y by this
singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of
lightning.

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous.
After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however,
one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of
a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.

(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice.
In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ he begins by
frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of
controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Last
century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were
valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin's
distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are
valuable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Shelley_
should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two
worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." Medwin,
we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called,
would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron.
But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or
near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends,
the original of the man who "saw Shelley plain" in Browning's lyric. None
the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A
relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in
Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot
help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a
treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in
the history of English literature.

Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland,
continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth.
Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the
age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only
in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar
microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we
are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his own
father sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book on
chemistry, as