than the intuition of his widow,—that she had, in some instances, manuscript authority for modifying passages in his poetry. That she also modified without such authority, there is no reasonable doubt; so that a re-editor has, necessarily, to use his own judgment, and whatever means are at his command, to discriminate between the authoritative and unauthoritative variations of Mrs. Shelley's editions from the originals. I have carefully collated every page of the originals with the two collected editions of 1839, and sometimes with later editions, and have adopted such verbal variations as seem to be improvements, and as have a decided air of authority; but the changes in orthography and punctuation shewn by the posthumous editions are, no doubt, as a rule unauthoritative, and probably, to a great extent, printing-house changes.

Beside the fact that Mrs. Shelley's editions are the only authority for much of the text of the posthumous works, we must remember that it is impossible to say how much of revision may have been floating in her mind from old experience of her husband's personal utterances, what he may have noted in copies of his poems belonging to her, or what he may have said to her about general or special imperfections to be amended. And this consideration should make us careful in rejecting important changes made in her editions. I will not say that the two editions of 1839 must hold quite the same position in Shelley literature as Heming and Condell's folio of 1623 holds and will ever hold in Shakespeare literature,-I will not say this, because, for the bulk of Shelley's works, the earlier editions are certainly more authoritative than the later; but I do say that there is an analogy between the editions of 1839 and the folio of 1623,-which analogy will remain as long as the study of English literature lasts.

The remarks made thus far in connexion mainly with the text of such poems as were published during Shelley's life-time of course apply in a great degree to posthumous works also; but, in editing these, change of method necessarily arises from change of materials. The largest mass of posthumous poetry is the volume issued by Mrs. Shelley in 1824 under the title of Posthumous Poems; but this has been steadily followed by one instalment after another of more or less precious and wonderful poetry, up to the years immediately past; and even yet the process is not complete.

for there are still buried works of Shelley's.

The volume of Posthumous Poems was followed by The Mask of Anarchy in 1832 and The Shelley Papers in 1833. The first collected edition of 1839 added somewhat to the known mass of Shelley's verse; and the second collection of that year added far more-among other additions giving the practically unpublished Edipus Tyrannus and the absolutely unpublished Peter Bell the Third. Mrs.. Shelley made no later additions, as far as I am aware; but the Lives by Medwin and Hogg added a little, and in 1862 there came Mr. Garnett's Relics. In 1870 Mr. W. M. Rossetti gave several pieces not before published; in 1876-7 there were still a few items left to make their first appearance in my Library Edition; and even the present edition has its contribution to the mass. Of some poems the text grew gradually under Mrs. Shelley's disentangling hand, some being incompletely issued in the volume of 1824 and added to afterwards; and in some cases the process of disentanglement has been carried on by later hands. In framing the present text, whatever posthumous work I have taken in the main from any of the several sources other than Mrs. Shelley's editions, I have submitted to a rigid collation with those editions whenever the poems occurred there as well as in the other books drawn upon. Such poems have, as Shelley's own issues have, been collated with both of Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1839. Indeed, in every case where further collation seemed desirable (and many such cases have presented themselves), several later editions also have been consulted; and wherever a manuscript has been available to me, I have collated the text with it word by word and point by point. In regard to any slight variation of this edition from the current texts, whether in orthography, punctuation, capitalling, or other minute particulars, it is to be understood in a general way that I have adopted the reading, either of the manuscript, or of one of Mrs. Shelley's editions. In the case of poems first given by Mr. Garnett and Mr. Rossetti, I have permitted myself some little liberty of variation from the text before me in these small details; and there is good reason for this slight relaxation: Mr. Garnett assures me that the manuscripts from which he has made transcripts have been very deficient in punctuation,-an assurance amply confirmed by my own experience; and as both

Mr. Garnett and Mr. Rossetti, who have given these transcripts to the public, disagree with me as to the utility of preserving Shelley's punctuation, I have not felt called upon to follow the pointing of the Relics, or of Mr. Rossetti's edition, as the case may be, but have punctuated the pieces as I should imagine Shelley punctuating them in a more advanced stage than that in which he left them. This has been to treat them as I must have done had the manuscripts been deciphered by myself instead of Mr. Garnett. For the rest, before settling the text either of the first or of the econd volume of this edition, I have carefully weighed every change made or proposed in the two-volume edition which Mr. Rossetti issued in 1870-always provided such change seemed to him important enough for record in a note. Truth to tell, the like has been done in regard to many changes not thus recorded; but it did not seem necessary to collate the text line by line with Mr. Rossetti's as with Mrs. Shelley's; nor have I made any rigorous examination of Mr. Rossetti's unannotated edition (Moxon's Popular Poets), or of the three-volume re-edition of 1878, the general tendency of which, so far as it varies from the edition of 1870, is in the direction, not of further emendation, but of reversion towards readings accepted before 1870. Mr. Rossetti adheres however to his view of systematizing the punctuation &c. from an external point of view, whereas it seems to me that, from the close inspection of manuscripts in various stages of advancement, a great deal as to Shelley's ways in small matters is to be learnt. The manuscripts often shew apparently trifling details that should, on my theory, be followed implicitly, as being intentional. Thus, in the careful manuscripts from which Julian and Maddalo and The Mask of Anarchy are given, it would be, if accidental, a very curious coïncidence that the system of turned commas is precisely the same. In each poem, in the earlier part, where the speeches are short, the quotation-marks are repeated at the beginning of every line; but when in Julian and Maddalo we come to the monologue of the maniac, a single turned comma before each paragraph is made to suffice: similarly, when we come in The Mask of Anarchy to the invocation forming stanzas xxxvii to xci, the turned commas are at the beginning of each stanza only, and not of each line.

It may perhaps be expected that I should indicate more

particularly within what limits I have exercised the editorial prerogative. It has already been stated that in regard to the work issued in Shelley's life-time, conjecture has not been admitted. It remains to say, as regards the posthumous poems, 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 as a rule minutely preserved.

Finding good reason to think that words ending in ize were duly spelt by Shelley with a z, I have, whenever I have observed an 8 in that termination in the posthumous poems, substituted a z. Shelley's text has probably suffered in this respect from the same agency that is operating to the damage of other texts in this matter, to wit the persistent indolence of compositors, who, when "at case," can pick up an s with much less trouble than a z

In the matter of quotations in Latin, Greek, and other foreign tongues, I have not sought to bring any scholastic interference to bear on what I have thought was deliberately written by Shelley: obvious printers' errors in these quotations, I have removed; but in other cases I have not thought it worth while to supply or correct accents and so on; for those who know more of the grammar of foreign tongues than Shelley did will not be misled,those who know less will not be annoyed. In regard to the epigram from the Greek Anthology 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 criticize; but I suspect these extracts give us pretty accurately the measure of Shelley's own exactness at the periods in questiou.

In the verses from Lucretius quoted at the head of 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 evidence as to Shelley's scholarship or accuracy in the year 1813, and having thus an intrinsic value for the student of the poet.

The only matter in which I have consciously departed from what I believe to have been Shelley's practice is that of past tenses and participles in ed. In this case accents have been supplied as a help to the reader whenever there was no doubt that the final syllable was meant to be separately sounded. To anyone technically familiar with the rhythmical manner of Shelley, this is almost always decided beyond a doubt by the scansion; but there are some few cases in which a line will scan equally well with the final ed mute or sounded. As far as I know Shelley never supplied the accents, so that wherever one occurs it is to be reckoned as a minute deviation from the original text.

For ease and simplicity of reference all poems exceeding in length a sonnet or fourteen lines have been numbered in the margins, unless already divided in the original editions into numbered stanzas, and indeed in some cases of long or irregular stanzas it has been thought useful to give a marginal numeration also; but no new numeration of stanzas has been introduced into Shelley's editions as reprinted in Volume I. Such helps as the insertion in the head-lines of "Canto I" &c., "Act I, Scene I" &c., are invariably given whether Shelley's editions give them or not; and I have sought to make the wording of the head-lines as useful as possible.

As a rule Shelley's own editions have been followed in the matter of indentations (or "indentions as they are technically called); though of course there as elsewhere there are occasional errors to be corrected in working from his editions. In Volume

II, in a general way, the setting of lines is arranged so that the "indentions" have some correspondence with the rhymes; but there are two forms of verse in which this plan has not been followed, -terza rima and the Sonnet. In printing the terza rima poems in simple groups of three lines, the present edition follows those