in the meaning,
and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of this method was
that his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which
is perhaps as great a quality as anything attained by the more bee-like
toil of better artists.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense, and no
attempt will be made even to summarise it here. A convenient one-volume
edition of the poems is that edited by Professor Edward Dowden for
Messrs. Macmillan (1896); it includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes.
There is a good selection of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series,"
compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been collected
and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes (1876-1880). Of
the letters there is an edition by Mr. Roger Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A
number of letters to Elizabeth Hitchener were published by Mr. Bertram
Dobell in 1909.

For a first-hand knowledge of a poet's life and character the student
must always go to the accounts of contemporaries. In Shelley's case
these are copious. There are T. L. Peacock,s 'Memoirs' (edited by E. F.
B. Brett-Smith, 1909); Peacock's 'Nightmare Abbey' contains an amusing
caricature of Shelley in the person of Scythrops; and in at least two
of her novels Mary Shelley has left descriptions of her husband: Adrian
Earl of Windsor, in 'The Last Man', is a portrait of Shelley, and
'Lodore' contains an account of his estrangement from Harriet. His
cousin Tom Medwin's 'Life' (1847) is a bad book, full of inaccuracies.
But Shelley had one unique piece of good fortune: two friends wrote
books about him that are masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's 'Life' is especially
valuable for the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's 'Records of
Shelley, Byron, and the Author', describes him in the last year before
his death. Hogg's 'Life' has been republished in a cheap edition by
Messrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of Trelawny's 'Records'
in Messrs. Routledge's "New Universal Library." But both these books,
while they give incomparably vivid pictures of the poet, are rambling
and unconventional, and should be supplemented by Professor Dowden's
'Life of Shelley' (2 vols., 1886), which will always remain the standard
biography. Of other recent lives, Mr. A. Clutton-Brock's 'Shelley: the
Man and the Poet' (1910) may be recommended.

Of the innumerable critical estimates of Shelley and his place in
literature, the most