dy, should be the most
unfit to undertake the task. Nobody could expect Lady Shelley to
enter into those painful explanations necessary to it. Accordingly,
in the work before us, we do not find any light thrown on those
places where a person would be most anxious to see it. Lady Shelley
slurs over the undutiful boyhood of the poet and the terrible
sternness of his Mirabeau-father. She merely glances across the first
foolish marriage and the catastrophe that closed it, as a bird flies
over an abyss. On such subjects she cannot set about contradicting
anybody.

But it is an ungrateful task to go on speaking of short-comings in a
case like this, where the hardest critic in the world must sympathize
with the feelings of the author, whatever becomes of the book. And
yet the book will be very welcome to every one who regards it as a
feminine offering of tender admiration and grief laid upon the grave
of departed genius. Though not exactly the sort of personal history
one would wish for from another hand, it is still valuable, as
furnishing very interesting matter for a future biography. We have in
it several new letters of Shelley's, some letters of Godwin's, and
others of Mrs. Shelley's, together with a number of touching extracts
from the diary of the latter. There are also two papers from the
poet's pen: one an "Address to Lord Ellenborough" in defence of a man
punished for having published Paine's "Age of Reason," and another an
"Essay on Christianity." In the first, with all a boy's enthusiasm,
he opposes the high abstract logic of truth and toleration to the
hard government policy which tries to keep a reckless kind of
semi-civilization in order, and cannot bring itself to believe, that, as
yet, the broad principle of license is the one that can serve the
cosmogony best. In the next he rather surprises the reader by
exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus
Christ,--but not after the manner of Saint Paul. No doubt, the secular
and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy
of a great many readers,--to whom, however, it will be interesting as
a literary curiosity. But it is meant to show the character of
Shelley in a more amiable light than that in which it is contemplated
by the generality of people.

To explain Percy Bysshe Shelley, by telling us he was inconsequent,
absurd, and odd in his manners, is as futile as to explain him by
saying he was a strange, wonderful genius, o