thing in a text is right, and reprint it in fac-simile; and it is not much less easy to go on the opposite assumption that everything a little out of one's ordinary experience is wrong, and alter it forthwith. But the difficulty, in such texts as Shelley's, is to discriminate between unintentional inaccuracies in printing or writing and intentional eccentricities of style, metre, punctuation, and orthography. In my opinion the least correct of all the volumes published by Shelley during his life-time is very far pleasanter to read, and very much nearer the fact of his intention, than any of the posthumous texts that have been published up to the present time. The chief reason of this I take to be a want of veneration on the part of his editors,-a failure to perceive that one man is not as good as another, and that Shelley's eccentricities, even his errors if errors there be, must be far more interesting to intelligent humanity at large than the punctilious correctness of intelligent mediocrity. Even if the aggregate genius of the present generation were brought to bear upon the task of systematizing Shelley's style and grammar and so on, we might perhaps not obtain anything comparable to the real Shelley; and I can conceive no better service to do to his memory than the very humble one of attempting to restore in every instance what he wrote or meant to write. I have therefore adopted as a principle, that it is better to leave unchanged any doubtful passage, about which there may be several opinions, and which is not, as a matter of certainty, corrupt. There is a wide distinction between recording a suggestion in a

note and making an alteration in the text, and I would ask readers of this edition to consider as criticism merely, and not as emendations, all suggestions of possible change that they find in the foot-notes. Their being in the notes and not in the text is intended, and will doubtless be understood, as an indication that they are offered for consideration, and not laid down as safe emendations.

There can be no reasonable doubt that, from one cause and another, the current texts of Shelley are very corrupt; but the course of my studies has led me to think that the original editions are not nearly so corrupt as they are generally said to be, or as might be expected, and also that much has been called corrupt which is really nothing but elliptical, or unusual in point of grammar, of construction, of orthography, or of punctuation. Hitherto, in my opinion, Shelley's editors have not made sufficient allowance for unusual features of his work which were deliberate, or which he would have seen no reason, as far as we can judge, for altering. To take as an example a single curious instance of seeming inconsistency, I would draw attention to his use of the interjection 0 or Oh. Throughout his works and Oh are used interchangeably without any apparent rule; and, more than this, they are sometimes followed by a comma, sometimes by no stop at all, sometimes by a note of exclamation. To me it appears most objectionable to interfere with this irregularity. Whatever Shelley's view on this small but important word may have been, I do not presume to think he unerringly carried out

that view in writing; but O is so constantly used within a line or two of Oh, that I cannot think he would have left so many of these divergences of practice had they been wholly unintentional. Of the half-dozen different ways of using the two forms of interjection, no two, if minutely considered, are of precisely the same metric value; and it is hardly fantastic to suppose that a slightly different intonation or stress is indicated by these slightly different interjections, though Shelley may have been wholly unconscious of any intention in the matter, and have simply written in each case what seemed to convey the weight of thought and word his mind was uttering.

The bearing on metric effect of what at first sight may appear to be mere slovenlinesses of grammar, orthography, and punctuation, is not easy to estimate in the case of so subtle a master of music as Shelley: I suspect his punctuation often depended more on euphony than on grammar; and it must always be intrinsically safer to leave the text as it is in these minute particulars than to tamper with it, unless there be a strong presumption that it has become corrupt since it left his hands. At all events, not only has this seemed to me safer and more in accordance with editorial obligations; but I have even thought it well worth while to preserve in the text, and not merely in the notes, so much of the minute history of Shelley's mind as is unfolded to us in the peculiarities and inconsistencies of his orthography &c., at least when it has seemed likely that the orthography &c. were his, and deliberately adopted.

But here again there are difficulties; for occasionally we come upon divergences of practice for which there is double and conflicting authority. In such cases, if I find good reason for belief in a certain rule as recognized by Shelley, I do not hesitate to apply his rule in correction of the text even where there is manuscript authority against the change, because very often the manuscript giving such authority is either hasty or seemingly immature, and the change such as he might reasonably be expected to make on proof-sheets, or whenever he discovered the departure from his own rule. The greatest difficulties of this kind are in the minute details of Laon and Cythna, of which difficulties examples will be found discussed in the notes in this edition.

Indeed, to carry out this view of the service required. towards the text of Shelley, it has been necessary to insert a great number of notes on variations of detail, trivial in themselves, but often involving questions of principle not readily apparent without making the notes longer than they are. It should therefore be premised that those to whom details are an affliction must not expect to find one note in a dozen interesting,-the bulk of the notes being merely in furtherance of the twofold view that the absolute text of the original editions ought to be accessible to every one, and yet that the text of a library edition should not include obvious errors of the press, or inadvertences, whatever it may be necessary to record in foot-notes. On similar grounds it has seemed desirable to afford all

possible bibliographical information, so that students may be in the best attainable position to study the original editions, and supplement, confirm, or controvert my conclusions on textual questions. And if the result has been the production of an edition of Shelley with much dry detail in the notes, that result is owing to my conviction that more service was to be done to the cause in this way than in any other, such as an unscrupulous remodelling of the text and a free addition of expository or explanatory notes.

In order to avoid many of these very uninteresting details, I have often left the punctuation or orthography of the text as I found it, even in cases where I have not been convinced of its being precisely as Shelley left it, but where the matter was of very little importance, and could not possibly be decided, so that, had I attempted any change, I must have burdened the page with a note, with no corresponding advantage. So many of the changes in punctuation made, but not specified, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and discussed in the notes to the present edition, alter the sense of the passages without letting the reader know what has been done, that I could see no way of guaranteeing "no important change" but that of specifying every change however minute. I therefore adopted that rule; and the only exception to it is the practice in regard to past tenses and participles in ed. In this case it is sufficient to say here, once for all, that the accents have been supplied wherever there was no doubt that the final syllable was meant to be separately sounded.