ies, which Miss Austen, though
no one knew it, had killed with laughter years before. (3) "Verezzi
scarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and
motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined themselves in
his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of
horror"--that is the kind of stuff in which the imagination of the
young Shelley rioted. And evidently it is not consciously imagined; life
really presented itself to him as a romance of this kind, with himself
as hero--a hero who is a hopeless lover, blighted by premature decay,
or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to all
eternity. This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental verse and
prose, much of it more or less surreptitiously published, which the
researches of specialists have brought to light, and which need not be
dwelt upon here.

(2 So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his
edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says that he did
not begin learning German until 1815.)

(3 'Northanger Abbey', satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels,
was written before 1798, but was not published until 1818.)

But very soon another influence began to mingle with this feebly
extravagant vein, an influence which purified and strengthened, though
it never quite obliterated it. At school he absorbed, along with the
official tincture of classical education, a violent private dose of the
philosophy of the French Revolution; he discovered that all that
was needed to abolish all the evil done under the sun was to destroy
bigotry, intolerance, and persecution as represented by religious and
monarchical institutions. At first this influence combined with his
misguided literary passions only to heighten the whole absurdity, as
when he exclaims, in a letter about his first disappointed love, "I
swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me--never
will I forgive Intolerance!" The character of the romance is changed
indeed; it has become an epic of human regeneration, and its emotions
are dedicated to the service of mankind; but still it is a romance. The
results, however, are momentous; for the hero, being a man of action, is
no longer content to write and pay for the printing: in his capacity of
liberator he has to step into the arena, and, above all, he has to think
out a philosophy.

An early manifestation of this impulse was the Irish enterprise already
m