erhaps no other poet, could have written. He was
refused the guardianship, though he was allowed to appoint guardians, of
his children by the luckless Harriet, and was (for him naturally, though
for most men unreasonably) indignant. But his poetical vocation and
course were both clear henceforward, though he never during his life had
much command of the public, and had frequent difficulties with
publishers, while the then attitude of the law made piracy very easy.
For a time he lived at Marlow, where he wrote or began _Prince
Athanase_, _Rosalind and Helen_, and above all _Laon and Cythna_, called
later and permanently _The Revolt of Islam_. In April 1818 he left
England for Italy, and never returned.

The short remains of his life were spent chiefly at Lucca, Florence, and
Pisa, with visits to most of the other chief Italian cities; Byron being
often, and Leigh Hunt at the last, his companion. All his greatest poems
were now written. At last, in July 1821, when the Shelleys were staying
at a lonely house named Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, he and his
friend Lieutenant Williams set out in a boat from Leghorn. The boat
either foundered in a squall or was run down. At any rate Shelley's body
was washed ashore on the 19th, and burnt on a pyre in the presence of
Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny.

Little need be said of Shelley's character. If it had not been for the
disgusting efforts of his maladroit adorers to blacken that not merely
of his hapless young wife, but of every one with whom he came in
contact, it might be treated with the extremest indulgence. Almost a boy
in years at the time of his death, he was, with some late flashes of
sobering, wholly a boy in inability to understand the responsibilities
and the burdens of life. An enthusiast for humanity generally, and
towards individuals a man of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet
did some of the cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things
from mere childish want of realising the _pacta conventa_ of the world.
He, wholly ignorant, would, if he could, have turned the wheel of
society the other way, reckless of the horrible confusion and suffering
that he must occasion.

But in pure literary estimation we need take no note of this. In
literature, Shelley, if not of the first three or four, is certainly of
the first ten or twelve. He has, as no poet in England except Blake and
Coleridge in a few flashes had had before him for some century and a
half, t