pirated edition (I believe Dugdale's) in two volumes-also in Mr. Shepherd's edition. The cantos really written by Shelley have never, as far as I can trace, been published: the statement made by Mrs. Shelley in the present passage applies therefore, I presume, to the cantos by Medwin, supposed by her to be by Shelley wholly or mainly. The story of the Wandering Jew evidently exercised great sway over Shelley's imagination; as, besides co-operating in this juvenile poem, he introduced Ahasuerus into Queen Mab, into Hellas, and into the prose tale of The Assassins: there is also an allusion to him in Alastor.

P. 251.

"Other alterations scarcely to be called improvements."

At this point of her note Mrs. Shelley extracts, from the Damon of the