in these exculpatory verses, characterise the difference between her and Ruth, or Lucy, the first "in a light vest of flowing metre,” and Peter, "proud as a dandy with his stays hanging on his wiry limbs, a dress,

Like King Lear's looped and windowed raggedness."

Shelley used to chuckle, with his peculiar hysterical cachination, over this Nursery Tale of Wordsworth's, and to repeat the stanza which forms the motto of his own Peter Bell, with tears running down his laughing eyes, as he gave utterance to,

This is Hell, and in this smother,
All are damnable and damned,
Each one damning, damns the other,
They are damned by one another,
By no other are they damned.

No one was more sensible to the merits of Wordsworth than himself, but he no longer, as proved by his sonnet, looked upon him as his ideal. He was still an enthusiastic admirer

VOL. II.

c

of his early productions, and particularly of his inimitable lines in blank verse to his sister, which satiate with excess of sweetness; but these, he said, were written in the golden time of his genius, and he held with Byron, as Nursery Rhymes, the Idiot Boy, and many others. The Excursion I never heard him mention; and he thought that Wordsworth had left no perfect specimen of an Ode,—that he always broke down when he attempted one. Collins he thought a cold, artificial writer; and of all the Odes in our language, he most preferred Coleridge's on the French Revolution, beginning, "Ye Clouds," which he used to thunder out with marvellous energy, as well as the Ancient Mariner. But to return to the Witch of Atlas. As to the objection of its not having human interest, one might as well make the same to Shakspeare's Queen Mab. But I even deny that such is the case; like its prototype, he carries the spirit of dream through the chambers of the great-to the perfumed couch of beauty, the paradise of love; nor this alone,

But she would write strange dreams upon the brain Of those who were less beautiful,

to soldiers, and priests, and kings; interweaving in the texture of the poem, his own philosophy, and drawing many a charming moral from the witch's pranks among the cities of mortal men, and sprites and gods. What a subject for Retch

to have illustrated!

Night's Dream.

a second

Midsummer

I must speak of other and higher strains.

Spain had given the signal to Italy-Piedmont asserted her freedom-Genoa threw off the yoke-Sardinia and the little state of Messa Carrara, in imitation of the Swiss Cantons, formed itself into a republic-Naples followed in extorting a constitution. These events, in which Shelley took a breathless interest, aroused all those sympathies which had already been displayed in the lines on "The Manchester Massacre," and "The Masque of Anarchy." His odes To Liberty, and Naples, have nothing in our language that can compete with them. They have the merit

of being-what few or none of our modern odes (miscalled) are-odes constructed on the models

left us by Pindar and Horace, and worthy of the best times of Greece and Rome; and have only one fault, that, alas! they were not prophetic,that his aspirations were unfulfilled, that bloodshed and anarchy have followed in the train of the Spanish revolution, and that that of Naples was soon put down by Austrian bayonets. A vain attempt to snap the chain only renders it more irrefragable. Shelley felt deeply the resubjugation of Naples, and used to inveigh against Moore's lines, beginning,

Yes, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are!

suggested by a failure which he deemed ignominious; and Shelley said that they were written in a spirit unworthy of himself and an Irishman, and whether merited or not, were cruel and

ungenerous,

In August, 1820, he had also written his Mock Play; or Comic Drama of Edipus

(Swellfoot), and a copy of which, given me by Shelley, I had in my possession more than twenty years before it was published by Mrs. Shelley. He told me that on the first day of its being exposed for sale in the City, the then Lord Mayor of London, who was a friend of the gentleman who corrected the proof sheets, advised him to withdraw it. There was nothing in it to call for the animadversion of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, nor do I think that a Crown prosecution would have been its fate, for it was perfectly harmless as regards the public, who could not possibly understand it. Edipus, (George the Fourth,) Iona Taurina, (Queen Caroline,) Laoctovos, (Wellington,) Purganax, (Castlereagh,) Dacrus-from his lachrymatory propensities (Lord Eldon,) form the dramatis personæ. The derivation of John Bull is very witty.

The Minotaur speaks.

I am the old traditional man Bull,

And from my ancestors have been called Ionian;