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 I should not have given even this passing notice to the matter had the passage been less important, the perversion less flagrant, or the mistake already cancelled. I have now, to adopt a pedagogic formula which might beseem the lips of a commentator in the heat of correction, discharged a painful duty, but one which I felt to be incumbent on me; and I may add, in the same professional style and spirit, that I hope I may never be compelled to undertake it again. It should also be noted by those who may feel most keenly the indignity offered to Shelley by such perversions and corruptions of his meaning and his music as those on which I have here had to remark, that no little service has been done to the text in other places by the simple correction of many such obvious and indubitable misprints as deform the penultimate stanza of "The Revolt of Islam;" where, to take but a single instance, the words "one line" had in all previous editions been allowed to stand in defiance of sense and metre, both of which for more than half a century had been crying aloud for the restoration of the right reading—"on a line."

I have but one other fault to find with this first critical edition of Shelley; and in this instance I am confident of having with me, I had wellnigh said all lovers of his fame, but that this would exclude at least one name which must always be counted among those of his most loving disciples—that of the editor himself. To reprint in an appendix the monstrous mass of doggrel which has been pitilessly preserved by the evil fidelity of Mr. Hogg, and to add even the metrical sweepings of "St. Irvyne," is an offence on which I believe that the