lipse.

SHELLEY'S _Revolt of Islam_.

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention
to a brief explanatory note on three points:

1. For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for
this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give
the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from
memory. Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and
some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them
from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so.
Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of
the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which
they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the
impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has
been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task
of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the whole
burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly I plead
in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of
person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance; and I
am separated from the hands which are wont to perform for me the offices
of an amanuensis.

2. You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative
of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is
rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider
who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be
said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part
at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen
or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to those
who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have some
record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but myself, I
do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making,
because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it again.

3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from
the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this I must
answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations
of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by
its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made attemp