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I think it well to give in the form of an appendix a less disjointed account of a volume which is really an important historical document, if it be true that our greatest poets are our greatest and most influential men,-or, as Shelley himself puts it, that "poets are the unacknowledged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.

л

VI.

"What then is 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 Pomen hai

And that men say, Gedhasappointed Death A

^ ^ 人

On all who scorn hd to wreak immortal wrath.

it's laws]

Men

!

Λ

VII.

mage they have seen Gedyandu

Or known from othaw wke kave known such thingsy

To securgo-ucinto slaves that Priests and Kings,
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.

say

that they themselves have trady

Or known from other who have knownch hig A Shade a

Forth, that, earth & Hearn Noten

Woolde 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.

which was to deprive him of the care of his two eldest children; nor need I discuss the propriety either of Lord Eldon's judgment against the poet as a citizen and parent, or of the publisher's judgment on the citizen as a poet; but surely Shelley had enough to harass him in that eventful year 1817, without the final blow to his hopes of literary fame which Mr. Ollier dealt him before the close of that year, no doubt under strong conviction of the necessity of dealing it. My present business, however, is to give an account of the recovered evidence of his positive personal manipulation of the poem. Hitherto the evidence has only been that of witnesses, credible witnesses enough; but there was no tangible proof of the alterations being Shelley's: now, proof is forthcoming; and the changes certainly are in his writing, while there is nothing to give a different colour to his known resistance to these changes, and clearly expressed ratification of the book as originally printed. The volume containing these changes in manuscript is, in fact, primarily, a copy of both the books dealt with in Appendix I, -a copy of Laon and Cythna, with all the cancel-leaves printed to convert it into The Revolt of Islam, bound in beside the original leaves; and it contains, moreover, a single leaf of a proof-sheet of the preface to Laon and Cythna, mentioned in the foot-notes at pages 95 to 97 of the present volume, where the variations shewn by this leaf will be found. The book is half-bound in a style which I should take to be considerably later than the style of 1818, and the edges are cut and marbled. Here and there the end of one of Shelley's letters is cut off; but, fortunately, there is no mutilation of the slightest importance to any but a bibliomaniac. For the information of that genus, I may add that the binder has left the sheets exactly eight inches and three-eighths in height, and that here and there is a leaf with the original rough edge of the paper left,-indicating that the book was not immoderately cut. The