s, Mrs. H. says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will
make, in that case, a manageable young lady.

I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae.
But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see
it. What a long letter I have scribbled.

Yours &c.

P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a
quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at
Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer two
thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though _her_
tresses are not "yellow."

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

It may sometimes seem as if there were only two things that
Shelley lacked--humour and common sense. As a matter of fact
he possessed both, but allowed them to be perpetually
stifled by other elements--not in themselves necessarily
bad--of his character. If either--still better both--had
been able to constitute themselves monarchs of his
Brentford, Duumvirs of the rest, his political and religious
extravagances would have been curbed; his less admirable
actions would probably--for he would not have married and
therefore would not have deserted poor Harriet--have been
obviated; and it is by no means necessary that his poetry,
though it could not have been much improved, should have
been in any degree worsened. Shakespeare, one thinks, had
plenty of both. Nor is this consideration irrelevant to the
study of his letters. There are glimmerings of the humour
which shines in _Peter Bell the Third_, and more of the
common sense which is not needed, but by no means negatived,
in the sublimer poems. But in the case suggested we should
certainly have had more of them in a department than which
they could have found no better home. Shelley wrote
everything (after his intellectual infancy) that he did
write, so excellently that he must have excelled here also.
As it is, we must take him as we find him and be thankful.
Since he wrote the following, English readers have perhaps
been satiated with writings about Art. But rather more than
100 years ago there had been comparatively little of it and
hardly anything, if anything at all, of this quality. And it
may not be absurd to dr