Shelley, but enough—she did not long enjoy her freedom. Shortly after this interview, she was confined to her bed; the seeds of malaria, which had been sown in the Mahremma, combined with that all-irremidable malady, brokenheartedness, brought on a rapid consumption.

And so she pined, and so she died forlorn.

The old woman, who had been her nurse, made me a long narration of her last moments, as she wept bitterly. I wept too, when I thought of Shelley's Psyche, and his Epipsychidion.

But back to Pisa. Some little time before quitting it, we had several conversations respect- ing Keats, and the Endymion; the attack on which poem in the Quarterly had been, though differing in degree, of a most unworthy character. Shelley felt for Keats much more than he had done for himself, under a similar infliction, and wrote a letter, a copy of which Mrs. Shelley found among Shelley's papers, and to which she appends the remark, that "it was never sent."

There she was right, but with some trifling alterations he did address a letter to the same purport, almost indeed a transcript of the other, -to Mr.Southey, appealing to him, as an influential person in the conduct of the Review, against the verdict of that tribunal; and this very letter, though Mrs. Shelley was perfectly ignorant of both circumstances, did obtain an answer; and which answer, instead of being a justification of the writer of the article, contained a most unjustifiable attack on Shelley himself; alluding to some opinions of his expressed at Keswick, so many years before, from which he hinted that the unhappy catastrophe that befel Shelley's first wife might have arisen. Shelley shewed me this answer, a more thoroughly unfeeling one never was it my fate to peruse. Indifferent as Shelley had been to the slanderous paper, which had emanated from the pages of the Quarterly, as coming from an anonymous libeller, this letter, signed by Southey, tore open anew the wounds of his heart, and affected him

Milman:

What!

for some time most keenly. And to it, Byron
alludes in the Conversations, with just and
severe reprobation, saying,-"Shame on the
man who could revive the memory of a mis-
fortune of which Shelley was altogether innocent,
and ground scandal upon falsehood!
have the audacity to confess, that he had for ten
years treasured up some observations of Shelley's,
made at his own table!" Who the author of the
second of these critiques might have been, of
course can never be known to a certainty. Byron
attributed it (see Don Juan, or rather, would you
could see, reader, as I have seen, the expunged
lines in the stanza, about "a priest almost a
priest;") to a divine, and poet; and Shelley
was fully persuaded the articles on himself and
Keats, were both by the same hand. If the
parentage was rightly affixed, I do not envy the
author. "Miserable man!" says Shelley, in his
Preface to Adonais, "you, one of the meanest,
have defaced one of the noblest specimens of the
workmanship of God! nor shall it be your ex-

cuse, that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers but used none." To prove that he thought this man and his own base and unprincipled calumniator, one and the same, may appear from

Live thou! whose infamy is not thy shame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me!
And ever at thy season be thou free

To spill thy venom, when its fangs o'erflow.
Remorse, and self-contempt, shall cling to thee.
Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow-
And like a beaten hound, tremble thou shalt as now.

The critique was so far an unjust one, on the Endymion, that, with its faults, it was evident that that work was the production of a true poet, one at least who had in him all the elements of poetry,-chaotic, indeed, but capable of being reduced to a world of beauty; and if the article had been written in that kind and parental spirit that becomes an old reviewer to a young. writer, if his object had been to remove the film from those eyes that flattery had blinded,

to lead him to form his style on better models, to draw from purer sources,-less blame would have attached to the critique. Shelley confesses that "Endymion is a poem considerably defective, and that perhaps it deserved as much censure as the pages of the review record against it; but not to mention that, there is a certain contemptuousness of phraseology for which it is difficult for a critic to abstain in the review of Endymion; he does not think that the writer has given it due praise ;" and in his letter above referred to, I remember his instancing the Hymn to Pan as "a proof of the promise of ultimate excellence." Shelley also adds, that there was no danger of the Endymion becoming a model of that false taste with which he owns it is replenished, confessing that "the canons of taste to which Keats had conformed in this composition, were the very reverse of his own."

Shelley, together with Byron, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Mr. Brown, and others, seems to have been mispersuaded, that the article in the Quar