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 self-selected name of Devilsdung I have derived, if no great amount of durable edification, so much intellectual or physical enjoyment and such keen emotion of sustained and admiring interest, that I am not curious to inquire why it should be considered unbecoming to prefer, in speaking of Swift's most distinguished imitator and most unabashed disciple, the surely more decent and indeed comparatively inoffensive designation of Coprostom or Cloacinus: but when I am reminded by friends or others that my estimate of Byron is far different from the opinion professed by a poet whom I should rank among the greatest of all time, I cannot but avow that my belief in Shelley is not the belief of a papist in his Pope or a bibliolater in his Bible. I may of course be wrong in thinking so lightly as I certainly do think of his critical or judicial faculty; but I cannot consent to overlook or pretend to ignore the significance of the fact that the great poet who bowed down his laurels before Byron's was also proud to acknowledge his inferiority to Moore, and exuberant in the expression of his humility before the superior genius of Leigh Hunt. There is nothing more singular in the character of Shelley than the union of self-devoted and heroic sincerity in all serious matters of action or speculation with an apparent or rather an evident excess of deference to the real or imaginary claims of courtesy or convention when addressing or mentioning an elder or a contemporary poet whose opinions were not on all points discordant or incompatible with his own. I cannot bring myself to believe that he really believed himself inferior as a poet to the authors of The Bride of Abydos, The Loves of the Angels, and The Story of Rimini: but, however this may be, I cannot understand why his opinion on any one of these authors should be held as more important, accepted as more sincere, admitted as more serious, than his opinion on the others. And if my